Does coming from a deprived background really seal your fate?

[Pinkjenny]

Just wondering, really, listening to Nick Clegg on R5 live. I come from Anfield in Liverpool, not deprived really, but certainly not affluent. My mum worked in a shop, and my dad was (and still is) an engineer.

I credit all of my success (relatively speaking, of course) to the way in which I was brought up, and the attitude of my parents, who told me I could be whatever I wanted to be, as long as I put my mind to it.

Does giving children money for their first shoes and first suit really help break that poverty cycle?

Or does it depend on the attitude of their parents and their general upbringing?

It is inconvenient Sakura, however there is a lot of evidence that IQ is strongly inherited.

But that doesn't actually mean much when you look at the facts. Once you are at a certain level of IQ, then the advantages of IQ disappear in any case - approx at 120.

So who cares? Many many people fall into that category - so the question remains as to why people born into lower socioeconomic environments with higher IQs still do not do as well as those in higher socioeconomic environments?

Just because there are people who have lower IQs does not mean that they cannot be fulfilled and productive members of society. There is room for everyone

I think it is rude to say rich and thick as it is poor and thick - they are both wrong.

Acknowledge privilege absolutely. I think IQ is a red herring. Yes, it is vaguely important in life, but is not the over riding factor as to why someone would be 'successful'

I do however think it is dangerous to not acknowledge the truth about IQ - that it is strongly inherited. But still, it does not predict enough of success - from memory I think it predicts about r= .3 of success from a job interview to success in job. ( i.e. it accounts for 30% of success in a job)

Boffinmum I'M not sure that's true about centiles because there is strong evidence to show that IQ tests favour those who create them in the first place i.e white males.

I posted a huge post earlier dispelling all the myths [there is a big chapter in this book] that IQ is inherited. (I'll post it again, if you like). Star sign is a more likely predictor of test results than genes.

ALl evidence "proving" IQ test is inherited have been biased. IN other words, the researchers set out to prove that it was inherited, and that is the result they came up with.

Sakura, good as that book is, I think you should be wary of treating like the holy gospel!

I think all possible factors should be considered. I agree that IQ tends to move to the mean - so two very clever people say with 130 IQ will tend to have a child less bright but nearer say 120; whereas two people with 80 child might well be 90 bu tnot 130 on the whole. I think that's what the research has tended to show. Was it this thread where someone said they had a husband with various problems and that one of the children also had the same and presumably that was inherited. Also your brain chemistry can be affected by your genetics too and we know suspectibility to depression etc to an extent is determined by genetic factors (but not entirely).

As there are so many variables none really wins out and genetics and environment do matter (never mind all the recent science about what happens to the baby in the womb matters too - another stick with which to beat women but rarely men).

Women are very very bad many of them at thinking they are brilliant and asking for more pay. I seem to be a rare exception. So how can we solve that? I put up on here the story about the £50k job no woman in Wales applied for. They put the wage down to £30k in the ad and got loads of women applying. Women would do a lot better in life and in work and in relationships if they didn't think they were useless and ugly and realised they were as good as many others, women and men. So how to make girls without being all American and full of themselves and with an inflated view of their importance, ask for more pay. Why do I think I'm one of the best at what I do in the UK and anyone is lucky to have me and plenty of women who are a lot better than I am at all sorts of things dont' think like that and think they are lucky anyone is prepared to employ them at all

I know where you are coming from and at one point I was a big fan of critical psychology and their claims that IQ was a construction and would favour white men who created them.

However, I have researched them quite thoroughly and my mind has been turned. There is evidence that it is inherited (I am careful not to say genetic you may note).

Please post your rebut again though- it is interesting

THat's true, duchesse, but let's be honest, he's a lone voice isn't he

And the majority of the points I make are mine formulated well before I found the book.
"When the pupil is ready the teacher will appear" as the old chinese proverb goes.

Look at all the people on here who are convinced IQ is inherited (when it isn't and all hard evidence points to that), or who think the poor should just try harder etc.
These are standard views on MN, apparently.

Xenia, I often ask for more pay.

Last time I went in and asked to be put up to the discretionary points at the top of the pay scale, I was told this was impossible because:

1. I had not published enough (not true - I have published more than many people on those points)
2. I did not deserve it as I didn't enough of a management role. Aha, so being in charge of an entire degree programme and 27 colleagues is not enough of a management role then? Apparently not.
3. If I just keep doing extra things and proving myself, then one day, just one day, I might get a promotion if I was a very good girl (the jam tomorrow argument we are all so familiar with).
4. It would help if I was more likeable, and stopped balking at colleagues not doing their jobs properly, even if it was an instutional disaster when this happened.

