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It's a housekeeping Monday here, so two things for your edification...first, our fourth season of the Well-Trained Mind Podcast has launched! This season, we're interviewing home school parents who've graduated their kids, as well as home school graduates who can look back at their experience. I volunteered to start the season off, and the next episode is an interview with my oldest son. So, contrast, and compare, and subscribe.
And I MEANT to post last week, when my colleagues at Well-Trained Mind Press told me about it, that the Press is having a big summer sale, which now ends...tomorrow. Sorry about that. This is why I don't handle the marketing side of our publishing enterprise.
But, anyway, subscribe to the podcast, visit the Press website, and enjoy June.
welltrainedmind.com/the-well-trained-mind-podcast/
welltrainedmind.com/store/
2 days ago
I recently listened to your episode on the Sons of Patriarchy podcast and really appreciated what you had to say, so I will definitely need to listen to this one! A question for you - my son and I are working our way through the History of the World books, and we are halfway through book 3. Is book 4 in the works, and if so is there any estimate as to when it will be published? Thanks!
You have no idea how happy I was to see the podcast back ❤️❤️❤️Thank you
Yay ! Excited to listen!
I’m so thankful you have a new season of the podcast coming out just in time to help me start recovering from the last and preparing for the next school year!
Oooh I need to listen to this -- I'm a second-gen homeschooler.
If you are looking for people to interview, let me know!
Skye Anderton have a read
This piece on IQ and genius, from The Atlantic, has multiple threads that are all fascinating, so click the link and read (it's a gift link so you should be able to see the whole piece).
Here's one of those threads, which echoes my own repeated cautions about IQ testing.
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Who has the highest iq in history? One answer would be: a 10-year-old girl from Missouri. In 1956, according to lore, she took a version of the Stanford-Binet IQ test and recorded a mental age of 22 years and 10 months, equivalent to an IQ north of 220. (The minimum score needed to get into Mensa is 132 or 148, depending on the test, and the average IQ in the general population is 100.) Her result lay unnoticed for decades, until it turned up in The Guinness Book of World Records, which lauded her as having the highest childhood score ever. Her name, appropriately enough, was Marilyn vos Savant. And she was, by the most common yardstick, a genius.
I’ve been thinking about which people attract the genius label for the past few years, because it’s so clearly a political judgment. You can tell what a culture values by who it labels a genius—and also what it is prepared to tolerate. The Renaissance had its great artists. The Romantics lionized androgynous, tubercular poets. Today we are in thrall to tech innovators and brilliant jerks in Silicon Valley…
In 1990, The Guinness Book of World Records retired the highest-IQ category, conceding that no definitive ranking was possible, given the limitations of and the variation among the available tests. This new mood of caution means that vos Savant’s Guinness record will remain untouched…
Why does the superlative matter? Because vos Savant couldn’t and wouldn’t have become a “genius” without the label being pinned on her first. Attention was paid, and then more attention followed, because if people were looking, then there must have been something worth looking at, surely. That should make us wonder if the same process happens in reverse. Do children who struggle at school get the message that they aren’t “academic,” and lose interest and enthusiasm?
By thinking about IQ, I was venturing into one of the most bitter battles in 20th-century social science. In the decades following the development of standardized tests, the “IQ wars” pitted two factions against each other: the environmentalists and the hereditarians. The first believed that IQ was entirely or largely influenced by surroundings—childhood nutrition, schooling, and so on—and the second argued that IQ was largely determined by genes. In America, these became synonymous with two extreme positions: hard-left advocacy for pure blank-slatism and far-right belief in racial hierarchy.
The hereditarians were tainted by the fact that so many of them dabbled in the murky waters of race and IQ—extrapolating beyond the observed differences in average IQ scores across various countries to the suggestion that white people are innately and immutably smarter than Black people. One example would be the Nobel Prize–winning engineer William Shockley, who followed what now seems a very modern trajectory: years of real achievements, including his involvement in the invention of the transistor, followed by a second career of provocative statements and complaints about what we would now call “cancellation.” Shockley’s views on white racial superiority were coupled with his advocacy for eugenics. In a 1980 interview with Playboy, he argued that people with “defective” genes should be paid not to reproduce. As he put it: “$30,000 put into a trust for a 70 IQ-moron, who might otherwise produce 20 children, might make the plan very profitable to the taxpayer.”
But the environmentalists went too far in their claims too. Most geneticists now acknowledge that IQ is partially heritable, even though progressive activists attack almost anyone who says so out loud….
