The The Hello and welcome to Behind the News. My name is Doug Henwood. The usual two

guests today will hear from the education researcher and writer Frederick

DeBoer about his new book The Cult of Smart And then Matthew Snyder will tell us about organizing a community land trust

in the inland empire of Southern California.

First, Education.

Frederick de Boer, known to most people, including me as Freddie, is a mostly retired internet celebrity whose day job is as an education researcher, teacher, and writer.

He's just out with a new book, The Cult of Smart, how our broken education system perpetuates social

injustice, published by all points.

His argument is that we need to rethink our obsession with smartness narrowly defined in its

central role in distributing rewards in this society.

To make this point he relies on an argument about the heritability of intelligence that will

make many uncomfortable.

It makes me uncomfortable.

But some uncharitable, careless, or tendentious reviewers of the book,

not all of whom have read it, I should say, have tried to conclude from this that DeBoer is some sort of scientific

racist on the model of Richard Hernstein and Charles Murray's odious and deeply racist

1994 book The Belkerve. That's just not true and outrageously so,

though again some of the most vocal critics on the social media have not to because they claim to know

what's in it even though they obviously don't.

Freddie repeatedly says that he's talking about individuals not races.

There's no heritable difference in IQ between the races and in fact

there's no such thing as race. I wish she'd focused instead on saying that people

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