Victor discusses this better than I can, but I too was struck by Rev. Wright’s discussion of education in the Detroit speech last night. He drew some rather stereotyped distinctions in the way white and black children learn — white children learn diagrams and numbers, while black children memorize reams of hip-hop lyrics. He was dead serious about it. I asked Chester Finn about it, and his response was:
Short answer is hogwash! There’s a lot of talk in educator circles about kids’ “different learning styles,” and some would correlate those with race or ethnicity, but no serious cognitive psychologist thinks there’s anything at all to this.