The Kauffman Foundation’s Ben Wildavsky reviews the new Charles Murray book in today’s Wall Street Journal, and doesn’t like what he reads. He describes Murray’s vision as “dismayingly fatalistic”:

One can accept the idea that inherent academic abilities are unevenly distributed while also believing that many low-achieving kids—and high-achieving kids, too, for that matter—could learn a lot more than they are learning now. International tests show that students in many other nations bypass American kids in reading and math. Could such comparative results really be a function of higher raw intelligence overseas—or are they more likely to reflect superior educational practices? It is telling that hard-headed education reformers like Eric Hanushek, Chester E. Finn and Jay Greene believe that we can do much more to boost the academic achievement of children upon whom Mr. Murray would essentially give up.

And:

While accusing education reformers of being wooly-headed romantics, then, Mr. Murray conjures up a romantic vision of his own. In his brave new world, the bell curve of abilities is cheerfully acknowledged; students and workers gladly accept their designated places in the pecking order; and happy, well-paid electricians and plumbers go about their business while their brainy brethren read Plato and prepare for the burdens of ruling the world. It is hard to believe that a dynamic, upwardly mobile society would emerge from such an arrangement, or “dignity” either.

Zing! Wildavsky concludes:

Mr. Murray says that he is deeply concerned about the dangers of overestimating the abilities of students. To which one might reply: Aren’t the dangers of underestimating their abilities vastly worse?

I think Wildavsky’s arguments are closer to the truth than Murray’s are, but let’s admit one thing. Education reformers do tend to be wooly-headed romantics (I speak from personal experience), so Murray’s realism is a helpful tonic for our soft edutopian world.

Are we really this far gone? The Wall Street Journal announced this morning, “Problem: Boys Don’t Like to Read. Solution: Books That Are Really Gross.” I salute the WSJ for this particular syntactic masterpiece of a headline, but let’s not jump on the bandwagon because we want to use the word “gross” on Page One.

I can understand why boys may not dig Charlotte’s Web or Little House on the Prairie, but there are plenty of other children’s or young adult books geared towards the rougher sex. What about The Jungle Book or some of Grimm’s scarier fairy tales? Plenty of children’s books are not about bunnies and rainbows—but are still age-appropriate for 5-, 6-, 7-year-olds. Yes, you might be keeping your son from blowing things up on his PlayStation, but isn’t reading a book about blowing things up just as bad? I would argue that the nuance of the English language and the rampant imagination of a typical child would make reading about something gory and inappropriate worse than seeing it on television.

The moral of the story is simply that we need to get all kids to keep reading, not by writing books that make them into adults that much sooner, but by being active and engaging parents who can relate The Pushcart War (a favorite!) to the contemporary world. This is about parents taking the easy way out, not about classic literature being outdated.

Japan’s famously demanding education system figures significantly in Natsuo Kirino’s new novel Real World, reviewed in Sunday’s New York Times books section:

“Real World” begins with a matricide. No longer willing to cooperate with the expectations of the “total idiot” who forced him to attend a prestigious high school even though he lacked the aptitude to succeed in such an environment, Worm bludgeoned his mother to death in what Terauchi, whose worldview allows no possibility of forgiveness or salvation, dismisses as a mindless, infantile response to frustration....

Welcome to present-day Tokyo, where “air pollution advisories” announce the arrival of summer vacation and where vacation isn’t a holiday from the 11-month academic year, but a break to be spent in cram schools taught by brainwashed college students who advocate studying hard enough to “spit up blood” as the avenue to a “tremendous confidence ... you can build on for the rest of your life.”

Check out this Education Week article for a preview of Charles Murray’s latest book, Real Education. Want a glimpse? Referring to college-level textbooks, Murray argues that “We’re talking about material that only about 10 percent of high school graduates can understand.”

He calls that speaking “truth.” We call it fatalism. Yes, Dr. Murray, asking schools to achieve universal proficiency in reading and math is stupid, but so is settling for the results our education system is currently attaining. As a wise philosopher once said, there must be a middle way.

The New York Times reviews some handwringing about that which America’s k-12 schools have wrought. (Checker, too, has reviewed William Damon’s book; the piece is here.)