Language, Ability and Educational Achievement

Christopher Winch

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2016
• eBook ISBN: 9781315530956
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

This title, first published in 1990, engages in the current debates about the teaching of literacy and the reform of education. Based on his dissatisfaction with prevalent theories of educational achievement and his experience of teaching in elementary schools, Winch argues that the dichotomy of biological inheritance and environmental influence is inadequate to describe the diverse phenomena of educational achievement. This title will be of interest to students of the philosophy of education.

CHAPTER 1
Historical introduction

There is nothing new about the idea that people vary in the kind and degree of ability they possess and that these variations in ability determine the kind of education (if any) that they receive as well as their general situation in life. The ancient Greek philosopher Plato (427-347 B.C.) in the Republic (Plato 1950) describes an ideal city-state in which the citizens are assigned an education and position in life that suits their characters and abilities. Such procedures, Plato maintains, are essential to the safety and well-being of the city-state. Apart from their intrinsic interest, Plato's descriptions of the Republic and its different types of citizen have a relevance to contemporary discussions, one that I hope to bring out in the course of this book.

Plato distinguishes between three types of people in the ideal city-state: the guardians or rulers, the auxiliaries or defenders against external enemies, and the productive class of artisans and agriculturalists. Corresponding to these three classes of people are three qualities of the human soul, each associated with a different kind of person. The first, figuratively associated with the metal gold, is the rational element; it is associated with the guardians. The spirited or passionate element (associated with silver) is connected with the martial and physically robust side of human nature and hence with the soldier-citizens; iron and copper are associated with human appetite, with need and desire, and with the artisan and farming class of people. In a division between the rational and the appetitive principles, the spirited principle always aligns itself with the rational principle.

Note that Socrates, who is speaking for Plato, puts forward this story as an agreeable fiction in order to convince the citizens of the city-state that the ordering of society is just. It is clear, however, that although a fiction, the account is also a reasonable approximation of Plato's view of the constitution of the human soul. There are three important points about Plato's discussion worth bearing in mind. The first is that the qualities of mind, or at least their distribution, are inherited, but mental characteristics are not always passed on intact from one generation to another:

Therefore inasmuch as you are all related to one another, although all your children will generally resemble their parents, yet sometimes a golden parent will produce a silver child, and a silver parent a golden child, and so on, each producing any.

(Plato 1950, 114)

If each can produce any, the rulers and their assistants will have to select children very carefully on their observed merits, in order to ensure that the right sort of person does the right sort of job. Second, Plato does not believe that merely because one has it in one to become a ruler or a soldier, it will necessarily follow that one will become one without a most careful and rigorous education. In other words, what one has it in one to be needs to be realized by an appropriate kind of education.

Third, the kind of education that Plato considers appropriate for a guardian, the possessor of the most noble type of soul, is an abstract and contemplative one, exemplified by the study of philosophy. The cultivation of theoretical reason as the highest good in education can be traced at least back to Plato; its consequences are very much with us to this day and are in fact at the center of current educational debates (e.g., Donaldson 1978, O'Hear 1985, Abbs 1987). The claims of theoretical reason and practical reason, sometimes competing, sometimes harmoni ous, will constitute one of the major themes of this book.

Plato's ideas have tended to support a generally hereditarian and hierarchical view of intellectual ability (e.g., Burt 1955, 182-204); Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712-78), on the other hand, forcibly expressed the view that it is the social environment rather than inherited characteristics that account for the unequal distribution of social position and reward:

It is in fact easy to see that many of the differences which distinguish men are merely the effect of habit and the different methods of life men adopt in society. Thus a robust or delicate constitution, and the strength or weakness attaching to it, are more frequently the effects of a hardy or effeminate method of education than of the original endowment of the body. It is the same with powers of the mind; for education not only makes a difference between such as are cultured and such as are not, but even increases the differences which exist among the former, in proportion to their respective degrees of culture: as the distance between a giant and a dwarf on the same road increases with every step they take. If we compare the prodigious diversity, which obtains in the education and manner of life of the various orders of men in the state of society, with the uniformity and simplicity of animal and savage life, in which every one lives in exactly the same manner and does exactly the same things, it is easy to conceive how much less the difference between man and man must be in the state of nature than in a state of society, and how greatly the natural inequality of mankind must be increased by the inequality of social institutions.

