Becky Elder, a Local Kansas Matriarch (and More)

Last week, on a clear and cold Friday afternoon, I joined a couple of hundred other people to attend, and pay our respects during, the graveside service of Rebecca Love “Becky” Elder, at Elderslie Farm, her family’s property in Kechi. She was a powerful and beloved Kansas matriarch, in the tradition of many others throughout the history of our state. She was also an inspiration and a friend, one that I will deeply miss.

I can’t remember when I first met Becky; it was likely a few years after my family moved to Wichita and I began teaching at Friends University in 2006. I know I was definitely aware of her by 2011; by that I time I had, after a slow start, begun to involve myself in local associations and arguments—I think my presentation on populism at the Wichita Pachyderm Club might have been one that really caught Becky’s eye—and as I became more familiar with different people, projects, and programs throughout Sedgwick County, I discovered that she and her family members were a thread which could connect almost all of them. People that knew Becky well could run down the same list of local endeavors she had her fingerprints on which my memory is calling up, and no doubt add many more to it: the Eighth Day Institute, the New Symposium, SunnyDale Community Library, the Friends University Neighborhood Garden (the only one of all these where my involvement actually preceded hers), Jubilee Presbyterian Church, and most importantly, Northfield School for the Liberal Arts.

The closest and broadest associations Becky had, at least from my observations outside the immediate Elder family and their church communities, were those that sprung, one way or another, from Northfield. Becky’s long crusade on behalf of home schooling, independent schooling, classical schools, micro-schools, and a half-dozen other overlapping alternative educational visions was central to her public identity. Becky's visionary aspirations perhaps put her more in the position of being an entrepreneur of teaching rather than a full-timer teacher herself, but as someone who has made the latter his career, my admiration for her skill with students is boundless. She was one of the purest believers in the ability of people to embrace the history, tradition, language, and culture they have inherited, simultaneously critique it, and through doing so make it part of their own civic and spiritual formation—the classical notion of humanitas--that I have ever known. While I never heard her quote it—and she quoted lots of authors, be they philosophers, theologians, economists, sociologists or more, to say nothing of dozens of figures from the literary canon—I cannot think of anyone I have known through all my decades in the classroom who more deeply embraced, as both a pedagogy and a telos, Goethe’s great celebration of self-discovery, and thereby self-revelation, from Faust:

 

Was du ererbt von deinen Vätern hast,

Erwirb es, um es zu besitzen.

Was man nicht nützt, ist eine schwere Last;

Nur was der Augenblick erschafft, das kann er nützen.

 

(What from your fathers you received as heir,

Acquire anew, if you would possess it.

What is not used is but a load to bear;

But if today creates it, we can use and bless it.)

 

My wife and I were products of the public schools, meaning our education was not one informed by such classical assumptions and discipline. That doesn’t mean we were ignorant of the limitations of the public schooling model, with its centralized and standardized curricula and bureaucratic disciplinary regimes; my mother turned to home schooling my younger siblings soon after I left home, and that legacy has shaped the education of most of my nieces and nephews. Still, Melissa and I never considered any approach besides the public one for our own children, perhaps in part because we always felt relatively successful in working with the schools our daughters attended, finding ways to preserve the localist and familial elements that are always present in any actually neighborhood school, or at least so we both believed. (The fact that, once we settled here in Wichita, we bought a home where our children could easily walk or bike to their elementary, middle, and high schools was certainly a part of this.)

As I wrote over 20 years ago, at a time when our four children were still in the midst of their public schooling journeys, “I like the idea of the state being a partial agent of education.” Why? Because the liberal democratic order—whatever its many flaws as manifested in the United States—can and, I think, usually does add an egalitarian element to one’s education, and by so doing complement and enrich the traditions one receives from home and community. Too often the personal development which an embrace of one’s individual inheritance makes possible is warped by our globalized capitalist world into just one more instantiation of meritocracy; structurally weaving the imperatives of liberal egalitarianism into the mass public educational ideal can preserve something truly civic, at least as much as the classic ideal may.