The question of what exactly IQ tests measure—and how accurately they can deliver judgment—is one that’s wrapped around inflammatory questions about group identity, as well as a lively policy debate about the best system of schooling. It is no accident that so many IQ researchers have ended up endorsing scientific racism or sexism. If humans can be reduced to a number, and some numbers are higher than others, it is not a long walk to decide that some humans are “better” than others too.
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A High IQ Makes You an Outsider, Not a Genius
www.theatlantic.com
Acing an intelligence test only counts for so much.1 week ago
Interesting article. I had always read about bias in testing, but never fully grasped how much it affected 2nd language speakers until I saw results in my student’s test scores. Crazy how much language affects “standardized” testing scores. Teaching Art I have kids for multiple years, and see their brilliance. Inevitably students whose parents grew up speaking a different language would have lower test score that did not reflect their academic standing. —-Interesting that IQ tests can sp obviously reflect that bias as well.
IQ tests only measure one aspect of intelligence, even when they do it well. For someone who doesn't test well, however, it doesn't even measure that.
I am delighted to know that a soul food quotient is possible. Thank you! 
I only get blocked . . . with the "we're working on it" graphic.
I continue to track the current administration's assault on higher education. This isn't just about Harvard. It's about UPenn, Arizona State, George Mason, Lafayette College, Northwestern, Ohio State, Michigan, UVA, and so many more.
As a long time academic, I bristle over the executive branch's sudden decision that the decades-old arrangement between the federal government and universities--in which the federal government essentially funds expensive, primarily scientific, research on behalf of the American people--means that the president can demand control over university hiring, teaching, and admissions.
As a taxpayer, I'm willing to believe that this arrangement should be reconsidered.
As a reasonable taxpayer, I believe that reconsideration should be carried out over TIME and with the oversight of Congress (you know, those people we elected to represent our local interests), not by sudden inexplicable fiat from a single branch of government.
As a historian, I'm intrigued by the question of whether foreign enrollment in U.S. universities should be regulated.
I thought this opinion piece from the New York Times raised some complex questions about this, and I'm interested in your reactions.
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...[T]he Trumpian viewpoint in a nutshell: The enrollment of foreign students is basically an elite scam. And the Trumpian solution, at least in Harvard’s case, is to shut things down as brutally as possible, regardless of the consequences for the students who cannot complete their degrees, the labs that need these students to conduct research and the university that is losing the tuition income.
But the fact that the Trump administration is handling the issue crudely doesn’t mean it’s not a real issue. Strikingly, the progressive historian Daniel Steinmetz-Jenkins and the conservative law professor Adrian Vermeule both suggested on X after Mr. Trump’s move against Harvard that perhaps international enrollments should not continue at the same level.
By some measures, the opening of American higher education to international students is an obvious, unqualified good. By others, it is much more problematic.
If we think of universities principally as generators of knowledge, expanding international enrollments clearly makes sense. By increasing the pool of applicants, it raises the quality of student bodies, thereby improving the level of intellectual exchange and facilitating better research and more significant discoveries.
If we think of universities as engines of economic growth, taking as many foreign students as possible is again a good idea. These students bring billions of dollars a year to American shores. Since many foreign students end up immigrating to the United States after graduation and earn salaries much higher than the national average, they contribute to the economy for decades. In their high-level jobs, they also help boost American productivity.
And if we think of universities as instruments of American soft power and international understanding, the benefits are especially evident. By coming here, foreign students create ties between the United States and their home countries, develop friendships with Americans and gain an understanding of American culture and society.
But if we think of universities as engines of social mobility and promoters of national unity, the story looks different. Many of the most elite American universities have not raised their overall enrollments significantly since the 1970s, even as the U.S. population has risen by 50 percent, making admissions far more competitive. The more slots that go to foreigners, the more challenging the process for homegrown applicants.
...[F]oreign students tend to come from considerable wealth and privilege; this is what allows them to pay the full U.S. tuitions. They have often graduated from elite schools that prepare them for the grueling American application process and, when necessary, teach them fluent English. So these students make U.S. universities look even more elite and possibly out of touch, at a moment when populist resentment of these institutions has facilitated the Trump administration’s destructive assault on the scientific research they conduct.
Furthermore, while foreign students bring one sort of diversity to U.S. universities, it may not be as great as the diversity provided by Americans of different social backgrounds. A graduate of an elite private school in Greece or India may well have more in common with a graduate of Exeter or Horace Mann than with a working-class American from rural Alabama. Do we need to turn university economics departments into mini-Davoses in which future officials of the International Monetary Fund from different countries reinforce one another’s opinions about global trade?
