The B.A. has become the union card for social respectability.
A bachelor's degree, the basic qualification for many jobs, is grossly inefficient as a source of information for employers.
The bachelor's degree is of little use to most students--and employers--today. Professional certification tests are a better approach.
We need to create a better learning environment for students and teaching environment for teachers.
The BA degree wreaks harm on a majority of young people, is grotesquely inefficient as a source of information for employers, and is implicated in the emergence of a class-riven America.
College is not for everyone, and guidance counselors and parents would do their charges a favor to tell them this.
The romantic belief that every child is capable of academic success has been proven incorrect.
America's university system is creating a class-riven nation. There has to be a better way.
Making sure that all gifted students hit their own personal walls is crucial for developing their empathy with the rest of the world.
One of the special tasks in the education of the gifted is to steep them in the study of how good applies to virtue.
Every complex society is run by an elite, including our society.
Instead of helping high school graduates grow up, colleges prolong childhood.
AEI Online
August 21, 2008
Instead of helping high school graduates grow up, colleges prolong childhood.
We must recognize the fact that most people do not have the ability or interest to succeed on the conventional academic track.
Our national obsession with the BA has created a two-tiered entry to adulthood, anointing some for admission to the club and labeling the rest as second-best.
The French, après tout, are not unlike Americans.
Educational romanticism asks too much from students at the bottom of the intellectual pile, asks the wrong things from those in the middle, and asks too little from those at the top.
When it comes to poverty and income inequality, the cycle of optimistic promises and zero results will repeat itself because politicians ignore causes that don't fit the way they want the world to be.
It is time for the United States to accomodate the needs of its intellectual elite.
The SAT is an unnecessary and socioeconomically divisive institution. We should drop it in favor of achievement tests.
NCLB is a disaster for federalism, excellence, and imagination.
Why are Jews overrepresented in every field of intellectual accomplishment?
AEI Online
February 22, 2007
Hardly anyone will admit it, but education's role in causing or solving any problem cannot be evaluated without considering the underlying intellectual ability of the people being educated.
We should acknowledge the existence and importance of high intellectual ability, and think about how best to nurture the children who possess it.
Rightly understood, college is only appropriate for a small minority of young adults--perhaps even a minority of the people who have IQs high enough for college work.
It is true that many social and economic problems are disproportionately found among people with little education, but the culprit for their educational deficit is often low intelligence.
AEI Online
December 14, 2006
How have classical liberal ideas on policy affected society?
Amonth before a major election, the Republicans have allied themselves with a scattering of voters who are upset by online gambling and have outraged the millions who love it.
NCLB has not had a significant impact on overall test scores and has not narrowed the racial and socioeconomic achievement gap.
AEI Online
April 14, 2006
Instead of sending taxes to Washington and straining them through bureaucracies, just collect the taxes, divide them up, and send the money back in cash grants to all American adults.
As the amount of money we spend on transfer payments continues to rise, while poverty endures, it must eventually become obvious to all that the problem is not a lack of money.
An interview with Murray about his new book,In Our Hands: A Plan to Replace the Welfare State, which outlines Murray'splan to overhaulwelfare transfer programs.
The welfare state as we know it cannot survive.
One mark of a great book is a thesis so powerful that after a few years people take it for granted. Thomas Sowell's A Conflict of Visions (1987) is such a book.
National Post
November 22, 2005
Weshould discussintractable differences between men and women, or between any other groups of people, because the refusal to confront the reality of differences has consequences.
AEI Online
October 7, 2005
The number of Americans unable to contribute productively either to society or to the well-being of themselves and their families continues to grow.
Whatismore contemptible--Democratsrediscovering poverty and blaming it onBush or Republicansrediscovering poverty and claimingthe government can fix it?
Survey of male-female and black-white differences.
Statistical Science
August 1, 2005
We have known how to lie with statistics for fifty years now. What we really need are theory and praxis for accusing someone else of lying with statistics.
Sunday Times
April 3, 2005
If we are unwilling to prevent an underclass by giving responsibility for behavior back to individuals, their families, and communities, custodial democracy is the only option left.
AEI Online
February 1, 2005
Examining cognitive differences between the sexes can help us understand the sources of human abilities and limitations.
New York Times
January 23, 2005
In the study of gender, large and growing bodies of good science are helping us understand the sources of human abilities and limitations, and it is time to accept their legitimacy.
The Public Interest
January 1, 2005
New York Times
October 13, 2004
It is unfair that 5 percent of Americans pay 54 percent of all personal income taxes yet use fewer government services than other Americans.
The Public Interest
June 1, 2004
Wall Street Journal
May 11, 2004
The recent price of $104.2 million for Picasso's "Boy with a Pipe" dramatizes the chasm that separates the art market from the contribution that great art can make to human life.
