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.

The Future of (Education at Places Like) Friends

It's simply a glorious October day here at Friends University--blue sky, light wind, temps in the 60s, the leaves of the trees (as I take in their colors through the windows of my third story office) are a mix of green, yellow, orange, and brown. This morning I raced a train on my bike to the crossing on Meridian on the west side of the Friends campus--trains are notoriously slow moving through Wichita, and I didn't want to be stuck there waiting for 10 minutes--and beat it by less than 40 yards. A good omen for the day, I hope.

We're officially inaugurating a new president here at Friends University today (though President Carey has been on the job since last July), and there are faculty showcases and tent displays and much pomp all around our small but (I think) beautiful campus here on the west side of Wichita, KS. I have a hopeful feeling today--though I'm sure the weather and my small bicycling triumph this morning, not to mention the fact that I've worked like crazy to get ahead on all the stuff piling up on my desk, have a lot to do with that. I think, though, that our new president, and a sensibility that feels rather new to be me as well--a sensibility that seems more realistic, more aware and accepting and determined in regards to the difficulties ahead--have something to do with that sense of hope as well.

It's been a rough few years here at Friends, and the rough years are going to continue for at least a few more years, that's certain. President Carey will be my third university president in the 9 1/2 years I've been here; like so many small liberal arts colleges (though Friends, with its small number of graduate and professional programs, prefers to style itself a "university," it's really a SLAC, and those who insist otherwise are just fooling themselves, I think), we're struggling to figure out how to survive as the traditional pool of students interested in small, mostly locally oriented, mostly religiously and/or academically homogeneous and focused, and generally rather expensive private institutions like ourselves disappears. Community colleges are less expansive, large state institutions (which are scrambling for students themselves, in the face of state and federal cut-backs) have more scholarship money to offer, and online programs claim (not always honestly, but nonetheless often persuasively) to have job placement rates that exceed anything we can promise. Particularly in this part of the country, where ethnic groups and religious bodies in distant farming towns all across the state historically pulled together to build colleges throughout the 19th and early 20th century (Kansas has nearly 20 schools that fit that description), there's a lot of scrambling and hard thinking--and painful changes--taking place. Here's hoping that, one way or another, the good work that I think we do here at Friends will be able to survive.

In the Democratic presidential debate this past Tuesday, Bernie Sanders--whom I've made clear I like a lot--said that going to college in America ought to be like going to high school: that is, free and universally available. (Specifically, he said: "This is the year 2015. A college degree today is the equivalent of what a high school degree was 50 years ago. And what we said 50 years ago and a hundred years ago is that every kid in this country should be able to get a high school education regardless of the income of their family. I think we have to say that is true for everybody going to college.") This led to a fair amount of discussion among various friends of mine--some of whom, obviously, criticized it as a massively expensive change to an already massively complicated higher education system, but others who, I think rightly, wondered about the deeper point: shouldn't we actually be encouraging people to find alternatives to college, rather than making it more and more possible to every single American to get onto the same meritocratic track?

This is something I've wondered on and off about for close to a quarter-century. On the one hand, it's undeniably true that "the academy"--the place where specialized education in the arts and sciences take place--can't help but be a somewhat elite enterprise. As I put it long ago, to pretend there aren't, or there shouldn't be, boundaries regarding who participates in and who is best suited for a university education is simply in denial about the whole justificatory structure of the enterprise, which (as I wrote over 10 years ago), depends upon people like myself who have been "highly educated, socialized to frame problems and discuss ideas in rarefied ways, and schooled to form expectations and think in terms of certain relationships and opportunities that are, frankly, the province of a leisurely, guild-protected elite." But at the same time, I resist strongly the idea that this structure requires a whole-hearted embrace of the aristocratic mindset which for centuries was its natural concomitant; global capitalism and the democratization of society have both so leveled our conceptions of the worlds we move through that standing firm on the idea that some particular sort of learning requires taking exclusivity as its premise strikes me a both ridiculous and unsustainable. Too much good has come from the spreading of knowledge and expertise and specialized, non-technical learning, I think, to want to embrace the complete re-aristocratization of post-secondary education, even if only indirectly (by kicking away all government subsidized loans, for example, despite the moral hazard they obviously present).

