Back in 1965, when he proposed the Elementary and Secondary Education Act to Congress, President Lyndon B. Johnson wrote, “Every child must be encouraged to get as much education as he has the ability to take.”
Today, that language might feel a bit dated (and gendered)—instead, we might say we’re aiming for “all children to achieve their full academic potential.” But the same idea is lurking inside these seemingly anodyne statements, and it is both common sense and something those of us in education policy don’t like to say out loud.
Ability matters and varies from human to human. As a result, we don’t all have the same ability “to take” the same amount of education.
While this might seem obviously true, particularly to anyone who has ever raised more than one child, is it scientifically true? Is innate ability, written in our genes, a real thing? If so, can we measure it?
Answering in the affirmative is Dalton Conley, a Princeton professor whose fascinating new book, The Social Genome, explores the interaction of our genetic code and the social environment. He demolishes what he calls “blank-slatism”—the assertion that variation in individual human traits, behaviors, and outcomes is caused entirely by our life circumstances, including social class. But he also takes down the “hereditarians,” who argue that everything is predetermined by our genes. It’s not nurture versus nature, he argues, but nature and nurture both, linked by an intricate dance whereby our genes seek out environments to fully express themselves.
Nobody in education needs convincing that “nurture” factors like the home environment kids grow up in, the type of neighborhood they live in, and the friends they keep have an impact on schooling outcomes. Indeed, for decades researchers testing the effects of new interventions have tried to control for these factors, so correlated they are to success or failure in school. But what may be harder to accept is that our DNA has a major impact on our education outcomes as well.
We don’t tend to resist this line of thinking when it comes to physical attributes. Tall parents beget tall children. Kids who are athletically prodigious often have moms and dads who were superstars on the field, too. When it comes to cognition and other school-related skills, however, we grow sheepish about the role of our genes—and for good reason. We’ve all studied the horrors that resulted from the eugenics movement of a century ago, culminating in the gas chambers at Auschwitz and beyond. And we’ve all read or seen science fiction novels and movies, from Brave New World to Minority Report to Gattaca, that warn us of a future when genetic predispositions are taken to be determinative, or when tinkering with our genes to create tailor-made superhumans becomes the dystopian norm. (This is indeed already happening at fertility clinics worldwide to some extent, as parents select for preferred traits.)
Conley worries about all this, too, but can’t deny what science is teaching us: Our genetic code has a big impact on many human traits, behaviors, and outcomes, and we’re getting better at measuring the relationship.