(Rousseau 1754, available in Cole, ed., 1968, pp. 188-189)

Both Platonic and Rousseauist standpoints are central to debates about ability and educational achievement. They form the basis of the two principal opposing points of view in the so-called "nature-nurture dispute"-that is, the dispute as to whether or not human abilities are predominantly inherited or acquired. With the advent of mass education in the nineteenth century, the Rousseauist view (shared by other eighteenth-century Enlightenment thinkers) largely prevailed. Poor educational achievement, it was held, could be ascribed to poor teaching and moral as opposed to intellectual deficiencies among parents and children (cf. Gordon 1981). An alternative view was beginning to emerge under the influence of the Social Darwinist thinker Herbert Spencer. This alternative was essentially a revival of the Platonic idea of hereditary innate intelligence and received vigorous expression in the work of Francis Galton. Galton states:

I have no patience with the hypothesis occasionally expressed and often implied, especially in tales written to teach children to be good, that babies are born pretty much alike, and that the sole agencies in creating differences between boy and boy, and man and man, are steady application and moral effort. It is in the most unqualified manner that I object to pretensions of natural equality.

(Galton 1892, 25)

In the years after the First World War, the science of psychometry and, specifically, that of the measurement of intelligence, which embodied hereditarian ideas about natural ability, came to dominate educational thinking, overshadowing the earlier Victorian view of natural equality-which was itself influenced by the thinkers of the Enlightenment. It is worth pointing out that another feature of the Platonic heritage, the idea that there are different types of mind, also revived and is notable in the Norwood Report (1943), which recommended different types of schools for different types of mind. It is no exaggeration to say that the eleven-plus selection system and the division between grammar, technical, and secondary modern schools in the United Kingdom was heavily influenced by psychometric ideas.

Psychometry has gone into decline as a major means for assessing educational potential and type of education. Its value for predicting educational success is now doubted by many. Very damagingly, one of its main exponents, Sir Cyril Burt, is suspected to have presented fraudulent evidence for certain aspects of the theory (cf. Hearnshaw 1979). More generally, as Gordon (1981) has noted, the deterministic and static view of human potential displayed by psychometric accounts of ability has gone against the social optimism and the demand for a skilled and educated workforce that have predominated since the Second World War.

From the mid-1950s until the present, a new cluster of "verbal-deficit" theories has emerged to explain class-related differences in educational achievement. These theories, notably associated with the work of Basil Bernstein, postulate differences in the social and cultural environment as a major determinant of educational achievement. A poor environment breeds an inferior form of language and thinking, which in turn accounts for poor educational achievement. Although apparently opposed to the hereditarian views of the psychometrists, verbal-deficit theories have quite a lot in common with theories of intelligence. This book will devote some space to disentangling the often close connections that exist between the two groups of theories.

Both intelligence and verbal-deficit theories have a determinist bias to them-that is, they propose factors beyond the control of the individual as crucial to his or her success. Both verbal-deficit and intelligence views have, in some versions, lent themselves to the idea that there are different kinds of mind.

Verbal-deficit theories have themselves aroused much controversy and have come under attack. There is now no single orthodoxy of views about the causes of differing educational achievement among different social groups, but there are a number of points of view and different lines of research. Among these lines of research the most promising seems to be inquiry into the connection between literacy and cultural background (cf. Donaldson 1978, Tizard and Hughes 1984, Wells 1987). It will be suggested in Chapter 12 that a point of view that takes into account the importance of literacy and culturally based interest is probably the most illuminating way of seeing the phenomenon of different educational achievement.

It is beyond the scope of this book and, indeed, beyond the scope of philosophy to provide an answer to the problems of educational achievement. What such a book may be able to do is to uncover some of the issues surrounding the various theories and to examine whether or not those theories are coherently formulated. This is not a marginal exercise. If a theory is not coherently formulated, then there is little point in putting it to an empirical test. It will be seen, however, that there are many conceptual problems both with the formulation of the theories under discussion and with the ways in which they are tested, and that these theories, dealing as they do with concepts of philosophical interest such as intelligence, language, and so on, allow philosophy ample opportunity for illuminating comment on their value.

CHAPTER 2
Intelligence, language, and learning

Intelligence

Before we can ask the question "What is intelligence?" it might be better first to pose the question, "Can there be anything that goes under the name 'Intelligence'?" In other words, can we understand "Intelligence" as an abstract noun referring to some (as yet unspecified) quality of the mind? Burt has with some justification pointed to the technical pedigree of the term from the writings of Plato and Aristotle to Cicero (Burt 1955, 183-84), but, as is often the case, the term and in particular its grammatical associates have passed into common usage and are used more or less synonymously in certain contexts with "clever," "smart," "able," "bright," "good," and so on.

We have no difficulty with such expressions as "He is an intelligent footballer" or "She handled that parent in an intelligent manner," which suggest a disposition of the footballer or the headteacher to behave in certain ways highly appropriate to the activities in which they are engaging. Psychologists, however, often mean by "intelligence" a general property of the mind, and we are justified in asking whether or not the term does in fact refer to an important unitary property of minds, for this is what is often claimed, particularly by theorists of intelligence.