Any debate about international enrollments might soon become, well, academic. If the Trump administration maintains its current border and visa policies and continues its attempts to detain and deport foreign students who express controversial opinions, foreign enrollments could shrink drastically of their own accord.
But as we look to the post-Trump future, it will be important for U.S. universities to recognize the genuine tensions and trade-offs of international enrollments and to balance their increase with more outreach to a larger range of domestic applicants..."
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www.nytimes.com
It’s complicated.2 weeks ago
I wonder about the impact the sudden shift will have on the ability of universities to offer undergraduate STEM courses. STEM dominated so much discourse around education the past couple decades. And all across the US, SO many of the undergraduate STEM classes are taught by international graduate student.
I think this is a great post and discussion. Initially I tend to agree that it’s better to have the international students but on second thought, education is what really lifts up disadvantaged people in this country and shouldn’t we make an effort to address the class issues; that said the current policies aren’t just against international students but also against disadvantaged families from lower socioeconomic classes and especially black and brown families. For all the talk of a racially blind meritocracy what we are actually seeing is a racial purge of many parts of society. For example let me cite the removal of names of ships named after prominent black and brown Americans. I think the current policies are universally focused on a transfer of wealth and power from the lower and middle class to the top 1%. The way universities are being required to eliminate DEI programs and international students is just part of this transfer. Without education opportunities black and brown students from lower classes will remain impoverished and at the mercy of our emerging oligarchy.
Another interesting question is how this may negatively impact the willingness of foreign universities to host and support US students? While most students that I personally know who have studied abroad for a term are from families that are well-off, it has been achievable for upper middle class students to make these programs happen for their children as well. Limiting the accessibility of these programs impacts the ability for further academic studies and what could be considered the far greater benefit of deepened cultural exchange.
Travelling the world has made me think we have class issues more than anything. Any college would benefit from kids with a variety of socioeconomic backgrounds far more than a simple cultural background that lines up equally with any culture. Whenever I travel I always end up with people who share my class and social background. It’s very easy to talk and banter and share when the only difference is cultural concepts versus having to try to understand another persons very different economic background. How often do we mix with people from differing backgrounds economic backgrounds? Aren’t we all in our own bubble? Our American government has made it such that economic disparities exist and ‘others’ are unrelatable. Traveling the world 30 years ago I realized very quickly how liberal economics have made it such that items and artifacts are in every market, every bazaar. Especially where the tourists are. What’s interesting is how people eat, especially the lower class. Where do they shop? If universities could gather all these different backgrounds - not cultural! - but people from various socioeconomic backgrounds into one great learning space where everyone shares ideas, how great would that be?
Here are my thoughts, as a parent of college kids who never considered Ivy League schools. I would point out that this is not only the Ivies. I live in a flyover state that is pretty far from what anyone would call the “coastal elites.” But our flagship state university consistently ranks in the top ten for engineering schools. I was shocked when COVID hit and it was reported that the university had taken out an insurance policy against any event that would affect the number of Chinese students enrolled. It struck me initially as really wrong that a state-funded school would be so focused on retaining international students. But then I thought about how state funding had be decreasing over the decades, and it kind of made more sense. Unfortunately, the flip side of this is that it has become extremely competitive for local kids to get admitted to the best programs. So the opportunity to participate in cutting edge research has grown, but its availability to the larger population has shrunk. And during all this, tuition costs have skyrocketed. This is certainly due in part to decreased state funding. But I also think and endless supply of foreign students happy to pay top dollar has enabled the rising costs, which is pricing out many middle class students. The influx of international students and workers is certainly a benefit to our community, but I can also see it stoking resentment among the population who can’t afford college at all.
Intrigued to hear your take on this Susan. I read this yesterday. While I can understand the perspective, I think it is responding to the administration's knee-jerk policy in ways that risk legitimating it. Are there issues with elite universities restricting social mobility, sure. But 90% of that problem is with legacy admissions not international students (some of whom are legacy - more than you might assume actually). I'm also not at all sure about the parsing of different purposes of the university - it does all the things listed, and must continue to do all of them because it is the interplay between them that matters and we cannot surrender to the idea that they must be purely about social mobility or cultivating national culture.
