Save your money on private school – DNA will decide whether your child does well at school not quality of education, leading geneticist claims

Plomin is basically right.  But a disorderly school can prevent a child from acquiring the knowledge he needs to pass exams. So that would normally require either a move to an area with better government schools or sending the kid to a private school.

But for many people top exam results are not sought.  Medium achievement may be more socially acceptable and a pleasant, safe  and peaceful school environment may be the aim.  But again moving or going private may be needed in some areas.

But most important of all for many parents the main aim is not educational at all.  The main aim is social.  Will the kid meet at school people who will be useful to him in later life? And private schooling is the big solution to that.

And most important of all is status maintenance.  Your family  has to be rich to use a private school so that usually means that you would like your son to marry a girl from a similarly elevated family. And private schools are VERY good for that.  The sons tend to marry the sisters of their fellow students -- who are almost always very "suitable"


A leading geneticist has told parents they don’t need to send their children to top schools like Eton – because genetics has already determined how well they will do in academics.

Robert Plomin, a professor of behavioural genetics at King’s College London, said prestigious schools ‘don’t add anything’ to children’s grades.

Speaking at the Hay Festival, he said that a child’s success is pre-determined by their genes, and ‘nature’ plays a much larger part in our lives than ‘nurture’ or external environmental factors.

When asked why a parent would spend money sending their child to Eton, he replied: ‘The reason why education is universal is literacy and numeracy are innate – children need to learn to read. We’re talking about what makes them different. So the issue is do differences in the quality of school make a difference in outcomes like GCSE scores or getting into universities?

‘There’s a correlation there – kids who go to selective schools have a GCSE score that is one full grade higher than kids who go to comprehensive schools. That’s a correlation though and correlations don’t necessarily imply causation and in this case they don’t.

‘If you correct for what the schools selected on, there’s no difference in GCSE scores. It’s a self-fulfilling prophecy. If you select the very best kids academically, yes they go on and do well. But have you added value? The answer is no.

‘So why send your kids to Eton? Don’t. If all you’re doing it for is educational achievement. But if you scratch the surface and talk to the parents it isn’t just for that. It’s for reasons like ‘I want them to be with the right sort of people, I want them to get access and credential, more than actual achievement.

‘But achievement itself – they [Eton] don’t add anything. Schools matter – kids have got to learn all this stuff. But do they make a difference? The answer is no.’

Eton, which costs £42,500 a year in tuition fees, has seen the likes of David Cameron, Eddie Redmayne and Boris Johnson grace their halls. Prince Harry and Prince William also attended the college.

But Professor Plomin argues they would have achieved the same grades if they had gone to a public school.

In his book, ‘Blueprint: How DNA makes us who we are’, he writes: ‘Students select schools and are selected by a school in part on the basis of the students’ prior achievement and ability, which are highly heritable.

‘Students in selective and non-selective schools differ in their DNA. Because the traits used to select students are highly heritable, selection of students for these traits means that students are unintentionally selected genetically.

‘Even though schools have little effect on individual differences in school achievement, some parents will still decide to pay huge amounts of money to send their children to private schools in order to give their children whatever slight advantage such schools provide.

‘I hope it will help parents who cannot afford to pay for private schooling or move house to know that it doesn’t make much of a difference in children’s school achievement.’

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The lynch mobbing of Noah Carl

Cambridge’s dumping of a research fellow raises serious questions about academic freedom.

The subversion of intellectual life at Oxford and Cambridge continues apace, as shown by the treatment of Noah Carl, removed from a Cambridge research fellowship following a sustained campaign aimed at having him sacked.

To recap, Dr Carl, then a postdoc at Nuffield College, Oxford, was elected last year to a research fellowship in social science at St Edmunds, Cambridge. He was known to be politically right-wing. He had written a series of articles on, among other things, attitudes to race and immigration that were unwelcome to the left. And he had attended an event called the London Conference on Intelligence, where eugenics, race and intelligence had reportedly been discussed (though not by him).