It's a bit hard to stomach this when you have had it for 20 years, tbh, but ultimately the people who say these things to be are the very people I intend to be firing in 5-10 years' time.

Absolutely agree with Sakura on this thread especially as regards the 'Xenias' of this world, whose 'successes' it could be argued are much more due to the priviledged world in which they move, than down to inherent intelligence/talent. They would be hard pushed not to suceed to a certain degree in whatever they do, I would have thought.

Refusing to believe any criticism of themselves could also be construed as being rather pig headed and arrogant, rather than being marvellously 'self confident', which is not actually a particularly attractive trait to have, although I will admit its probably pretty good to have that if one's only interest is in making money, regardless of anything or anyone else.

Xenia- IQs moving towards the mean certainly hasn't worked in our family! Which leads me to believe that it is possible to add IQ points through conditioning and nurture. But as a GP friend pointed out when I was expecting child 4 at 41 and worrying about genetic abnormalities- even if the baby were Down's, Down's knocks off 30-40 IQ points. If your child were destined to have an IQ of 140 then even with Down's it would still be of average or above average intelligence. I kind of view nurture in the same way. Barring catastrophic damage, good/bad nurture can only add/remove a smallish proportion of potential intelligence.

PS I also took the liberty of hacking semi-legitimately as an authorised user into a certain database at a certain institution once, to ascertain what my male colleagues were earning for similar jobs, and found it was around 35% more than me. Interesting. I was better qualified too. I broached this in a very roundabout way with my boss at the time, and the response was that their work was so very different and they were so much more experienced, yada yada. This was not true, but my boss just needed to believe it to justify his own salary as well, I think. Particularly as he was spending half his time running his own business around the corner on company time, so to speak, with a handy little webcam trained on our open plan office to make sure he could see us remotely and know who was doing the face time. But that is another story.

I think success is borne of many things.

Motivation/attitude is one of the major ones imo. Then ability. Then luck (although "luck" can also be engineered to a certain extent.

The best estimate at the moment is that education can move IQ 10 points (either way)

yes, duchess, regarding your last sentence, I agree with you.
What is also rarely acknowledged is that the real differences in innate intelligence are negligible. NUrture and environment are the biggest factors (the least 'intelligent' child in any class today is much much more 'intelligent' than the average child of our grandparents' generation)

There is also more and more evidence to show that discoveries (in science, for example) were just about to be discovered, and are therefore never the work of one mind. They are an accumulation of other peoples' work that was put into practice by one person. In other words, if it hadn't been Einstein, it would have been someone else, for example.
True, Einstein was more intelligent than average, a genius, even, but his circumstances (white male privilege) allowed him to be so.

More intelligent than grandparents = Flynn effect

Discoveries just about to be discovered = standing on the shoulders of giants. Nothing is truly original.

Einstein was also probably Aspergers. So would have had a very different story today.

I think you're right about the 10 points, Lady Blah Blah. Teaching to the test can also help, particularly if you want your child to get some kind of scholarship.

"THe IQ Gene

"In recent years, in the more unequal of affluent countries like Britain and the US, it has become a little more common for the elite to suggest among themselves that children born to working-class or black parents simply have less ability than those born to higher class or white parents.

The people who say this are not being particularly original; they are just a little more boldly and openly echoing claims made commonly, if discreetly, by the class they were born into or (in a few cases) have joined. They often go on to quietly suggest that children of different class backgrounds tend to do better or worse in school on account of some '...complex interplay of sociocultural and genetic factors.' It may sound subtle to include the words 'complex' and 'sociocultural', but once 'genetic factors' are brought into the equation all subtlety is lost. 'Genetic factors' could be used to defend arguments that women are inherently less able than men, black people in essence less able than white. Slip 'genetic factors' into your argument and you cross a line."

===

Basically [sakura speaking], the gist is that the OECD, a bunch of economists have chategorized children into seven groups of intelligence. This is not how children actually are it's how they are according to the OECD.
They have produced a graph of 'intelligence and ability' which is bell curve. Apparently to achieve this result they would have had to predict a bell-curve in order to search for the particular evidence they were looking for.

"This bell curve suggests that right accross the rich world children are distributed by skill in such a way that there is a tiny tail of truly gifted young people, and a bulk of know-nothings, or limited, or barely able, or just simple young people. It is no great jump from this to thinking that, given the narrative of a shortage of truly gifted children, then as working young adults those children will be able to name their price and will respond well to high financial reward.
In contrast, the less able are so numerous they will need to be cajoled to work.
These masses of children, the large majority, will not be up to doing any interesting work, and to get people to do uninteresting work requires the threat of suffering. This argument quickly turns then to suggest that they will respond best to financial rewards sufficiently low as to force them to labour. It is best to keep them occupied through hours of drudgery, it has been argued, admittedly more vocally in the past than now.

