What Your Child's DNA Can Tell You About Parenting | Newsweek Culture | Newsweek.com

Are there genetic limits to children's ability to learn from mistakes? Recent science suggests that up to 30% of children possess a genetic variant that prevents them from learning from mistakes in childhood and youth, thus dooming them to repeat problematic and even dangerous behaviours time and again. Though this article focuses on the implications of this finding for parenting, I wonder what the implications of this finding might be for teaching, especially in early childhood. From this article:
'[I]ndividual genetic differences are the 800-pound gorilla of child development," says Jack Shonkoff, director of the Center on the Developing Child at Harvard University. "The promise of genomics is that you will be able to tailor experiences as we tailor drugs.' The tailoring of experiences is difficult, of course, and the tailoring of drugs (as in the case of ADHD and other disorders) a more commercially profitable industry.

Somehow this smacks of Hernstein and Murray. Yuck.