Raymond B. Cattell

“. I think it might not be a bad idea to remove the inscription from the Statue of Liberty which calls for the “wretched refuse” of the other countries to migrate here. This is not what you want to build a nation of. If we have immigration, we ought to have it from the best sources. At the moment, the sociologists have won out on that issue with their claims that there are no differences among immigrants. But I would maintain that there are most marked differences, in both innate intelligence and personality, among people who enter the U.S.”
― Raymond B. Cattell

“The current decline in educational achievement is, like most things, multiply determined. The evidence points, first, to about 50-100 years of genetic decline in ability. It doesn’t take much–perhaps a one-point decline every 30 years–to reduce substantially the percentage in the upper range of IQ. With our present mean IQ of 100, 1 person in 250 would exceed an IQ of 140. If, however, the average dropped to 85, you’d have only 1 in 8,000 who would exceed an IQ of 140. We must suppose that academic standards are much affected by the percentages of high IQ individuals, and that their becoming more scarce will lower academic performance. So part of the remedy for this problem definitely lies in eugenic practices.

But there are some environmental factors as well, such as the failure to do “streaming” in schools, in which children of much the same ability level are put together. And I think something in the way of general idleness and slackness has gotten into the system since the 1960s which could account for a part of the decline, particularly in the more precise subjects like mathematics.”
― Raymond B. Cattell