All this, of course, meant that Becky and I had some very deep disagreements when it came to schooling. And yet those disagreements never got in the way of us conversing—always curiously and joyfully—about the potential for neighborhoods to reflect, and provide foundations for, the plurality of ways in which people can learn and grow, and thereby sustain one another, their communities, and their natural environments. She embraced and was always looking to share with her students and me and anyone else who would listen those authors and intellectual models who tied their stories to the socio-economic and environmental conditions that made real localism possible. She was instinctively sympathetic to deeply Kansan anti-government, anti-union attitudes she had inherited from her family, but she took up those arguments in a populist, even radical way. In that way, her Old Right libertarianism and my anarcho-socialism met on common ground. The first time I was invited to speak at Northfield (back when the school met in the old Love Box warehouse on 37^th St. in north Wichita), I walked into the makeshift classroom, saw quotations from McGuffey’s Eclectic Readers all around the walls, and assumed I was entering a traditionally conservative environment; but after a day of presentations and discussions with students of all ages, conversations which had ranged from town meetings to backyard gardens to the interstate highway system to oil monopolies to climate change to do-it-yourself-tractor repair, I saw the truth: Becky Elder was a hippie. God bless her for it.

The hippies get a bad rap, to be sure, and much of it is deserved; so much of the counter-culture a half-century or more ago turned its back upon tradition entirely, and assumed that a new civilization could be simply willed into existence, through communes and co-ops, from the ground up. And too many of the wrong lessons of that counter-cultural vision continue to inform the transhuman delusions of the Silicon Valley elite, whose understanding of the DIY mentality focuses more on venture capital and AI technology than practical crafts and community sharing. But the best aspects of hippie-dom, especially when conjoined with the kind of deep Christian faith and agrarian practice that Becky’s whole existence reflected, are profoundly wise. It is a good thing to insist on developing real local knowledge, on breaking away from larger systems and getting down on one’s knees instead, whether to weed a garden or pray to God or read a text closely (or ideally, all three). While the political culture of Kansas may on the surface may seem to be anything but friendly to this kind of deep, loving, local engagement, I think that Becky’s example of rooted, trusting, make-it-up-as-you-go-along activism actually only adds to our state’s long tradition of local matriarchs making the most of the soil and situation around them, and making history as they do so.

I’m thinking here of Mary Skubitz, a Slovenian immigrant to Kansas who was brought to the coal mining country of Crawford County by her parents as a child in 1890. Decades later, she helped organize other wives and mothers into the “Amazon Army” of 1921, a mass protest of women, marching from mine to mine, facing armed threats from the owners, demanding improvements of the terrible conditions their husbands and sons suffered in the mines. Or I’m thinking of Minnie Wish-Ken-O, a Potawatomie woman in Jackson County who took up the leadership in her tribe during the 1930s, in the midst of the dissolution and despair brought on by drought and the Dust Bowl, and from her farm led the fight against the national government’s efforts at tribal re-organization and termination over the subsequent two decades.

Even more humbly, my colleague Ken Spurgeon has resurrected—through his film Sod and Stubble—the story of Rosa Hagg Ise, a new bride who settled with her husband Henry and raised a family in Osborne County in the 1870s. The frontier challenges she overcame made her a determined believer in education, and her children in turn graduated from some of the most prestigious schools in America (as well as telling their mother’s story in what became an early Kansas classic). Unsurprisingly, education is a constant in so many of these stories—which just brings us around to Becky again. Her great-grandmother, Eldora Dugan Love, settled with her husband Charles in Butler County in the 1870s; from her homestead, Eldora published a women’s journal which made educational and religious improvement its central message. And three generations later, that message continues on.

