Carl%20Sagan%20-%20The%20Demon%20Haunted%20World

THE DEMON-HAUNTED WORLD
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 lowincome
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 preschool 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 lives had changed as a result of the family
literacy programme, typical responses described improved selfconfidence
(nearly every participant) and self-control, passing
high-school equivalency exams, admission to college, new jobs,
and much better relations with their children. The children are
described as more attentive to parents, eager to learn and - in
some cases for the first time - hopeful about the future. Such
programmes could also be used in later grades for teaching
mathematics, science and much else.
Tyrants and autocrats have always understood that literacy,
learning, books and newspapers are potentially dangerous. They
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