The college’s students’ union protested against the appointment. Later a Cambridge mathematics professor stirred the hornets’ nest by writing an open letter to St Edmunds accusing Dr Carl of producing work that was ‘ethically suspect’, ‘methodologically flawed’, and amounting to ‘racist pseudoscience’ which had been weaponised by the far right. The professor demanded an investigation into Dr Carl and how he had been selected. This was passed round the academic grapevine and signed by some 1,400 academics and students from the UK to Mexico and Taiwan, only a fraction of whom can have had much idea of what was going on.

Nevertheless an investigation was held. Afterwards, the Master of St Edmunds, The Hon Matthew Bullock, made the announcement everyone wanted. His statement amounted to a grovelling apology to the student body. It said Dr Carl’s work did not ‘fulfil the criteria we expected for academic scholarship’ and announced that Dr Carl had left. Within days Dr Carl became an academic unperson: even the original announcement of his election has been airbrushed from the college website.

That the college chose to cave in to a leftish academic lynch-mob seems pretty clear. The master’s complete omission of any reference to the open letter and his implicit suggestion that St Edmunds was merely responding conscientiously to concerns raised by its student body is disingenuous. Colleges do not remove fellows on the basis of student pressure to do so.

But a closer look at the master’s statement shows that there is more to the affair than this.

For one thing, the thesis hinted at by the master – that the whole debacle could be reduced to an academically informed determination of poor scholarship, with politics an irrelevant side issue – will not hold water. True, Dr Carl had published lightweight pieces in a couple of academically dodgy journals (Mankind Quarterly and OpenPsych). But a glance at his publication list, on the basis of which he was presumably elected, shows a highly impressive academic CV, including impeccable journals such as PLoS ONE, the American Sociologist, European Union Politics, Electoral Studies, the British Journal of Sociology and the Political Quarterly.

Cambridge colleges do not make a habit of terminating research fellows at the beginning of their tenure merely because of a few dud articles in a line of very good ones. Indeed, Sir Patrick Elias, the very shrewd retired judge (and ex-Cambridge academic lawyer to boot) who was asked to investigate the appointment process, was forthright: the college had, he said, ‘fairly selected the best candidate’. Given the keenness of competition for research fellowships, that is highly telling.

Secondly, note that the allegations made against Dr Carl – the offending articles, and his prior attendance at the London Conference on Intelligence – related not to what he had done while a fellow, but to activities before he had even been elected. No matter: in the master’s words, Dr Carl’s writings had had ‘a detrimental effect on the atmosphere within the college with feelings of hurt, betrayal, anger and disbelief that the college could be associated with such views’. In other words, we now have a situation where a college regards it as acceptable to elect a fellow and then remove him because it later finds out it is uncomfortable with some opinion he has previously expressed and wants to change its mind. If this is the new practice in academia, it is distinctly worrying.

Thirdly, for all the implications of a legal process impeccably conducted, the master’s statement leaves a strong suspicion that the college was desperate to do anything to avoid the storm that was breaking over it, if necessary at the expense of sacrificing the interests of a young scholar. Take a look at the list of the findings of the college’s Investigation Panel. Apart from alleged poor scholarship (see above), there were two. One was that Dr Carl had ‘collaborated with a number of individuals who were known to hold extremist views’, and that therefore his appointment ‘could lead, directly or indirectly, to the college being used as a platform to promote views that could incite racial or religious hatred, and bring the college into disrepute’. The other was the way in which Dr Carl had conducted himself with regard to his publications (by which presumably they meant that he had defended them), which, it was said, had ‘a detrimental effect on the atmosphere within the college’.

One might have thought it obvious that such matters should be irrelevant to an academic appointment. But there is a more important point. If push had come to legal shove, it seems obvious that neither finding gets remotely near providing a justification for removal of a fellow. For this the college’s own statutes require proof of ‘grave misconduct’ and a two-thirds vote of the fellows. Collaboration with the holders of lawful political views, extreme or otherwise, is hardly grave misconduct; nor, we hope, the fact that an article written in all innocence might be taken up by some boneheaded political zealot somewhere and twisted to suit his perverted purposes. And this is quite beside the fact that all these events had in any case happened before Dr Carl became a fellow, and (as Sir Patrick Elias pointed out) he had been under no duty whatever to tell the college about them unless asked.