I've wondered about the imbalance of U.S./international students since I went to Duke one day for my husband's chemo infusion at the hospital there. For the day, I walked the campus, and I was truly stunned by the number of foreign students there -- more foreign than domestic. So many Asian students. I'm very supportive of international students and their work, but the ratio seems quite heavily weighted at Duke toward the foreign students. We live near a sailing village in NC. Over the years many Northerners have moved here -- Long Island, Conn., NY state, New Jersey. They come for the "Southern" slow experience they desire, to escape that Yankee life. But eventually the sheer numbers end up killing off the Southern charm they came for, and our little village feels more Yankee than Southern. There's a delicate balance in numbers and influence when other cultures come to experience a new place. Locals can't afford to live in this village anymore.
I think, in my completely uneducated in the ways of academia and enrollments perspective, that it makes sense to cap foreign enrollments to a reasonable percentage... and we may want to think very carefully about which countries they come from. Tbh, China has a very well-documented and widely known habit of co-opting technology and patents, and generally disregarding intellectual property. I have very mixed feelings about having a large number of Chinese researchers studying in the U.S., especially adding in the generally authoritarian and coercive nature of their government. I do think this may open the door to significant risks... but we also manufacture many products there, so I'm not sure that it makes that much of a difference. They could just take the plans there. I have mixed feelings there. As far as affordability of education? That is a huge issue. I honestly think that we should be doing aptitude tests for students and directing them on career paths much sooner than we do in this country. I think that college *should* be accessible for all who want to go and have the aptitude. And I think that it's wildly out of reach for even the middle class much of the time. I'm not sure that the solution is to limit rich foreigners who can afford to pay full tuition... but maybe a one to one solution could help? One rich foreign student must be offset by one student who is less affluent from within the U.S. and limit students who got in because their parents were alums? I don't know. Maybe there is a balance there?
I am so tired of the xenophobic decisions. Foreign undergraduates have made direct investments in the lives of my little kids. I’m not somehow aggrieved that there are less places for my kids in the Ivy League. Those are not the only institutions worth attending.
First of all, Trump isn’t “deporting foreign students who express controversial opinions”. He’s deporting foreign students shutting down classes, preventing Jews from entering the campus, and threatening the lives of Jewish students. And he’s attempting to shut down money to Harvard and foreign students due to Harvard’s complicity to it all- not because a student innocently expressed an opinion 🙄. Right - Ice officials are going to start auditing classes at Ivy League schools just waiting for a foreign student to say something contrary to Trump Policies. 🙄 Consider this excerpt from John Childers: Recently, the Wall Street Journal ran a story headlined, “Harvard Has Trained So Many Chinese Communist Officials, They Call It Their ‘Party School.” It seems Harvard has become Animal House for Marxist dictators. The Journal marveled that China’s communist party prefers to send its officials to US institutions for governance training. What does it mean when our premier colleges are the top finishing schools where up-and-coming communists learn how to be better Marxists? For decades, the party has sent thousands of mid-career and senior bureaucrats to pursue executive training and postgraduate studies on U.S. campuses, with Harvard University a coveted destination described by some in China as the top "party school". The story also reported that last Wednesday, Secretary of State Marco Rubio announced the Administration will soon severely restrict visa applications from China, and “aggressively revoke visas for Chinese students, including those with connections to the Chinese Communist Party or studying in critical fields.” 🔥 According to the story, Harvard-trained comrades include Xi Jinping’s top trade negotiator, a former vice president of China, and several sitting Politburo members. In 2010, President Xi’s daughter even attended under an alias. While her daddy prepared to rule the world’s largest dictatorship and assume the reins of America’s geopolitical enemy, get this: Harvard helped hide her. “Harvard administrators and some faculty members,” the Journal coolly reported, “were aware of her identity.” While American manufacturing collapsed, IP theft soared, and the U.S. lost entire sectors to China’s strategic trade practices, America’s top universities enthusiastically invited Chinese Communist Party officials into the inner sanctum— training new communists in public policy, governance, negotiation, and national development. Presumably, they weren’t learning about how to run capitalism. We didn’t beat communism. We’re exporting it! We professionalized it, credentialed it, and sent it home dressed in Ivy League robes sporting red berets. Today’s CCP technocrats don’t carry little red books—they carry Harvard diplomas and PowerPoint decks from the Ash Center for Democratic Governance. The truth is that the Trump Administration is fighting fiercely to disclose the