As a consequence, I listen to Senator Sanders, and I'm intrigued. Might it not be the case that the only way we can get back to apprenticeships and innovative local work and other routes to productive lives beyond professionalized, meritocratic races up capitalist staircases, is literally by taking money out of the equation (at least insofar of our own direct contributions as "buyers" of education, anyway)? Making higher education a free good might loosen up the demand for college by making people more willing to experiment with their time, in other words.

Does this have it backwards--is it, instead, the lure of college loans and other financial incentives which is discouraging such experimentation? Maybe. But it seems to me that the supposed "easy money" out there isn't there solely because of FAFSA; banks are delighted to get in on the game of financing (at long-term rates of interest) other people's dreams. One could respond by saying that such a prospect only became appealing to banks because government provides subsidies for them to do so--but that, I think, isn't so much an argument against Sanders's suggestion of tuition-free college as it is an argument against using redistributive means to accomplish the aims of affordable higher education for all when institutions of higher education are expected to turn a profit. It's basically the single-payer argument for health care reform, once again: are you going to use a kludgy collections of questionably constitutional laws and sweetheart deals with big insurance companies to essentially fake your way towards university health care, or do you just want to up and pay for it? As I tend to to believe that the socio-economic fears driving everyone to get their kids to college are probably permanent features of late capitalism, I think, rather than jury-rigging increasingly expensive ways to respond to those fears, maybe we should just take one of the contributing pressures off entirely.

Of course, if we take Senator Sanders's words literally, and the goal ought to be to turn higher education entirely into high school--that is, make not only free and universally available but also more or less compulsory--then we'd be missing out entirely on the opportunities for alternative flourishing that allowing for an ease of experimenting with different forms or approaches to higher education might provide, to both students and us faculty alike. (Experiments that have long been in evidence in many Western European countries, where free or nearly-so higher education is combined with an extensive system of testing which has encouraged, over the decades, the development of a multiplicity of vocational, technical, as well as professional routes to productive living.) So no: I don't want college to be like high school--I have too many students who act like it is already. But maybe, just maybe, knowing that college was a non- (or at least far less) burdensome option would help many of these students see that perhaps a middle-class or better life needn't be a college-diploma-or-nothing game. And, in seeing that, that in term might enable employers and government agencies adjust their social expectations accordingly. I suppose it's possible that allowing the whole system to collapse, and trust that home schooling will take its place, might achieve the same ends. But that would mean, among other things, that there wouldn't be very many liberal arts colleges like Friends left anymore, and the teaching we're able to do here would disappear. Selfishly speaking, I think that would be a loss. And, as I look around at the good work that is done by so many here, and the good ideas and high hopes which I feel around me on this day, I think: and maybe not so selfishly speaking, too.

What Was High School For Anyway?

[Cross-posted to Front Porch Republic]

Twenty-five years ago today (I think; my memory is far from perfect) I graduated from Central Valley High School in Spokane Valley (then "Veradale"), WA. Herewith some thoughts on this momentous occasion from my past.

1) High school didn't suck. Oh, there was a lot about it I hated, and as I think back on what little I can remember of my classes and locker-mates and student activities and all the rest from a quarter-century ago, there's much which fills me with embarrassment or loathing. But the truth is that I have the tendency (a definitely non-unique one, I've discovered over the years) to make many experiences of mine out to be particularly crazy, difficult, or dramatic, when they were probably mostly just dull. Looking as best I can over the whole sweep of my 43 years, I was probably no more messed up or depressed during my high school experience than at any other particular period of my life, and maybe even less.

2) That said, I've never really been able to relate to those for whom high school was a wonderful or transformative or memorable time--one of whom is my wife. So many of her life-long expectations and relationships and perspectives were shaped during those happy years, and I kind of envy that. Despite having grown up milking cows and baling hay, I'm probably about as commercialized a suburban kid as any other white American boy of my generation, and so I also watched Sixteen Candles and Breakfast Club, and wanted that kind of experience.