The technology exists to create high-quality reproductions of artworks, but thus far it has not been widely utilized.
New York Times
April 14, 2004
Allowing taxpayers to name where their tax dollars go would put large segments of local, state, and federal government out of business.
Sunday Times
January 25, 2004
By any realistic measure, British criminal justice historically was superb. Its philosophical core was retributive justice, applied consistently and without apology. Isn't it time for its return?
The Times
January 18, 2004
The British legal establishment shouldstop being kind to criminals.
What belongs in the hall of fame of unintended outcomes in the arts and sciences, when a truly wonderful accomplishment inadvertently contributed to some truly awful consequences?
Cato Policy Report
October 1, 2003
The Public Interest
June 1, 2003
The West may have been pivotally important, but has it been too much at center stage?
Essays adapted from remarks made at theAEI's book forum "Human Cloning and Human Dignity" onOctober 29, 2002.
The revamped SAT's focus on acquired skills gives an advantage to the usually affluent students who already attend the best schools.
AEI Online
December 1, 2001
Single parenthood is declining but is being replaced by cohabitation, and the consequences are no better for children.
Washington Post
October 30, 2001
In reacting to the news about changes in American family structure, the right mix seems to be hopefulness about marriage among blacks and concern about the increase in cohabiting parents.
Public Interest
September 1, 2001
Does England have an underclass? If so, is it big or small? Stable, shrinking, or growing?
Many elites are trying to reinvoke old norms and reverse the process, but most are succumbing to "proletarianization."
The Wall Street Journal
February 6, 2001
The New World of Welfare
January 1, 2001
Sunday Times (London)
February 13, 2000
National Review
January 24, 2000
AEI Online
January 24, 2000
Rapid advances in genetics and neuroscience will likely include a challenge to our notions of equality and a renewed temptation to engage in eugenics.
AEI Online
January 1, 2000
Charles Murray argues that social conservatives and libertarians find themselves in increasing agreement about the importance of virtue to a free society.
Weekly Standard
November 29, 1999
Review of One Nation, Two Cultures: A Searching Examination of American Society in the Aftermath of Our Cultural Revolution, by Gertrude Himmelfarb.
Review of The Great Disruption: Human Nature and the Reconstitution of Social Order, by Francis Fukuyama.
National Review
May 31, 1999
Review of Property and Freedom by Richard Pipes.
The Public Interest
April 1, 1999
Review of The Politics Of Large Numbers: A History Of Statistical Reasoning, by Alain Desrosieres.
The Weekly Standard
February 22, 1999
AEI Online
February 22, 1999
Parallels between the Dreyfus Affair, the defining political event in France at the last turn of the century, and Clinton’s administration and impeachment will become clearer and stronger.
Wall Street Journal
February 2, 1999
Elated by falling crime rates and shrinking welfare rolls, we haven't had to acknowledge how far we have already traveled on the road to custodial democracy.
The Public Interest
September 1, 1998
Review of All You Need Is Love by Elizabeth Cobbs Hoffman.
The New Republic
June 22, 1998
Charles Murray responds to Glenn Loury.
AEI Bradley Lecture
March 9, 1998
Charles Murray's Bradley Lecture on Human Accomplishment.
Wall Street Journal
February 20, 1998
AEI Online
January 1, 1998
The violation of three tacit compacts between Washington and the American people may well be responsible for the drop in public trust in the federal government.
Washington Times
June 8, 1997
Review of What Money Can't Buy by Susan Mayer.
The Public Interest
June 1, 1997
National Review
October 9, 1995
The Public Interest
September 1, 1995
Cato Policy Report
May 1, 1995
The Public Interest
January 1, 1995
Sunday Times
May 29, 1994
Sunday Times
May 22, 1994
AEI Bradley Lecture Series
April 11, 1994
It is time for America once again to try living with inequality, as life is lived.
The new trend that threatens the U.S. is white illegitimacy.
New York Times
January 8, 1993
City Journal
January 1, 1993
Review of Upon this Rock: The Miracle of a Black Church.
Journal of Labor Economics
January 1, 1993
Review of A Question of Intelligence: The IQ Debate in Americaby Daniel Seligman.
Review of The End of Equality by Mickey Kaus.
Cato Journal
September 1, 1992
National Review
June 8, 1992
Times Literary Supplement
May 22, 1992
Review of Andrew Hacker's Two Nations.
National Review
March 30, 1992
Washington Post
February 2, 1992
New York Times
January 16, 1992
The Public Interest
January 1, 1992
National Review
July 8, 1991
AEI Online
January 1, 1990
Nothing has really changed yet with the American underclass; that is the thesis to which most of this article is devoted.
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