Real Education: Four Simple Truths for Bringing America's Schools Back to Reality

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Real Education: Four Simple Truths for Bringing America's Schools Back to Reality is a 2008 book by Charles Murray. He wrote the book to challenge the "Educational romanticism [which] asks too much from students at the bottom of the intellectual pile, asks the wrong things from those in the middle, and asks too little from those at the top."
Murray claims that there are "four simple truths" about education:
"Ability varies."
"Half of the children are below average."
"Too many people are going to college."
"America's future depends on how we educate the academically gifted."
Critic Michael J. Feuer, writing in Issues in Science and Technology, in addition to Murray's “'four simple truths'” also sees "an equally simplistic proposal: ... [that] privatization will fix the schools."
When New York Times interviewer Deborah Solomon said, "I believe that given the opportunity, most people could do most anything," Murray responded, "You’re out of touch with reality in that regard." Times critic Charles McGrath defends the current educational system:
And yet for all its sloppiness, the present arrangement seems preferable to what Mr.