3) But what, really, is "that kind of experience"? Part of it is educational, of course, but only a small part--mostly, anyone who talks honestly about high school, about the prospect, pitfalls, and possibilities of packing dozens or hundreds or even a couple of thousand of 15 to 18-year-olds together, ends up admitting that the larger part of that experience is social and emotional and cultural and sexual and civic. Which one of those parts looms largest for you, and what you saw happening in regards to it, probably determines what you think of high school, no matter what grades you earned or what they enabled you to do afterwards.

4) Within two years after my graduation, my mother and father had decided that they were going to home school the rest of my siblings. The family legend is that it was my experience as a student--a precocious, socially awkward, emotionally resentful, intellectually confused, bully-attracting kid--that mostly led them to this decision. It's a decision which has extended on to most of my family; out of nine children, all of whom are married with children, six home school their kids.

5) Melissa and I aren't one of them, and not particularly because my wife loved high school, or even public schooling in general. No, it's because, on the one hand, we've actually been impressed by, and hence have strongly supported and invested ourselves in, the educational opportunities and outcomes we've seen benefit our children, and on the other hand, because we've never seen them be confronted by social or emotional or cultural or sexual or civic messages or environments that we deeply disapproved of--or if we have disapproved of them, we've never yet been unable to address and counter said messages or environments, with the result that the balance of pros and cons still tilts towards public schooling.

6) Besides, were believers in it. Trying to work out how to pay for or scale up (or down) public education is a never-ending argument, but by and large, as I put it once, "I like the idea of the state being a (partial) agent of education; insofar as the state is the reflection of the collective interest we all have in promoting and sharing certain civic goods with one another, especially the poor and marginalized, then it is an agency worth supporting."

7) We have one daughter in high school now. She's a smart and ambitious girl, more so than her parents (she'd going to summer school now, as she moves towards graduating a year early). Just the same though, when she had the opportunity to enroll in Wichita's International Baccalaureate program, she chose not to, preferring to attend our neighborhood's own Northwest High School, because she wanted to stick with her friends and the part of the community which she knew best. That was a decision which made me proud.

8) Not that she doesn't have regrets (there are always regrets to every decision, are there not?); attending East High School now for summer school, she's struck by how much public schools, especially high schools, have adapted (been downgraded, I think) with the times. Northwest is your typical contemporary high school--a sprawling (part-Panopticon) campus of prison-like buildings, though decked out within with the best technology and amenities which declining state budgets and limited bond-campaigns can afford. Older high schools like East, however, were often beautiful, multi-story buildings, constructed in the midst of an ongoing civic space.

9) There is a story there, a story of the decline of intact neighborhoods and stable jobs and cohesive families and the public schools which aspired to educate the people who lived and worked and loved in the midst of such. Time was that a high school education was the pinnacle, the finale, of the average American citizen's learning; the reason why people had such strong ties to their high school's football teams or glee clubs over the decades was because it was from there that they were ushered into the adult world of making careers and families. So of course high schools were imposing edifices; like churches and city halls, they were spaces where the surrounding community got  made. Yet when high school is transformed--thanks to the disappearance of reliable local work, the imperative of specialization and mobility, the breakdown of church and family connections, the shift of wealth away from the grounded vocations of land and manufacturing and to the distancing operations of finance and the "information economy"--into one more meritocratic step which the smart student (like my own daughter--and like, to be fair, her own parents as well) will negotiate as quickly and as efficiently as possible, looking at every class as something to maxmize for future college-application effect...well, if nothing else, it changes things. For one thing, the mind-numbing expectation to qualify everything that happens in light of some state-mandates assessment drives out much of the lunatic (but educational!) fun that putting so many kids together at least in theory ought to make possible (and the absence of which often just means all that remains, for some many students anyway, is video games and booze). For another thing, with such changes there's no longer any particular reason to make the high school building itself such a permanent fixture. Far better to build more flat, easily reconstructed schools out in the distant suburbs and bus the kids in; that will make it easier to build swimming pools and tennis courts, anyway.

