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Book: Inside American Education
Quotes of Book: Inside American Education

Thomas Sowell _ Inside American Education
It would be impossible to understand the persistence and vehemence of these arguments against test scores without understanding the political purpose they serve. Arguments that test scores under-estimate the subsequent academic performance of minority students {1} serve to justify preferential admissions of minority students and {2} permit denial that these are in fact preferential policies, by enabling the claim to be made that different admissions standards merely adjust for the "unfairness" of the tests. In reality, the tests are not unfair. Life is unfair and the tests measure the results.
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Thomas Sowell _ Inside American Education
Moreover, even at elite colleges, the personnel attracted to college admissions are seldom themselves part of the intellectual elite. Yet their job is to select students unlike themselves, to be taught by professors unlike themselves, for careers unlike theirs. It can hardly be surprising that admissions personnel are drawn toward non-intellectual criteria and toward ideas not unlike the notion of judging "the whole person," as found among educators at the pre-college level. Over the years, all sorts of criteria from popular psychology and sociological speculation have assumed increasing weight visa-vis such standard intellectual criteria as academic records and test scores. The
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Thomas Sowell _ Inside American Education
Outside the world of education, few would be confident, or even comfortable, claiming that it is a lack of self-esteem which leads to felonies or its presence which leads to Nobel Prizes. Yet American schools are permeated with the idea that selfesteem precedes performance, rather than vice-versa. The very idea that self-esteem is something earned, rather than being a pre-packaged handout from the school system, seems not to occur to many educators.
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Thomas Sowell _ Inside American Education
would be hard to think of a more monocultural, insular and self-complacent nation than Japan-and vet the Japanese are among the leading participants in the international economy, in international scientific and technological developments, as well as in international travel and tourism. This is not a defense of insularity or of the Japanese, It is simply a piece of empirical evidence to highlight the non sequitur of the claim that international participation requires the multicultural ideology or agenda. Another
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Thomas Sowell _ Inside American Education
The ideological component of multiculturalism can be summarized as a cultural relativism which finds the prominence of Western civilization in the world or in the schools intolerable. Behind this attitude is often a seething hostility to the West, barely concealed even in public statements designed to attract wider political support for the multicultural agenda.
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Thomas Sowell _ Inside American Education
The availability of federal grants and loans to help students meet rising tuition costs virtually ensures that those costs will rise. A college which kept tuition affordable could forfeit millions of dollars annually in federal money available to cover costs over and above what students can afford, according to a financial aid formula. Arguments
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Thomas Sowell _ Inside American Education
In other words, it is the amount of money that colleges and universities can get-from tuition, endowment income, donations, etc.-which determines how much their spending or costs will go up, not the other way around, as they represent it to the public. To say that costs are going up is no more than to say that the additional intake is being spent, rather than hoarded. When
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Thomas Sowell _ Inside American Education
But, as the late Nobel Prize-winning economist George Stigler put it, "the typical university catalog would never stop Diogenes in his search for an honest man."25"
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Thomas Sowell _ Inside American Education
In short, some of the least qualified students, taught by the least qualified professors in the lowest quality courses supply most American public school teachers.
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Thomas Sowell _ Inside American Education
The virtually unanimous support of bilingualism among Hispanic activists, "leaders" and "spokesmen"-in contrast to Hispanic parents-is understandable only in terms of the self-interest of those activists, "leaders" and "spokesmen," who benefit from the preservation of a separate ethnic enclave, preferably alienated from the larger society.
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Thomas Sowell _ Inside American Education
Other countries whose educational systems achieve more than ours often do so in part by attempting less. While school children in Japan are learning science, mathematics, and a foreign language, American school children are sitting around in circles, unburdening their psyches and "expressing themselves" on scientific, economic and military issues for which they lack even the rudiments of competence. Worse than what they are not learning is what they are learning-presumptuous superficiality, taught by practitioners of it. The
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Thomas Sowell _ Inside American Education
That educators who have repeatedly failed to do what they are hired to do, and trained to do, should take on sweeping roles as amateur psychologists, sociologists, and social philosophers seems almost inexplicable-except that they are doing it with other people's money and experimenting on other people's children. There
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