Educational achievement: race makes a difference

To place the data shown in this chart in context, we need to go back 21 years, to the publication of Race, Evolution and Behavior, by John Philippe Rushton (3/12/43 to 2-10/12), a British-born professor of psychology at the University of Western Ontario. Professor Rushton became known to the public during the 1980s and 1990s for his research on race and intelligence, race and crime, and other apparent racial variations. He was a proponent of the idea that racial differences in IQ are partially related to genetic inheritance.

Professor Rushton studied the size of brains and genitalia, the effects of inbreeding depression on IQ, and the effects of race-mixing. He concluded that genetic factors make blacks less intelligent, less sexually restrained and less law-abiding than Asians and whites.
Putting it even more plainly, he contended that the yellow people -- my word, not his -- are the most intelligent and evolved -- and blacks the least, with whites somewhere in the middle. Conversely, blacks are the strongest and most athletic, east Asians the least, with whites again in the middle.

For his pains, Dr Rushton was vilified by the usual suspects, and held onto his position at the university only because he was tenured. Yet what he was saying is what most people believe, even today. It's just that we keep it to ourselves for reasons of political correctness, for fear of the thought police.

Fast forward to 2015, to the Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study -- tests conducted in 57 countries to measure the educational attainment of 580,000 students. In "Bottom of the class", in this week's Economist, the table at the left is presented as part of an analysis of the defects of the educational system of South Africa, which ranked 75th out of 76 countries evaluated in the TIMSS.

The reasons advanced for the South Africans' poor test scores are many and various: poverty, poor teachers, corruption, and of course the horrible apartheid system under which South Africa was, until the mid-1990s, the most prosperous of all the countries of sub-Saharan Africa. There is one reason the writer fails to mention -- race.

Look at the chart. Nine countries are compared. In the top three countries -- Singapore, South Korea and Japan -- the students are predominantly "yellow" -- east Asian. In the bottom three countries -- Botswana, Morocco and South Africa -- the students are predominantly brown or black, African or Middle Eastern. Let's not rehash the old argument about whether Arabs are a separate race or a subset of Caucasians who got darker in the sun. They're non-white and non-yellow. And their test scores are right down there with the sub-Saharan blacks. The countires that are (or used to be) white -- Australia, Sweden and Italy -- are in the middle. In other words, the TIMSS results conform right down the line to the observations of Professor Rushton.

Click here to see "Latest Research on Race", a video of Professor Rushton speaking to an American Renaissance conference in 2000. Running time 57 minutes. Warning: The speech contains politically incorrect phrases like "retarded"! Prof. Rushton starts off by speaking about what he observed on a visit to South Africa. The first slide is an IQ chart. The lowest IQ ever found in the world, he says, is that of African blacks -- even lower than that of American blacks. Snowflakes and SJWs don't believe in IQ testing. Nothing to do with what the tests reveal, of course. If you can't stand the truth, don't watch this!