But what of those in between children, with effective but not well-developed knowledge- what is to be done with them? Offer them a little more, an average wage for work, a wage that is not so demeaning, and then expect them to stand [on] a place halfway up the hill. Give them enough money for a rest now and then, one big holiday a year, money to run a couple of cars, enough to be able to struggle to help their children get a mortgage..."

'Teaching to the test can help, particularly if you want your child to get some kind of scholarship'. Too right!!!

But what if you don't move in the sort of circles where 'scholarships' are bandied about??

There are plenty of poor, deprived children who are just as intelligent as those going for scholarships.

My DCs went to an ordinary bog standard state primary but I knew many people whose children were in the private sector, the ones who got scholarships to the local private schools were no more intelligent than some of their counterparts at my DCs' school, but their parents knew about scholarships/knew the leg up a private education would give their children.

Now I live in a very middle class/professional area, and even some of the parents here don't understand about scholarships and the (completely unfair IMO) leg up it will give their child to have a private education.

How on earth does someone from a really deprived background even begin to use any of these 'tools' to get out of poverty???

Saw a completely bonkers woman at a scholarship exam once, refused to speak to any of the other parents, white, thin lipped and utterly stressed, son in a suit of all things (age 7) and did not take her coat off for the whole two days we were all being assessed. Big bag with IQ home test books spilling out. Mad, absolutely mad. Also strangely amusing, I must confess. Did not want DS2 to go to school with people like that.

Be reassured, lack of apititude need not ever get in the way of winning prizes and scholarships .

I think we have to sort out state schooling rather than adopt the Sutton Trust approach of picking off a few bright worthies for independent schools to offset the guilt of others.

If the state schools we looked at had addressed my children's academic and emotional needs they would not be in fee-paying schools now.

I too am shocked by the way pupils are treated in state school by staff. When I was a teacher I went out of my way to be extremely courteous to the pupils. Unfortunately in a school where other teachers were making very personal remarks to the pupils, casting aspersions on their home backgrounds, and some were using frank physical violence against them, a few lone teachers being courteous and polite is not going to have much effect on pupils' self-esteem or regard for adults/institutions/academic stuff. I think it utterly unacceptable to harangue entire classes for the behaviour of one pupil, unacceptable to pin a pupil against a wall by the throat, whatever they were doing, unacceptable to suggest to a child that their parent(s) is a lazy good for nothing, etc.... Yet all this happens fairly routinely in our schools.

Einstein apaprently couldn't talk at 3 therefore tevchnically he has Autism not Aspergers, though it would be an HFA variant of course (the key difference between the two being a language delay at age 3).

Anyway.

I get really annoyed by IQ / nature / etc theories: they compeltely deny people's life experiences. The only reason that we are poor is that I had to give up work to be a carer, and that is the only reason the boys are raised in a household under the average income. The only reason I was born into a low income family was that after several stillbirths Mum spent ehr 3 successful pregnancies bedridden and tehrefore could not work; in fact dad's income rose rapidly and he was on a decent wage for the are when I hit my teens. We didn;t ahev cars / foreign holidays etc, but that was becuase it went on school trips abroad and driving lesson- things to help us children. OK so I hot a concrete wall but both my sisters are doing exceptionally well, one has just bought herself a five bed in a nice aprt of Somerset; her DS is far from being raised in poverty.

Indeed, genetic IQ- ha. Mum went to Grammar, Dad was accepted but forbidden from going by Nan. Clearly it wasn't my parent's IQ holding them back! I have no idea about my paternal grandparents as they drank away their ability, the other two did OK though: test flight engineer and school caretaker (back in the day when a woman holding a job after children was considered an achievement).

Ultimately, peopel face different hurdles and it's not fair to compare the day to day ones of most people with those of many who take up the poorest- the sicks,, carers, etc. Whatw as the recent figure- 1/3 middle aged woman a carer for elderly parents? That's not about ability but pure luck combined with how good the social services provision in your area happens to be.

For about three years we went through a time when DH became exceptionally ill and almost died, we had to sell teh hosue and rent to cope with the lack of income (typically I as 38 weeks pg when he fell ill); then a child was diagnosed with a disability; then another; then we had concernsaised about another....... the fact we are still here and fighting is pure attitude, the hardships pure shit luck. I will not accept the views of the people who think our income is down to poverty of attitude, IQ or effort, because in reality we should have collapsed under the strain years ago and instead have used this time to retrain and start afresh. So we're a bit behind on the riches road compared to others- hardly bloody surprising LOL!