The cognitive consequences of education: Some empirical evidence and theoretical misgivings

F both practical and theoretical reasons, the last decade has seen a renewed academic discussion of the intellectual consequences of formal education. On an international scale, training in basic academic skills was promoted as an essential prerequisite to economic progress (Gray, 1956); nationally, the expenditures for Operation Head Start were often justified as a means of breaking the' cycle of poverty' by teaching young children the basic intellectual skills that promote learning to read and do arithmetic; following such influential theorists as Hunt (1961), these latter programs assumed that intellectual skills could be taught and that schools were the place where they were most likely to be learned, at least for the poor and 'culturally different.' More recently, the assumptions that formal education promotes economic development and that intellectual skills are learned in school have come under attack. At both the national (cf. Greer, 1972) and international levels (Harmon, 1974), evidence has mounted that the development offormal educational facilities follows, rather than leads, development. In a parallel manner, many social scientists have come to accept the idea that schools do not modify children; rather, they screen children according to previously determined levels of ability. This is by no means a new idea. Many years ago, Pillsbury (1920) actually advocated largescale intelligence testing precisely because tests could carry out the school's screening function more efficiently. Jencks' (1973) widely cited conclusions concerning the inability of schools to change educational outcomes predicted from home background factors, when combined with popular interpretations of Jensen's (1971) conclusion that 'educability' is inherited, have also contributed substantially to the notion that schools do not bring about basic cognitive changes. These issues are a matter of very broad concern and the controversy surrounding them is easy to understand. Unfortunately, they are also very difficult issues to resolve, scientifically as well as in terms of social policy. A major impediment to their scientific resolution is the close