Indeed, reading between the lines, one suspects the college knew that it might be on thin legal ice. Interestingly, the master’s statement does not announce that Dr Carl was removed from his fellowship – which one might have expected him to say if he had been – but that his position as a research fellow had become ‘untenable’. Put another way, what seems likely is that he informed Dr Carl, presumably with the connivance of a large proportion of the 60-odd fellows (the lack of objection from whom is itself cause for concern), that he would do well to resign, with the vague threat that his life would be made impossible at the college if he did not. If this is right, the sanctimonious reiteration at the end of the master’s statement of the college’s commitment to academic free speech rings somewhat hollow. What really mattered, it seems, was saving the college’s record as a promoter of diversity, inclusion and the abhorrence of racism. The image was everything; the principle of free speech, and the idea of a college as a place for debate and vigorous argument, came a poor second.

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Your university degree might be useless

When Fiona Pok first enrolled in her business degree, she was convinced it would lead to a glittering future career.

But after graduating in 2013, her hopes were dashed and she soon lashed out at her university and the “mickey mouse” degree she says she was left with.

Then, last year, she revealed plans to sue the UK’s Anglia Ruskin University (ARU) over a breach of contract, arguing the course failed to deliver the chance of “a rewarding job with prospects”.

Now the 30-year-old has finally triumphed after being awarded a £61,000 ($A111,192) payout.

The sum was agreed upon in an out-of-court deal, with the campus handing over a £15,000 ($A27,342) settlement as well as £46,000 ($A83,850) to cover her legal fees.

Ms Pok, who also goes by the name Pok Wong, told the UK’s Sunday Telegraph the result was a win for her and other disgruntled students.

“The payout means this is a victory for me despite the university strenuously fighting my case and denying any responsibility,” she said. “In light of this settlement, I think universities should be careful about what they say in prospectuses. “I think they often make promises which they know will never materialise or are simply not true.”

But an ARU spokesman told the paper the settlement did not mean Ms Wong’s claims were correct.

“Ms Wong’s longstanding litigation … has been settled at the instruction of our insurers to draw a line under these matters and to prevent a further escalation of their legal costs,” he said. “The claims were wholly without merit and resulted in cost orders made against Ms Wong by the Central London County Court on two occasions.”

THE CASE

The beginnings of the landmark case started back in 2011 when Ms Wong, originally from Hong Kong, moved to the UK to study at ARU’s Lord Ashcroft International Business School in Cambridge after being impressed by the institution’s prospectus.

She graduated with a first-class degree in international business strategy in 2013 but was convinced the organisation's claims it was a “renowned centre of excellence” that offered a “high quality of teaching” were false.

Last year, she told the UK’s The Sunday Telegraph her two years of study left her with little more than a “mickey mouse” degree, and she was entitled to compensation as a result.

“The prospectus convinced me that the university is really impressive,” she told the publication at the time. “But, as soon as I started in 2011, I realised there were failings. Although I graduated with a first-class degree in 2013, it is a mickey mouse degree.

“I hope that bringing this case will set a precedent so that students can get value for money, and if they don’t, they get compensated. Anglia Ruskin talked a good talk but then they didn’t deliver.”

Ms Wong complained of lecturers arriving late to classes and claimed students were regularly instructed to “self study” with little guidance.

She also alleged she was once “locked” in a room by staff members when she tried to protest against the university at her graduation ceremony.

A picture on Ms Wong’s public Facebook profile from October 2013 shows the woman in her graduation cap and gown holding a large multi-coloured sign that says “ARU sucks”. In the caption accompanying the photo, Ms Wong described being “forcibly removed from the stage” during the ceremony.

When the case first made headlines last year, legal experts claimed it could potentially set a precedent for other unsatisfied students to pursue similar legal battles.

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