Tim Lott: It’s no surprise that white working-class boys do badly at school

There has been another report – this time from the Sutton Trust – showing that white working-class children are underperforming in schools. This is a long-established tendency. Nearly all ethnic minority groups do better. This includes black African, Chinese and Bangladeshi children.

We are in a tricky area here – where race meets culture. Biology makes it plain that there are no differences in traits between races. However, races can be associated with cultures – and there are rough personality variations between cultures, whether ethnically related or not. Parisians and Boers, white Americans and Native Americans, Saudi Arabians and Israelis – all are liable to have their own separate collective views of and assumptions about the world. These are not binding, but they constitute what you might call mass tendencies. And as if this were not complicated enough, we have to throw class into the mix.

Cultures are inherited, enshrined habits of thought and behaviour, both good and bad. They are, as David Mamet puts it, “the way we do things here”. They are malleable, they are mutable – and extremely powerful. Their relationship to the chimera of “race” is complex and hard to chart, but appears to be real enough.

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