Self-anointed "expert" says we're stupider

Imagine if you can what the outrage would be if some academic released a study claiming rich folks weren't as smart as working-class people. But someone puts out a paper claiming the opposite, and the media slurps it up like it's gospel truth.

Bruce Charlton, a psychiatrist at Newcastle University in England, has written a report claiming that working-class people like you and me have lower IQ's than the rich. Charlatan says that this - not economic prejudice - is why so few poor and working-class students are admitted to prestigious universities.

This report is academic arrogance, elitism, and class bigotry at its worst. Where I come from in Kentucky, we call it bullshit.

Charlton calls himself an evolutionary psychiatrist. He's a shrink who's trying to cloak his right-wing class bigotry under the guise of science. As a discredited pseudoscience, psychiatry now seems to be the refuge for followers of eugenics, which itself was discredited years ago.

The doc further tries to imply that other academics won't publicly take the same position because there's a big, mean, left-wing conspiracy to censor it. He calls it a fear of creating controversy. But it looks like the Free Republic bullshit trust is about the only folks who agree with him.

He uses his "findings" to attack the British government's verifiable claim that prestigious schools are rejecting prospective students based on social class. "Higher social classes have a significantly higher average IQ than lower social classes," sniffs Charlatan, and he says that because of this, the government should just stop worrying about the problem of economic discrimination.

I can't find any evidence of Bruce Charlton backing up his assertion that we're stupider than he is because we have less money. Maybe it's because he can't back up his hate speech, so he pulls it out of his ass.

It's amazing that any mainstream newspapers actually have the gall to give a soapbox to this shit, which only serves as more grist in the Far Right's long war against the working class.

(Source: http://news.scotsman.com/education/Working-classes-are-less-.4108730.jp)