One of the perennial questions that educators have to face is the question of nature v. nurture. How much of a student’s capacity is built-in, hard-wired, having nothing to do with the school, and how much of it is dependent on surroundings, environment, good teachers, and so forth?
The demand that we come down on one side or the other is a false choice, and I believe that the path of wisdom is to grant that nature provides a basic platform from which to work, while nurture (of various kinds) has a far bigger impact than we might think at first.
Allow me to state my conclusions at the front end, and then I will seek to come around after the fact in order to do some backfilling.
Every educator knows that some students are naturally quick, naturally bright. You explain things to them once, and they have it. Other students are slower, but they are methodical, and they do get there. And other students simply struggle, and you come to realize the truth of the maxim that you can’t put in what God left out. And so this is a given. We have really bright students, average students, and below average students. And for the most part, this appears to be something that is dispensed by the hand of God. Nature, in other words.
But environmental factors are also a major factor. Good schools matter a great deal. So do intact and loving families. Another major influence would be the way the students worship God, or not.
This is a rough and ready estimate, and it is only an estimate, but I believe that educators should teach as though a third of a student’s potential is given him by the hand of God in inscrutable ways, and that two thirds is dependent upon that student’s surroundings and upbringing. What the teacher is doing in the classroom matters a great deal. Nurture, in other words.
In the early part of the twentieth century, the progressives were all about IQ tests, and they believed that these tests proved conclusively that intelligence was simply and solely a matter of hardwiring. They held to a form of genetic determinism. This led them in turn to the belief that certain ethnicities were going to be backward, no matter what, and that others were going to be advanced, no matter what. This was because widespread IQ testing showed pronounced disparities between whites, and blacks, and Asians. It was simply assumed that this was a matter of genetics. The disparities were simply a fact. The progressives explained this at first in terms of genetic determinism, and then shifted later, explaining it in terms of white supremacy and racism.
In this latter setting, in 1996 Charles Murray and Richard Herrnstein published The Bell Curve, which touched off a firestorm of controversy. This was because they frankly discussed the ethnic disparities that IQ tests revealed. But this annoyed a researcher named James Flynn, who gave his name to a phenomenon—the Flynn effect. Because IQ tests require an average score of 100, it is necessary (from time to time) to re-norm the tests. What Flynn did was demonstrate that the hardwiring aspect of IQ had been greatly over-rated. In other words, although blacks lagged behind whites today, when you compare apples to apples over time, the average black scores were on par with the average white scores in the early part of the twentieth century. We have a large sample size because of all the IQ tests that were administered by the US military. The clear implication is that this is not a genetic matter—a large part of it is cultural, which would include families and schools. This is the Flynn effect.
So then, what might those factors that contribute to effective nurture be? This will seem simplistic to some, but I am going to give a Sunday school answer here. The answer is love. Let us take a bright student, someone who has been gifted by God with a tachometer that can really bounce the needle. Correct that. Let us take two such students, and let’s make them boys, and drop them into completely different environments.
One of them grows up without a father, and family life is characterized by instability. The home has about three books in it, and none of them are ever opened. The school he attends is lousy, and the teachers are all hirelings who can’t wait to get out of there. He grows up looking at degrading entertainment on the screen, and he sees a great deal of shiftlessness on the streets. He started smoking pot when he was thirteen. His native intelligence stands him in good stead when deciding which gang he should join.
The other one was born into a loving, intact family. He has a strong father who loves books, and who reads to the kids every night after dinner. The home is full of good books, and the children are encouraged to pursue their interests. Screen time is not absent, but it is carefully watched. The family sits down to eat together every night, and they attend worship every Sunday.
Now you tell me . . . in this thought experiment, does the environment have any impact at all on how a student might score on a test?
But let us take it one step further. Suppose we take this godly family as a template, and we multiply it by some thousands. We consequently see the development of a subculture that values all these things—worship, family, books, good food, fellowship, and all the rest of it. Over time, say a few generations, do you think that this cultural development will have an impact on what people come (erroneously) to think of as “natural.”
In short, some nurture takes a lot of time. This is the kind of thing we should think of when we envision the ways that the gospel can have an impact on a culture. And we can also see how, if it is a gift that is given to us slowly enough, how some people might fall into the error that the early progressives did with their racism. What came to them as gospel fruit they grabbed and clutched, and claimed it as their own birthright. In short, Jeshurun waxed fat, and kicked.
Thanks for the encouraging post!