🧠 Supporting America's smartest kids: A Quick Q&A with … political scientist Charles Murray

'They are a precious national resource. We can’t afford to waste them.'

America is only as sharp as its people. If the United States wants to maintain its competitive edge on the global playing field, it requires making sure our MVPs (the innovators, the tinkerers, the one-in-a-thousand super-smarties) are put in the position to do their best work. We need to get the best out of our brightest. And when it comes to promoting excellence in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics, the trick is to identify talent early and give them the resources they need to excel.

American Enterprise Institute scholar Charles Murray argues in his recent Wall Street Journal essay, The Roots of STEM Excellence, that we’ve been doing the exact opposite. In our attempts to level the playing field, the education system has abandoned its sense of rigor and objectivity, to the detriment of young people and our country as a whole.

Murray is the F.A. Hayek Chair Emeritus in Cultural Studies at the AEI. He is the author of several books, including “The Bell Curve” and his latest, “Human Diversity: The Biology of Gender, Race, and Class.”

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1/ Why does America’s future greatly depend on how we educate the academically gifted? The notion probably strikes many people as terribly inegalitarian. 

The long answer involves all academically gifted young people. They need an education that instills in them an old-fashioned moral obligation: From those to whom much has been given, much is expected. They also need to learn humility by being pushed so hard academically that they discover they aren’t as smart as they thought they were. It would take me another several hundred words to flesh out those thoughts.

The short answer is about people who are academically gifted in STEM. The far reaches of accomplishment in STEM both drive technological advances, which in turn are crucial to the economy, and call for a level of mathematical and visuospatial ability that only a fraction of one percent of the population possess. They are a precious national resource. We can’t afford to waste them.

2/ Can you elaborate on the importance of standardized testing in identifying the STEM talent pool?

I like Francis Galton’s definition of genius: a combination of ability, zeal, and a capacity for hard labor. Standardized tests are extremely efficient for measuring the math and visuospatial abilities required by most STEM fields, and are able to discriminate among differences even within the top percentile. They aren’t good at identifying the other personality traits that contribute to great achievement. I want places like Cal Tech and MIT to admit from the top down on the basis of test scores and then use their rigorous curricula to weed out those lacking zeal and a capacity for hard labor. Otherwise, I don’t care what their personalities are like or whether they volunteered at soup kitchens during high school—and neither do the quant hedge funds or the departments within Google and Apple that take on toughest STEM tasks.