One cannot infer a single mental property of intelligence just by reflecting on ordinary usage. Where "intelligence" is used, it can be taken usually as a paraphrase for "intelligent F" (where "F" is a term standing for some kind of human activity). We can, however, look for some general traits of intelligent behavior. Thus, for example, attention is drawn to a flexibility and adaptability of response (Bennett 1964) or to the ability to see connections (White 1974). These traits can be seen as complementary, and others, also expressive of behavior appropriate to a particular activity, can be added. "Good," "able," "clever," and so on are also used to describe activity or behavior that is highly apt in a particular context or particularly well-executed.

One can draw attention to sympathy and interpretative vision in a musician, to an eye for detail and a capacity to take pains in an administrator, quick-wittedness in a lawyer, psychological insight in a detective, an eye for terrain in a military commander, and so on. In drawing attention to these traits, I do not mean to imply that they are interior or unobservable discrete mental acts that somehow constitute the behavior as intelligent. Nor do I mean to imply that these traits are necessarily exclusive to the activities to which I have just ascribed them. However, our understanding of what these traits are will vary from activity to activity. Thus, a capacity to take pains may be a trait of an able musician as well as of an administrator. We would tend to ascribe it to a musician who, for example, practiced diligently, or who took great care in selecting an instrument, whereas the administrator who took pains might be said to do so because he was methodical and cautious in the actual execution of his work.

These traits can be grouped together in certain cases and separated in others to form families of complementary and contrasting characteristics of behavior appropriate to a particular activity. For example, the intuitive grasp and boldness of initiative of a good footballer is less obviously an appropriate set of traits for an activity that requires careful observation and deliberation before action is taken—by a snooker player, for example. This is not to say that boldness and intuitive grasp are not necessarily characteristics of good snooker players, but that they are less prominently so and have a different manifestation in the snooker hall in comparison with the football pitch.

The terms "intelligent" or "clever" are also used in a fairly general way to talk about the variety of response in animals. For example, if we say that a fly is less intelligent or less clever than a dog, we mean roughly that the fly has a more rigid pattern of behavior and a less flexible set of responses than a dog, rather than that the dog does certain things better than the fly. Nor do we imply that the fly has some fixed quantity of "intelligence" than a dog, but to a lesser degree.

Another point about the use of expressions that indicate and evaluate behavior according to how well it fits an activity is its normative character—that is, they are used to indicate and evaluate behavior as more or less appropriate to an activity. "Intelligent" also has a constitutive use as in "Some animals are intelligent but no machines are," where "intelligent" is used to indicate the presence of a property of animals in contrast to its absence in machines, without implying anything as to degree or quality (a point made by White 1974).

It might, however, be said that perhaps ordinary usage is a poor guide and that "intelligence" should properly refer to a unitary property of the mind (Spearman 1904) or a hierarchical structure of abilities (Burt 1949) whose nature can be uncovered by scientific investigation. This is a question that I will attempt to answer in Chapter 6. In the meantime, we need to turn to language and communication before discussing rationality. A discussion of language and rationality is necessary for the proper understanding of both verbal-deficit theories and theories of intelligence.

Language

It is well known that many animal species have some means of communicating with each other—that is, some specialized way of conveying information from one member of the species to another or of expressing a feeling or an emotion. For example, there are warning signals and mating dances among mammals. Even among some kinds of insects there are highly developed systems of communication, for instance the "dancing" behavior of bees to convey information as to the whereabouts of food.

It is natural to contrast such behavior with the use of language. Just how this contrast is made is a difficult problem, and perhaps it is a mistake to try to demarcate the use of language from other forms of communication too sharply, for fear of ending up with an overly rigid conception of what language must be. Perhaps it would be better to talk of a continuum of communicative behavior from the most limited forms of animal communication to the languages that humans speak. It is true that some species have evolved complex ways of conveying information, some of it resembling in certain respects the complexity of human linguistic behavior. Bees again are a good example of this phenomenon (cf. Bennett 1964), as is the colony of chimpanzees who took over the sign language Ameslan for their own use (cf. Midgley 1980).

Communicative behavior comes to resemble human languages to the extent that it enables a flexibility and novelty of response in a wide variety of situations. Thus the communication of bees, although possessing a certain kind of complexity (a lot of different messages can be conveyed by subtly different forms of "dance"), is also very rigidly circumscribed. Communication relates to one subject, food, and only c...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Original Title
• Original Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1 Historical Introduction
• 2 Intelligence, Language, and Learning
• 3 Class, Culture, and Interest
• 4 The Theory of Intelligence
• 5 Intelligence Quotient Theory and Education
• 6 A Critique of the Theory of Intelligence Quotient
• 7 Theories of Cultural and Verbal Deficit
• 8 Verbal-Deficit Theories: The Counterattack
• 9 Verbal-Deficit Theories: An Overview
• 10 The Educational Implications of the Verbal-Deficit Controversy
• 11 Literacy, Literate Culture, and Education
• 12 Equality, Culture, and Interest
• 13 Conclusion
• Bibliography
• Index