Towards the conclusion of Becky’s graveside service, the pastor invoked Becky’s commitment to “place,” both in terms of landed particularity (the family had made arrangements beforehand, in accordance with Kansas state law, to bury Becky without embalmment on her own property, which they did), and in terms of an attitude towards our part of God’s plan—loving where we are planted, and looking forward to that heavenly place of love and grace where we can reside after our earthly sojourns end. As I watched her body lowered by her sons into the grave, I could help but think of my own mother’s recent passing, and also think of how this great matriarch of the Elder clan was still teaching. By example, she was showing us how one puts down roots, and becomes part of an ever-growing, ever-revealing bounteous creation. She lived a Kansas life, and a Christian life, and a life that found and shared freedom and opportunity and insight in fertile minds and fertile ground. What could be more graceful, and more local, than that?

 

 

 

On Simplicity, Transparency, and Educational Trust in Topeka

[A shorter version of this essay appeared in the Wichita Eagle here.]

There are several different ways to talk about the "Parent's Bill of Rights and Academic Transparency Act" being debated in the Kansas legislature. One obvious way is to look at the role of ALEC and conservative and Republican-leaning groups and activists in flooding state legislatures across the country with bills challenging what their advocates see as the unpatriotic curriculum often taught in public schools (usually associated with the "Critical Race Theory" bogeyman), employing the same claims which helped elect Greg Youngkin to the governorship in Virginia. But that perspective, though obviously correct, focuses only on the ideological and partisan actors at work in the promotion of this legislation. However polarized American voters have become, I also suspect that bills like this can ultimately only enjoy whatever popular success they do because they also appeal in part to a frustration and confusion, and certain kind of a longing for simplicity and trust, which is all but universal--because it seems to so often compromised-- in our modern lives. So as politically naive as it may be, I want to set aside the dark money accusations for the moment, and focus on that appeal.

That the ordinary lives lived by you and I and anyone else who may read this in the United States today--as in almost every other industrialized and post-industrialized economy--are regularly shaped by all sorts of complicated corporate, governmental, and bureaucratic systems is hardly a new insight (paging Rousseau, Weber, Berry, or my own pretentious writings about "simplicity" from the early days of this blog, more than a decade and a half ago). Almost no one like this, and almost everyone complains about it, but relatively few people--maybe entirely home-schooling parents, maybe off-the-grid Amish farmers, etc.--are both willing or able to reject the many goods (in terms of time, convenience, and specialized services, many of which are life-saving, but may others of which are, I'd like to believe most people would admit, merely distracting fun) which these complex, usually out-sourced systems provide. In the midst of this complexity and tension, how to hold onto the ideal of ordinary citizens being able to access the information to truly governing themselves? For some, like this bill's authors--or, probably more accurately, the audience for whom the ideologically disposed authors of this bill intended it--the answer is “transparency.”

That “transparency” is a key component of modern democracy is undeniable. If the decision-making of those whom we elect stays invisible, it invites corruption and poisons our civic health. But like “democracy” itself, the concept of “transparency” can sometimes become a totem, a term used to advance a cause rather than a standard to assess what is actually taking place. And that is, unfortunately, what I think has happened with this proposed educational reform. When a couple of Kansas legislators recently defended the bill, they only passingly mentioned the “unhealthy ideas” and “harmful ideologies” which they believed could find their way into the public schools. Instead, they focused upon how parents “have a right to know what their children are being taught,” claiming that the bill simply aims to guarantee “easy access to curricular materials that already should be available today,” and concluded by writing that “there are no enemies in transparency.” And on a certain level, they’re completely correct. 

Who, after all, likes to be kept in the dark, however unintentionally, by the specialized bureaucracies were are obliged to negotiate? When these two Republican legislators--both of whom, for whatever it's worth, are mothers and former educators themselves--point out that for “busy parents” the process of finding out just what exactly is happening in their children’s classrooms may be “unclear, unfamiliar, and tedious,” I would imagine that anyone who has ever had to negotiate the complex systems around us (think about trying to find a human being to talk to when calling to file an insurance claim or fix a problem your wireless plan) can relate.