10) It's a bad choice, if you couldn't guess what my conclusion would be. When I went to high school from 1984 to 1987, we still had wood and metal shop and home economics classes; they could be avoided if you were worked your schedule right (and many students, intent on landing that National Merit Scholarship, did just that), but they were there. For a long time now, they haven't been, at least not in the public schools I've seen (but I'm gratified to note that, in some small ways, they may be making a comeback; my daughter's botany class planted tomatoes and potatoes this year, and maintained a greenhouse). More relevantly, it's hardly an obvious conclusion that in streamlining high school into one more component of a globalized economy, the "public" which public schools were designed to serve have been helped. Yes, it's true that, in all likelihood, the old economic model of local manufacturing and production will never return. And yet, it remains a fact that, by some measurements, going beyond high school and specializing in one or another professional field accounts for only around a quarter to a third of all the productive work out there.You can spin one solution after another about how to turn those non-specialized practical jobs into high-paying ones through some creative additional education, but in the end, high school could be, ought to be (as it once was, and for many still is), a way to give experiences that help complete citizens in their lives and communities and attachments, rather than simply rubber-stamp them on their way to someplace else.

11) As always though, you roll with the changes, and try to build what you can out of where and what you have. I salute (though not without some reservations) those who, for reasons of religion or politics or personal preference, elect to take their kids out of public schools, as perhaps they were taken out themselves, and allow them to create a high school experience for themselves (and/or create one for them). For ourselves, thus far our local publics, as compromised as they are, have been worth supporting, just as, as I think back on it now, mine was probably worth the effort too, even if my own parents later drew different conclusions. I graduated, and I learned things, and I went through stuff, most all of which I've now forgotten. But there were some moments there, and while I won't say I'm grateful for them, I will say, anyway, that they didn't all suck. Considering that I was, after all, just a 15-18 year old dork at the time (note the proudly worn "Flock of '87" duck t-shirt), that's not a bad thing to be able to say.

(Go Bears!)

The Judicial Meritocracy Marches Forward

Matt Yglesias says the only thing, I think, which really needs to be said about Elena Kagan's rise though the judicial hierarchy:

I think the clear similarity is between Kagan and John Roberts, both the very models of a modern Supreme Court justice. The key things you want in a justice are someone who is (a) young, (b) ideologically reliable, and (c) easily confirmable. That points to someone who, like Roberts/Kagan has had a meteoric career rise due to the deliberate patronage of powerful politicians without assembling much of a public record on contentious legal issues.

You might think, as I do, that this is a dumb system. If it were up to me, Supreme Court justices would serve fixed terms and the only people eligible for a nomination would be experienced appellate judges. But we have the dumb system we have, and Kagan is, like Roberts, a perfect candidate given the system....

When Roberts was put forward, you had certain BSy efforts to scrutinize his record or “temperament” and discover he was like such-and-such but it was perfectly obvious to anyone with common sense that he’d vote like an orthodox conservative Republican. Similarly, it’s perfectly obvious that Kagan will vote like a mainstream Democrat, with all the plusses and minuses that implies....[I]n principle it would be nice to see presidents nominate people with meaningful public records we can scrutinize, just as it would be nice for nominees to give real answers to questions at their hearings. But presidents and nominees respond to the incentives in our flawed, centuries-old system.

I'm not quite as cynical as Matt here--as I've argued before, I don't care for a politically powerful judiciary, as I see that as deeply undemocratic, and so frankly I'd rather it not be especially important that the people who end up on the court have extensive real-world judicial experience that we can all scrutinize, argue over, and presumably attempt to align with whatever political projects or goals we prefer. Given that what I'd really like to see is a judicial environment where the implications of Marbury v. Madison were radically limited and the Supreme Court was constitutionally obliged to play a far smaller role in our polity, the notion of having a Supreme Court justice whose exposure to the law is overwhelmingly academic doesn't necessarily bug me. [Slight update, 12:00pm CST: In other words, I'm not saying that I necessarily prefer nominees with slight or opaque records, but rather that I wish we lived in an environment where slight or opaque records would be something of a non-issue, because the Supreme Court wouldn’t be that powerful, rather than in the environment we actually live in wherein, because the SC is so powerful and politically contested, weak or opaque records become an actual political plus for strategic political operatives...or for that matter, who knows? Perhaps canny, ambitious lawyers themselves.]

