Cognitive Development and Social Policy

Abstract

The city of Warsaw was razed at the end of World War II and rebuilt under a socialist government whose policy was to allocate dwellings, schools, and health facilities without regard to social class. Of the 14,238 children born in 1963 and living in Warsaw, 96 percent were given the Raven's Progressive Matrices Test and an arithmetic and a vocabulary test in March to June of 1974. Information was collected on the families of the children, and on characteristics of schools and city districts. Parental occupation and education were used to form a family factor, and the district data were collapsed into two factors, one relating to social marginality, and the other to distance from city center. Analysis showed that the initial assumption of even distribution of family, school, and district attributes was reasonable. Mental performance was unrelated either to school or district factors; it was related to parental occupation and education in a strong and regular gradient. It is concluded that an egalitarian social policy executed over a generation failed to override the association of social and family factors with cognitive development that is characteristic of more traditional industrial societies.

Intelligence: Is It the Epidemiologists' Elusive "Fundamental Cause" of Social Class Inequalities in Health?

“…Equalizing socioeconomic environments does little or nothing to reduce the dispersion in IQ, as was illustrated by the great variation in intellectual capacities among children born in post-WWII Warsaw despite the city's Communist government providing the same (integrated) housing, medical care, and other amenities to all inhabitants (Firkowska et al, 1978).…”

Studies of socioeconomic and ethnic differences in intelligence in the former Soviet Union in the early twentieth century

“…In a study carried out in communist Poland in 1974, substantial social class differences in intelligence were reported in a sample of approximately l4,000 11 year olds in Warsaw (almost all the children in the city) (Firkowska, Ostrowska, Sokolowska, Stein, Susser, & Wald, 1978). The authors concluded that "an egalitarian social policy executed over a generation failed to override the association of social and family factors with cognitive development that is characteristic of more traditional societies".…”

Family Socioeconomic and Educational-Emotional Characteristics as Predictors of School Achievement

“…and academic achievement (8,12,24,26,33,34,37,40). The degree of the association varies between a correlation of 0.35 to 0 .5 depending on the study and whether it focuses on achievement test scores or educational attainment (24).…”

“…T he importance of the family to children's academic performance is well documented in numero us studies (2,4,12,20,21,24,30,31) showing that a large proportion of children who fail in school are from disadvantaged families. The period of most rapid rate of growth of intelligence and achievement occurs during the first few years of life (3), when the family's influence is paramount.…”

“…Family characteristics associated with academic achievement and intelligence can be divided into status variables such as socioeconomic status -for example, education, occupation, income (2,4,12,18,24,30,31 )-that, though interesting, tell little about how their effects are mediated to the child, and into process variables-for example, achievement press of parents, home language models, academic home gUidance , and social participation of family (9, 15, 19, 20, 26, 27 , 28,41, 45)-that are closer to being mediating variables.…”