But all the same, I wonder about their perspective on their former careers. The great majority of public school teachers I have known regularly bend over backwards to involve parents in their curriculum, and to help them through the process of understanding that curriculum, with frequent parent-teacher conferences, open houses, book fairs, and so much more. The history of our four daughters moving through Kansas's public schools haven't been conflict-free by any means (I can remember one rather tense meeting when we and several other parents confronted the principal of Wilbur Middle School over a division action a teacher had taken), but overwhelmingly, when have sacrificed sufficient time so to become fully familiar with and thus committed to the specialized work being done by the neighborhood schools our daughters have attended, the results have been pretty wonderful, and as close to collective, slowly built, long-term educational experience with pursuing the public good as I've ever known.

Weigh that reality--which I am sure I am not alone in having experienced--against what is actually in the proposed bill. It woulds require school districts to set up “transparency portals” to give parents online access to “each test, questionnaire, survey, or examination,” as well as explanations of the rationale behind each assignment and accounts of how any of the data collected from any of those assignments will be used in the evaluating the student, plus links to all the library materials used in any of the aforementioned assignments, and much more. In light of all that, it’s not unreasonable that many here in Kansas see bills like this as using the cry of “transparency” to express, instead, a simple distrust in educators themselves.

The bill won’t pass right now, thanks to strong Democratic opposition and dissents from some Republicans concerned about the intrusive governmental mandates it involves. But whether it dies, or sneaks through as part of an appropriations bill, or comes back again next year, the problem inherent to employing a valuable concept like transparency to justify creating more work and reporting for teachers whom parents should be talking to regularly anyway will remain. 

Outside of a complete embrace of home schooling, the classic small-r republican ideal of parents and teachers working together in local schools for the “the common good of the child”—as these legislators put it—will probably always face at least a little difficulty, since their roles and responsibilities of parents and teachers are different. Public schooling in America has always involved a balance between providing a private service to parents--providing their children with the skills and knowledge that will presumably benefit them in their adult lives--and a public good to society at large--introducing to minors civic concepts and a degree of cultural literacy which is judged to be appropriate to the responsibilities of adult democratic citizenship. That balancing act, in practice, will likely disappoint and frustrate as often as it succeeds; that’s what life in a complex, specialized society unavoidably brings us. Technological transparency may smooth over some of these frustrations, but considering its costs, maybe resisting the temptation to demand that the internet to be used to survey everything happening in one's children's classrooms at all times, and instead making the time to respectfully talk and listen, thereby showing trust in each others’ areas of concern and expertise, would surely be the better path.

Why The Cult of Smart is a Book for Every Parent in 2020 (Whether Anarcho-Socialist or Not)

[Cross-posted to Front Porch Republic]

This past summer a book was published, with little fanfare, that made what was, in retrospect, an argument that millions of middle-class, public-schooling parents everywhere--my wife and I included--desperately needed to hear. The argument was, in essence: don't worry about your kids and the inconsistent online education they are likely receiving thanks to the pandemic; just remember that while teachers matter a great deal, and the information which teachers have to impart to our children matters as well, the actual structure of the "schooling" received by students really doesn't matter much at all, or at least not in the way most successful members of our society have come to believe.