But of course, these preferences of my own also lead me around to some of Matt's claims as well--the idea of fixed as opposed to lifetime terms, for example, makes good sense to me. And overall, what he says about the judicial meritocracy, and the exceptionally narrowing process it has on "good" candidates for the court, is simply dead accurate. In the end, Kagan, assuming she is confirmed (and she probably will be; you can't imagine that Obama's people hadn't already counted out all the votes as far as they possibly could into the future before they came to this decision), will be a reliable, smart, acceptable liberal voice. The last great surprise on the Supreme Court was David Souter; no one, of either party, very reasonably, wants to hand the keys to an institution this powerful (unfortunately) over to someone who isn't going to decide things about as predictably as reason allows. For those of us who want something different...well, the problem begins, as always, with the process and the context, not the candidates themselves.

Massaging the Meritocracy (The University Today, Part 2)

So, getting back to my meetings from last week...

The second day, Tuesday, was taken up with reviews of how the state expects those of us responsible for education majors here at Friends to collect, interpret, and present data on their performance in the classroom and on the various assessments which we've had to design to prove that we're satisfying state standards--as well as, just possibly, along the way, producing some good teachers. I've complained about this process before, confident that my complaints would be echoed by just about every instructor involved in teaching aspiring educators who happened to read my rant...which in fact has turned out to be the case. And that actually has been helpful to me--it's always good to figure out just how many people you have beside you, suffering with the same regulations, fighting the same bureaucracy, working to get things done and out of the way so you can get back to, you know, teaching. And so Tuesday wasn't so rough. There's also the fact that our eventual rejoinders to the Kansas State Department of Education, in history and government teaching and in everything else, all passed with flying colors; and plus the simple fact that I've been doing this for more than a year now, and I'm starting to figure things out. I still have data I have to collect and massage into formats which the state will accept, but I think I might actually be gaining ground insofar the improvement of teaching in my area is concerned, as opposed to just treading water.

Speaking of "massaging," that leads me to Wednesday, the last of my three days of meetings, and far and away the one which gave me the most thought. No, we didn't receive massages; rather, we received a couple of books: Tracy Kidder's Mountains Beyond Mountains, and a volume titled StrengthsQuest, which is the physical embodiment of the website, educational philosophy, and organizational tool found here. It is the latter book which, it seems to me, is all about "massaging"--specifically, about taking some hard and rough truths and trying to present them as pliable, negotiable, tolerable.

Friends University is going to be instituting a "First Year Experience" for all incoming freshman next fall, which I think is a fine idea. A lot of universities do this, and have had some real successes with their various plans to have their new students, often placed together in small cohorts, share a core educational experience or a common bit of socialization or both. We did it at Western Illinois University; there, the common text that everyone was supposed to read and discuss and which teachers were supposed to build writing assignments around was Eric Scholsser's Fast Food Nation (which I ended up discussing a bit here and more here). The choice of our college--Kidder's book on Dr. Paul Farmer's experiences in trying to share the blessings of modern health with desperately poor people in some of the most deprived conditions in the world (mostly in Haiti, but also elsewhere; read more about him here)--is more focused on broader issues of social justice and service than Schlosser's polemical book (as right as it is about many things), and thus is probably a more appropriate fit for this Quaker-Christian university. I'm anxious to use it, talk about it, try to get my first year students to think and argue about, and to work it into my Christianity and Social Justice class as well, which should be a snap. My feelings about the other book, however, are quite a bit different.

StrengthsQuest--as a book, a test, a way of life--was presented to us (again!) by a couple of devotees of basically the same educational/organizational worldview I talked about last week. Like the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator or the Color Code test (both of which I've taken, been analyzed by, and seen used in situations ranging from personal counseling to relationship advice), StrengthsQuest is one of these jury-rigged sciences of the personality, an attempt by way of seemingly random questions to identify traits and skills, aptitudes and attitudes, all for purposes--presumably--of helping people Know Themselves and know better how to Work With Others. I call it "jury-rigged" because I don't know how else to describe a system which plucks out certain reactions and propensities--in this case, thirty-four of them, ranging from "Achiever" and "Activator" to "Strategic" and "WOO" ("Winning Others Over")--from a person's gut reactions, labels them "strengths" or "positives," and cobbles them together into a set of proposed goals, plans and tasks. In a university context, it's the sort of thing that can--and often is--used to program much of the student's whole experience, beginning with such comparatively minor things such as helping one's students frame and construct a written self-assessment (writing a personal autobiography being a common first assignment in many of these freshman programs), all the way to using the data pulled from the test to coordinate class registration and scheduling, assign advisors, even determine roommates in on-campus housing. (And it's not just students; some of the schools that have embraced StrengthsQuest which were presented to us as examples have their faculty categorized according to their supposed strengths, with committee assignments and other duties distributed to them in accordance with the kind of groupings which different tasks presumably require.)

