Education Quote by J. Philippe Rushton

“Mean pattern” is doing a lot of quiet political work here. Rushton dresses a controversial claim in the lab coat of statistics: not people, not policies, not history, just a tidy average that supposedly travels. The phrasing is designed to sound modest - “increasingly been found,” “prove valid,” “internationally” - but it’s a rhetorical escalator. Start with Canada and the United States (places audiences already think of as data-rich, administratively legible, and “multiracial”), then imply the same hierarchy holds everywhere. The move isn’t to argue; it’s to launder a conclusion through the tone of accumulated evidence.

The specific intent is to naturalize inequality. By framing educational and economic outcomes as a “pattern” within “multi-racial countries,” the quote nudges readers away from structural explanations (segregation, immigration policy, labor markets, redlining, school funding) and toward the idea that group disparities are stable, measurable, and ultimately portable. “Mean” further flattens the messiness: variation within groups disappears; selection effects vanish; context becomes noise.

The subtext is older than the sentence: a rebranded hereditarian story that treats social stratification as a cross-cultural constant rather than a product of institutions. Rushton’s broader career sits in the late-20th-century battle over race, IQ, and “scientific” justifications for policy retrenchment. This line reads like a bridge between academic publication and public insinuation: if the pattern is “internationally” valid, then interventions look futile, and unequal outcomes can be recast as descriptive inevitabilities rather than democratic failures.