That's an unfair and reductive description of Frederik deBoer's fine (if somewhat overlong and scattered) The Cult of Smart: How Our Broken Education System Perpetuates Social Injustice, but it's not fundamentally inaccurate. The primary target of deBoer's book is the American educational meritocracy and those who, because they benefit most from it, are among the last to see its harms, and thus who most frequently push hard against both common sense and scientific data in their efforts to keep it working. But in surveying all that aforementioned data, and explaining how it reveals the very small role that certain types of formal education--however expensive or expert--ultimately play in expanding minds and developing talents, deBoer's attack on meritocratic elites also serves as a consolation to parents and caregivers worried about what their children, and students all across America, may be missing out on. As he writes at the end of his chapter on school quality--following paragraphs of delightfully vicious swipes at Harvard, Yale, and the Gates Foundation--even when we synthesize data from "more than a hundred studies over a 15-year period" looking at the "benefits of...afterschool programs, behavioral interventions, computer-assisted teaching, and more," the results are undeniable: "most things didn't work." He concludes that "[t]his is not an argument that school does not matter" (he notes, for example, the limited yet real impact that small group tutoring can have); rather, "it is instead a question of how school matters" (pp. 120-121). Hence the succor that can be found in The Cult of Smart: if online learning often seems to consist, at least in part, of far too many poorly delivered, incoherently received make-work assignments--and as a college professor myself, I assure you: I am entirely familiar with the pressures which have led struggling instructors around the world to arrive at these far from engaging assignments!--then rest easy; if you're still taking the time to help your kids out around the dinner table, then you're already doing the thing that matters most to their education anyway.

It is unfortunate that "doing homework at the dinner table" is so commonly--however inaccurately--coded as "conservative"; I promise you (again, speaking from personal experience) that left-leaning parents make use of such family schooling traditions just as much of right-leaning ones do. Still, perhaps that coding was inevitable. All through last year, it was solely conservative media outlets which gave deBoer's book any attention; reviews of the book--all of which praised different parts of his argument, if not the whole thing--appeared in National Review, the Wall Street Journal, Business Insider, and the Washington Examiner. It's possible that deBoer--a self-described revolutionary socialist, and a writer who has an equal reputation for thoughtfulness and contrariness--takes some pleasure from being ignored or misunderstood by his own ideological compatriots, but missing his provocative claims is a loss for the American left. It's also possible that, on some deep, inarticulate level, these conservative outlets thought deBoer's book was worth engaging with because the reviewers recognized in it some parallel with Ivan Illich's anarchist classic Deschooling Society, which they learned about from some hippies that sneaked into a home-schooling conference they attended once. In all likelihood, though, none of the above applies; rather, the more likely answer is that the media outlets which took the book seriously were those who like running features that challenge, as they see it, the aims of public education, and the media outlets which dislike challenging the those premises didn't. (In the interests of full disclosure, let it be known that earlier versions of this review were submitted by me to Dissent, Jacobin, and The Nation, all without success--which may be a reflection of the quality of my writing, but I suspect there is more to it than that.

The one extensive exception to this (and boy, is it ever extensive) came from Nathan J. Robinson of the very left-leaning Current Affairs, who wrote a massive, purposefully exhausting response to The Cult of Smart, claiming in essence that it is correct both that the right has looked positively upon the book and that the left has ignored it, since deBoer's arguments, according to Robinson, embrace the same racist assumptions which Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray infamously wove into their arguments over a quarter-century ago in The Bell Curve, only repurposing their old genetic judgments about the heritability of intelligence for anti-meritocratic ends. Robinson’s overlong effort to bury his earlier, pre-publication enthusiasm for deBoer’s book is, I think, almost entirely mistaken. The Cult of Smart, despite its flaws, does have something distinct to contribute to the development of a socialist vision of education--and, in that such a vision exists in opposition to that which is presumed by our liberal meritocratic bureaucracies, to a localist, even anarchist, vision of education as well. While it is fair to push back against some of the ideas which deBoer’s consideration of cognitive science leads him to, his is absolutely a left (maybe left conservative?) argument, and not a repackaging of Herrnstein and Murray. The challenges which cognitive psychology and neuroscience have already posed to numerous fields--education in particular--will not go away any time soon; leftists and anarchists and localists of all stripes, so long as they accept that education is a public good, need an appropriate framework to develop the sorts of answers to those challenges which will advance their ideals. DeBoer’s book, whatever its limitations, is an excellent place to start doing so, granting it a value far beyond simply reminding parents like my wife and I not to worry too much about what their daughters may have missed out on as their teachers struggled to make physical education, forensics, and culinary arts classes work online.

