Thomas sowell Quotes - QuotesSweet | quotesweet.com

Author: Thomas Sowell
Quotes of Author: Thomas Sowell

Thomas Sowell _ Inside American Education
It would be impossible to understand the persistence and vehemence of these arguments against test scores without understanding the political purpose they serve. Arguments that test scores under-estimate the subsequent academic performance of minority students {1} serve to justify preferential admissions of minority students and {2} permit denial that these are in fact preferential policies, by enabling the claim to be made that different admissions standards merely adjust for the "unfairness" of the tests. In reality, the tests are not unfair. Life is unfair and the tests measure the results.
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Thomas Sowell _ Conquests And Cultures: An
It was in the wake of these erosions of economic controls that intellectual challenges were then made to the role of government in the economy, first by the Physiocrats in France, who coined the term "laissez-faire," and then by Adam Smith in Britain, who became its leading champion.
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Thomas Sowell _ Conquests And Cultures: An
British kings could not repudiate national debts-and this in turn made Britain a more attractive country for lenders.71
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Thomas Sowell _ Conquests And Cultures: An
Complex and time-consuming international economic transactions, including long-term investments, are particularly dependent on a reliable framework of law, so that changes of government policy or of individuals in power, do not create large uncertainties as to whether commitments will be honored or foreigners treated on an equal plane with the natives involved in commercial and financial transactions.
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Thomas Sowell _ Conquests And Cultures: An
What the British had earlier than many other peoples was a framework of law and government that facilitated economic transactions.
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Thomas Sowell _ Conquests And Cultures: An
Between 50,000 and 100,000 Huguenots fled to Britain from France in the seventeenth century, particularly after revocation of the Edict of Nantes, which had previously guaranteed religious freedom to Protestants.67
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Thomas Sowell _ Conquests And Cultures: An
stability of government and dependability of laws which attracted foreigners.
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Thomas Sowell _ Conquests And Cultures: An
financial transactions that produced both wealth and unpopularity.
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Thomas Sowell _ Inside American Education
Moreover, even at elite colleges, the personnel attracted to college admissions are seldom themselves part of the intellectual elite. Yet their job is to select students unlike themselves, to be taught by professors unlike themselves, for careers unlike theirs. It can hardly be surprising that admissions personnel are drawn toward non-intellectual criteria and toward ideas not unlike the notion of judging "the whole person," as found among educators at the pre-college level. Over the years, all sorts of criteria from popular psychology and sociological speculation have assumed increasing weight visa-vis such standard intellectual criteria as academic records and test scores. The
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Thomas Sowell _ Inside American Education
Outside the world of education, few would be confident, or even comfortable, claiming that it is a lack of self-esteem which leads to felonies or its presence which leads to Nobel Prizes. Yet American schools are permeated with the idea that selfesteem precedes performance, rather than vice-versa. The very idea that self-esteem is something earned, rather than being a pre-packaged handout from the school system, seems not to occur to many educators.
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Thomas Sowell _ Inside American Education
would be hard to think of a more monocultural, insular and self-complacent nation than Japan-and vet the Japanese are among the leading participants in the international economy, in international scientific and technological developments, as well as in international travel and tourism. This is not a defense of insularity or of the Japanese, It is simply a piece of empirical evidence to highlight the non sequitur of the claim that international participation requires the multicultural ideology or agenda. Another
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Thomas Sowell _ Inside American Education
The ideological component of multiculturalism can be summarized as a cultural relativism which finds the prominence of Western civilization in the world or in the schools intolerable. Behind this attitude is often a seething hostility to the West, barely concealed even in public statements designed to attract wider political support for the multicultural agenda.
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