things as "Who was Wilkins McCawber?

", "What is the meaning of

`sudiferous'?", "What should a girl do if a boy hits her?" (Hitting him back
is not the right answer!) And how do we know that someone who does well
on such a test is intelligent? Because, in fact, the tests were originally
standardized to pick out precisely those children in a class whom the teacher
had already labeled intelligent. That is, I. Q. tests are instruments for giving
an apparently objective and "scientific" gloss to the social prejudices of
educational institutions.
Second, people who decide on an early adoption for their children are
usually working-class or unemployed people who do not share in the
education and culture of the middle class. People who adopt children, on the
other hand, are usually middle-class and have an appropriate education and
cultural experience for the content and intent of I. Q. tests. So adopting
parents have, as a group, much higher I. Q. performances than the parents
who have chosen adoption for their children. The educational and family
environment in which these children are then raised has the expected result
of raising all their I. Q. s even though there is evidence for some genetic
influence from their biological parents. These results of adoption studies
illustrate perfectly why we cannot answer a question about how much
something can be changed by answering a different question, namely, are
there genes influencing the trait? If we wanted seriously to ask the question
posed by Arthur Jensen in his famous article "How much can we boost I. Q.
and scholastic achievement?",11 the only way we could answer would be to
try to boost I. Q. and scholastic achievement. We do not answer it by asking,
as Jensen did, whether there is a genetic influence on I. Q. , because to be
genetic is not to be unchangeable.
Biological determinists claim that there are not only differences in ability
among individuals but that these individual differences explain racial
differences in social power and success. It is hard to know how one would
get evidence about Black-white differences that did not totally confound
genetic and environmental variation. Inter-racial adoptions, for example, are
uncommon, especially of white children adopted by Black foster parents.
Occasional evidence does appear, however.
In Dr. Bernardo's homes in Britain, where children are taken as orphans
soon after birth, a study was done of intelligence testing of children of Black