DeBoer’s primary two-part thesis is simple. First, he asserts that the role which genetic differences play in any given person’s cognitive ability and academic inclinations, while not determinative in any final sense--as deBoer writes in his introduction, “the relationship between genes and behavioral traits is neither perfect nor fixed; environment does matter, to a varying degree, and there are interventions that can ameliorate some of the impact of genes” (p. 23), a caveat which Robinson seems to have missed entirely--ought to accepted as a matter of policy. But second, he notes that as much as we may causally acknowledge the ordinary reality of these differences, the “cult of smart” prevents us from fully accepting these differences for what they are. Instead, we find ourselves institutionally driven to maximize access to the meritocracy of contemporary life, telling ourselves that education--assuming the opportunity for such can somehow, someday, finally be fully guaranteed to all--will be the great equalizer. But as any educator who looks at the data honestly can tell you, that is always, at best, a partial truth. What deBoer sees, not unreasonably, as the denial of this fact simply infuriates him: “The Cult of Smart, for the people who excel within it, is more than a political platform or a vision of success. It is a totalizing ideology that colors everything they buy, say, and do” (p. 32).

All of the debates about educational outcomes which deBoer introduces in the early chapters are controversial, and his approach to them is often uneven. Still, deBoer’s slaying of various cows sacred to the education establishment in America is kind of a delight. It’s hard to deny that progressive efforts to make schools both more effective and more egalitarian have often relied upon data which only masks how much the results of America’s unequally funded education system often simply entrench income inequality. Similarly, it is clear that many articulations of equality of opportunity implicitly posit students as “blank slates,” ready to compete, which only increases the pressures on both students and teachers to come up with evidence to prove to legislators and donors the supposedly transformative outcomes of learning. As much as more than few philosophical liberals--of both progressive and conservative varieties--may be loath to admit it, our reluctance to be honest about differences in natural academic talent (in contrast to our uncomplicated acceptance of most differences in natural athletic or artistic talent, which are generally seen as obvious) does seem to be a contributor to our constant expensive experiments with school quality, test scores, teacher accountability, and more, giving us along the way such arguable misfires as No Child Left Behind, Common Core, and various other “ed-tech boondoggles,” in deBoer’s wonderful phrase.

It is the book's middle which gets to the meat of the argument, however: the “heritability of academic ability,” and consequently the very real possibility that “the range of the possible in the classroom is dramatically smaller than conventionally assumed....[with a] large portion of the variation in academic outcomes...remain[ing] permanently out of the hands of schools and teachers” (p. 121). Robinson sees this claim as a criminal reduction of the always unknown potential lurking in the relationship between students and their environment, or even students and their past selves. But even if deBoer’s examples aren’t always as careful as they could be, his presentation of the science around them is succinct and clear. His efficient summary of numerous studies in behavioral genetics, as well as critiques of those studies, leads to the carefully stated conclusion that “the impact of genetic ancestry on human behavioral traits seems indisputable” (p. 137). Despite his penchant for picking fights, deBoer is uncharacteristically sympathetic to the challenge which this information puts to those who have fought so long for what they generally accepted as the true "ideal" of public education (simplistically put, that literally any student can achieve literally anything they put their mind to) but neither does that understanding cause him to pull back:

It’s understandable...that many progressive people have decided to wash their hands of the topic of genetics and intelligence altogether. Understandable, but disturbing. Disturbing because by avoiding these subjects, good people have essentially ceded the conversation to bad....I believe that we can engage in the fight against bigotry in all forms while acknowledging the overwhelming evidence that intelligence, like all cognitive traits, is significantly influenced by genetic parentage. In fact, we need to do to so....[W]e need to separate a belief in claims about individual genetic difference from claims about group genetic differences. Through grappling with the data, we can craft better arguments against those who would misuse it to advance their racist and sexist agendas. Or we can ignore the data, dismiss the subject entirely, cede the field to the worst people imaginable, and suffer the consequences (pp. 140-141).

