The Demon-Haunted World_ Science as a Candle in the Dark - Carl Sagan [174]
Some programmes wisely instituted on the Federal or state level in America deal with malnutrition. The Special Supplemental Food Program for Women, Infants and Children (WIC), school breakfast and lunch programmes, the Summer Food Service Program - all have been shown to work, although they do not get to all the people who need them. So rich a country is well able to provide enough food for all its children.
Some deleterious effects of undernutrition can be undone; iron-repletion therapy, for example, can repair some consequences of iron-deficiency anaemia. But not all of the damage is reversible. Dyslexia - various disorders that impair reading skills -may affect fifteen per cent of us or more, rich and poor alike. Its causes (whether biological, psychological or environmental) are often undetermined. But methods now exist to help many with dyslexia to learn to read.
No one should be unable to learn to read because education is unavailable. But there are many schools in America in which reading is taught as a tedious and reluctant excursion into the hieroglyphics of an unknown civilization, and many classrooms in which not a single book can be found. Sadly, the demand for adult literacy classes far outweighs the supply. High-quality early education programmes such as Head Start can be enormously successful in preparing children for reading. But Head Start reaches only a third to a quarter of eligible pre-schoolers, many of its programmes have been enfeebled by cuts in funding, and it and the nutrition programmes mentioned are under renewed Congressional attack as I write.
Head Start is criticized in a 1994 book called The Bell Curve by Richard J. Herrnstein and Charles Murray. Their argument has been characterized by Gerald Coles of the University of Rochester:
First, inadequately fund a program for poor children, then deny whatever success is achieved in the face of overwhelming obstacles, and finally conclude that the program must be eliminated because the children are intellectually inferior.
The book, which received surprisingly respectful attention from the media, concludes that there is an irreducible hereditary gap between blacks and whites - about 10 or 15 points on IQ tests. In a review, the psychologist Leon J. Kamin concludes that ‘[t]he authors repeatedly fail to distinguish between correlation and causation’ - one of the fallacies of our baloney detection kit.
The National Center for Family Literacy, based in Louisville, Kentucky, has been implementing programmes aimed at low-income families to teach both children and their parents to read. It works like this: the child, 3 to 4 years old, attends school three days a week along with a parent, or possibly a grandparent or guardian. While the grown-up spends the morning learning basic academic skills, the child is in a pre-school class. Parent and child meet for lunch and then ‘learn how to learn together’ for the rest of the afternoon.
A follow-up study of fourteen such programmes in three states revealed: (1) although all of the children had been designated as being at risk for school failure as pre-schoolers, only ten per cent were still rated at risk by their current elementary school teachers. (2) More than 90 per cent were considered by their current elementary school teachers as motivated to learn. (3) Not one of the children had to repeat any grade in elementary school.
The growth of the parents was no less dramatic. When asked to describe how their