unavoidable truth that the West is no longer containing Marxism. It’s rebranding it, polishing it up, and handing it off like a Subway franchise model. In other words, it’s been lies all the way down. The same schools that have long claimed to stand for “liberal democracy” are actually training the next generation of Chinese Communists— on how to outcompete liberal democracies using our own tools against us. Nor does the academic tolerance extend both ways. In Democrats’ America, if you’re a domestic dissenter — *a parent questioning school boards, *a scientist skeptical of pharma funding, or *a Facebooker posting unapproved memes— you’re labeled a threat to democracy, deplatformed, and probably put on a watchlist. But if you’re a high-ranking Chinese Communist official, you’re no threat to democracy at all! You get a Harvard fellowship, a guided tour of the State Department, and trained seal-like applause from the Kennedy School faculty for your “innovative governance.” 🔥 Maybe what was most encouraging about this story was its timing. The Journal’s piece reads like a fresh exposé, but nearly everything in it, from Xi’s daughter at Harvard to the CCP’s mid-career training programs at the Kennedy School, has been in the public record for years. We’ve seen this kind of thing before. Rather than real investigative journalism, this story is elite repositioning, a soft pivot into a strategic recalibration. The Journal’s editors are reading the room. They’re sensing that the regime consensus of engaging China, educating their officials, and “exporting democracy” has collapsed. To be fair, for years corporate media has reported on Chinese influence in education. But this story is different. It breaks ground by reporting not just Chinese influence but academic complicity. In the story, Harvard wasn’t described as the victim. China was portrayed as Harvard’s strategic partner, a de facto training academy for Communist Party élites. In other words, this WSJ story is a major narrative reframe, a new permission structure. Maybe the Trump Administration is preparing to disclose damning new evidence of Harvard’s complicity in CCP logistics, and someone leaked it to corporate media, which quickly unveiled this latest limited hangout. Who knows? Either way, this story pig-piles on Harvard and justifies the Administration’s crackdown. So, it’s progress Credit: Jeff Childers
Hasn’t federal money always come with federal govt strings? Isn’t that why some colleges do not take federal money? Is there an equal level of indignation about the strings that conservative colleges are subject to?
Harvard University's alleged ties to Chinese paramilitary group, Iran-backed research spark GOP probe The lawmakers raised alarm over Harvard’s repeated hosting and training of members of the Xinjiang Production and Construction Corps (XPCC) — a paramilitary organization sanctioned by the U.S. government for its role in the Chinese Communist Party’s genocide against Uyghur Muslims. Between 2020 and 2024, Harvard researchers also collaborated on at least four projects funded by an agent of the Iranian regime, raising concerns about violations of U.S. sanctions laws.
I am finishing up a PhD in University of Birmingham (UK). Two months ago, the university issued a warning to students that they could no longer recommend the US as a completely safe place to travel to their international body. Agree with these policies or not, this and dozens of other news stories demonstrate the damaging of our reputation.
Former Harvard University Professor Sentenced for Lying About His Affiliation with Wuhan University of Technology www.justice.gov/archives/opa/pr/harvard-university-professor-and-two-chinese-nationals-charged-th...
1) American institutions should be principally for the benefit of Americans. Especially if they are receiving federal funds. I can't even believe this is debatable. 2) The statement "They have often graduated from elite schools that prepare them for the grueling American application process and, when necessary, teach them fluent English" is patently absurb if you've ever been in college classes with foreign students. Have you, sometime in the past ~20 years? I have. I can attest that many (most?) I encountered barely spoke English. It's also been reported by students, TAs and professors for years that they engage in rampant cheating on assignments and tests. But no one is allowed to do anything because they pay full freight. Additionally, they typically congregate among their own national/racial groups and rarely assimilate with the English-speaking, American-born student body. The end result of this is the chaotic Balkanization that you're seeing in the news at places like Harvard and Columbia, where foreign students are causing massive disruptions over a foreign war and intimidating our native-born Jewish students. This is completely unacceptable. 3) There are potential major national security issues with students from certain countries, namely China, participating in research. See the recent federal indictments of 2 Chinese national student researchers who smuggled a fungal bioweapon into the US. This is not an isolated incident. 4) These students end up on OPT visas that take jobs from native-born Americans. There is an incentive for this, as employers do not have to withhold FICA taxes for OPT workers. We've put up with this crap for too long. I don't care whether this is addressed by executive order or Congress, it has to be fixed. These insitutions can't be reformed slowly over time, the hammer needs to come down HARD and hurt them financially in order for things to change. This is how the world works.