What, in deBoer’s view, are those better arguments? Central to them is a recognition of how the meritocracy, and its roots in a libertarian reading of the equality of opportunity, should have no place is any actually democratic public school system. DeBoer makes good use of John Rawls’s concept of the “veil of ignorance” as a tool for intellectually justifying the creation of a social contract--and, for that matter, a public school system--where we shape circumstances without any cognizance of our natural assets, abilities, or intelligence. As a socialist, though, he goes beyond Rawls’s assumption that a redistributive principle can ameliorate the differences which will nonetheless result from the purely opportunistic (and thus invariably luck-influenced) choices in our resulting lives, and instead suggests that our insights into cognitive differences should point us away from the glorification of equality of opportunity entirely. In the educational sphere especially, “opportunity” is often tied to specific academic measurements, which different people with different genetic traits, insofar as deBoer's argument points, can probably never realistically give full and equal consent to. Consequently, the aim of education should instead be to accommodate the widest possible range of dispositions among students. The goal should be empowerment and plurality, rather than equality and uniformity.

That many educators already know this, and have leaned hard in its direction in the midst of the pandemic-related disruptions experienced in many of the (perhaps sometimes too restrictive) patterns which govern much public school teaching, is important to emphasize. And it is something parents like myself have needed to hold onto as well: the idea that the ability of kids is variable, as is the number of paths open to them, and that such variability will not be much changed by however much schooling itself changes (or, sometimes, simply fails). While any number of civic goods or socializing experiences might be more tied to one particular form of public education or another, whatever empowering academic potential which schooling itself has almost certainly is not. 

These realizations and experiences do not on their own, however, amount to an alternative--a leftist, localist, or anarcho-socialist alternative--to deBoer's "equality of opportunity" canard. While I think deBoer is correct that it is a misunderstanding of classic Marxist thought to enshrine “equality” as a central socialist goal, he doesn’t do enough in the book’s final chapters to really develop what alternatives to it would involve. This is unfortunate. DeBoer’s exploration of diverse reforms (including the intriguing suggestion that compulsory schooling end and children be allowed to drop out of school after age 12--something which more that a few parents dealing with pandemic-related school closings probably think they've already experienced!), as part of his drive to undermine the Cult of Smart and “save us from our smart-kids-take-all economy” (p. 227), are thoughtful but hardly systematic. By failing to more consistently consider the character of a truly socialist and pluralistic education model, and instead engaging in yet another attack on charter schools (as well as a passing swipe at the anti-communism of Michael Harrington and the Democratic Socialists of America), deBoer doesn’t provide a theoretical structure to support his conclusion: that the aim to “achieve [academic] equality of any meaningful kind is to deny our nature,” while using education to recognize that “we have fundamentally different abilities and talents...is the first step in [our] liberation” (p. 239).

Here, deBoer's arguments can be fruitfully compared with a similarly radical attack on our educational meritocracy from two decades ago, one which lacks deBoer's insight into cognitive research (and his accidental pandemic relevance!), but which shares his radical passions. In 2000, Michael W. Apple, a well-known Marxist educator and scholar, published Educating the “Right” Way: Markets, Standards, God, and Inequality (a second edition came out in 2006). It was a furious broadside against what he called “conservative modernization,” which philosophically was a misnomer, since what he was attacking was the neoliberal meritocracy, not anything actually conservative, properly speaking. But whatever the best label for the interest groups and educational entrepreneurs and reformers who crowded around the Bush I and Clinton administrations, Apple saw them all as blaming the lack of educational accomplishment in American public education on the supposedly stifling uniformity and secularity of the schools themselves. Their proposed solutions, as he saw them, involved undermining both teachers unions and the traditional (and, from our perspective today, distinctly non-high-tech) standards-enforcing bureaucracies which those unions had complicated opinions about, and replacing both with various market-based and localizable educational options (charter schools, public school vouchers, religious schools, home schooling, etc.) which would use cultural and economic competition (serviced by centralized corporate interests, to be sure) to generate excellence.

