From It Takes a Village, p. 59: “It has become fashionable in some quarters to assert that intelligence is fixed at birth, part, of our genetic makeup that is invulnerable to change, a claim promoted by Charles Murray and the late Richard Herrnstein in their 1994 book The Bell Curve. This view is politically convenient: nothing can alter intellectual potential, nothing need be offered to those who begin life with fewer resources or in less favorable environments.”
From The Bell Curve, p. 410: “Lest anyone doubt that environment matters in the development of intelligence, consider the rare and bizarre cases in which a child is hidden away in a locked room by a demented adult or breaks free of human contact altogether and runs wild. . . . From these rare cases we can draw a hopeful conclusion: If the ordinary human environment is so essential for bestowing human intelligence, we should be able to create extraordinary environments to raise it further.”
In a spirit of Christian charity, not to say liberal compassion, we hope critics are fairer to Mrs. Clinton’s book than it is to other people’s work.