Needless to say, Apple found all of this appalling. But he also recognized that the ideas contained within this movement connected with the hopes and fears of many parents. To counter that connection, a new and "truly public school ideal" needed to adopt “a somewhat more populist set of impulses,” including “tactical alliances” with distinct religious, linguistic, and cultural groups, such as might be best served by properly constructed--that is, genuinely community-based, as opposed to corporately astroturfed--charter schools, or whatever else might best enable educators to respect “the cultures, histories, and experiences of these students and their parents and local communities.” The point being that, in confronting what he saw as a profound threat to the democratic possibilities of public education in America, Apple's socialist suggestions made room for difference and proceeded to think about how to make available to all something that needed to be shaped differently for all. (Educating the “Right” Way, pp. 100, 224-226, 228-229).

Apple's arguments are two-decades old, but the concepts they reflect--like the mature thought of Michael Harrington's anti-bureaucratic decentralist socialism, in fact--are relevant to the arguments which deBoer engages. Harrington, like many other socialist theorists, came to acknowledge that a truly democratic socialization of the economy--and, it seems reasonable to assume, of public education as well--would be the exact opposite of the totalizing meritocracy which we have today and which deBoer rightly condemns. Instead, it would partake of something almost republican in the civic sense: that is, distinct and at least partly autarkic communities of learning, work, leisure, and political participation. DeBoer touches on one aspect of this idea briefly, when he insightfully points out that the progressive reliance upon decreasing social mobility in America to attack income inequality is actually an implicit licensing of the disruption and meritocratic sorting--in other words, the “mobility”--which generates so much inequality in the first place (p. 156). But his insight that mobility (moving to find the best school district! competing to hire the best teachers!) is at best orthogonal, if not in some ways actually in opposition, to a genuinely egalitarian educational environment, is never connected to the larger theoretical question of a model that sustains people in all their various different creations of the good life in the places they are. Given deBoer’s rejection of any form of the charter school idea which Apple saw as potentially a component in a populist front against supposedly-free-but-actually-corporatized educational “reforms” (assuming that such charters could be designed around a difficult balance of non-discrimination and real local pluralism, rather than around fake promises of efficient, competition-driven results), it would at least have been good to see deBoer present other alternatives for building a truly differentiated public schooling movement--like the formal enlistment of home schooling, or attaching educational institutions to local guilds of apprenticeships, perhaps. (Something for those 12-year-olds who, having learned the basics of reading and writing, dropped out!)

I don't want to condemn deBoer’s book for failing to flesh out all its own theoretical parameters and implications. The Cult of Smart is deeply entrenched in most modern systems of public education around the world, and the increasingly clear reality of cognitive and genetic differences between different human beings poses not just a practical challenge to educators committed to giving everyone an idealistically equal opportunity to prove their merit, but also a painfully sharp one to some liberals whose membership in the Cult makes them want to deny this reality entirely, since it threatens the usual justifications of the meritocracy which gave them the positions they enjoy. By forcing his readers to recognize the Cult for what it is, and why neuroscience and behavioral genetics should be opportunities for critics of the meritocracy--whether from a socialist or a localist or yet some other ideological direction--to make the case for an education that empowers rather than one which vainly strives to homogenize, deBoer has performed an important service. And, not incidentally, as 2020 draws to a close, he has given parents and caregivers obsessing over what their students may be missing out on something different to worry about. As an educator myself, I want to do the best I can in terms of teaching my students. But it's helpful, as I close the books on the fall 2020 semester, to be reminded, as this book does implicitly, of something that every teacher and parent ought to remember as well: that basically, more often than not, the kids, in all their variety and abilities and interests, are, and likely always will be, pretty much all right.