All this was, to say the least, a bit much (and to his great credit, our dean acknowledged the concerns and doubts which properly should go along with bringing into a freshman class environment such a purportedly comprehensive--and thereby perhaps overly determining--system). But my basic worries and criticisms were not focused on StrengthsQuest itself; I don't have any truly fundamental or methodological objections to honest attempts at self-identifying and hence labeling, as long as people recognize that said labels should be understood as analytical tools, not normative guides. No, my real difficulty with what was presented to us--and here I'm referring to the StrengthsQuest presentation itself, not our university's overall aims for the First Year Experience, which I think are exemplary and which I plan to be a part of--was the contradictory nature of the implied message of StrengthsQuest.

Basically, it packages an approach to the world which eschews limitations and weaknesses, preferring instead to turn every encounter with the real world--another person, a new subject, a difficult textbook--into an opportunity to highlight and finagle into some kind of relevance one's "strengths." One of the presenter's cardinal points was "Each and every entering student already has all the talents needed to achieve and persist in college!" Well, this is simply false; the thing we call "college"--or "higher education," if you prefer--represents a historically and disciplinarily determined set of specific strengths, standards, expectations, and priorities; a student can be strong and smart and decent and good and yet still happen to lack the requisite mix of talents, skills, and interests which match this always-evolving-yet-mostly-predetermined thing called "college." This is not to say that we, as teachers, should try to shape people, to improve and even (heavy qualifications here) "enlighten" them, to change them into the sort of people capable of achieving their goals: that's another way of defining education itself, after all. Yet this subtle message of students as creatures of infinitely adaptable strengths runs counter to another one of the presenters' subsequent cardinal points: "Not all behaviors can be learned; it is false to assume that 'if you try hard enough, you can do it'!" Exactly! Which I think plainly means, at least as far I can tell, that one shouldn't assume that "college"--or more particularly, any number of the practical and theoretical tasks and knowledge sets it contains--can always be taught to anyone, even someone of goodwill. I tried to point this out, by making the presenters reflect on their praise of hiring in part according to StrengthsQuest results, hoping to indicate that if sometimes people weren't hired in part because their projected strengths don't fit the needed tasks, then that might imply that not everyone's strengths should always be assumed to be adequate to any institution or set of demands. But they brushed my questions aside, assuming--or so it seemed to me--that college is just some borderless (again!) and empty field of action, within which anyone can, with the proper guidance and priorities, figure out a way to maximize themselves in regards to any particular point. Which, as last week's post shows, is something I just don't believe.

Over the past couple of weeks, Professor X's brilliant and true screed about the lack of preparedness and lack of relevance which crashes down upon those who struggle--as both students and teachers--to live out the liberal arts ideal "in the basement of the ivory tower," has gotten a fair amount of comment. Laura McKenna has picked up on it, pointing the finger primarily at "a shoddy public education system," about the results of which "only the invisible adjuncts know the truth." Rod Dreher picked up on it too, and began a long, fascinating discussion of the way in which our late-capitalist, post-industrial economy constantly rewards--not just monetarily, but in terms of presumptions about the good life, about who should rule and who should make the rules--the cognitive elite, the one's who, for reasons of luck or home environment or good elementary schools or all three, do very well at algebra, creative writing, and all the rest (but good luck in asking them to fix your car or your plumbing). The point that I see ringing forth loudly from both of these bloggers' comments, and from those of many others--to say nothing of all that is obviously being often muttered not a little angrily by hundreds of thousands of students and adjunct professors and employment counselors across this country, all trying to make sense of the disconnect between "American Dream"-type aspirations now more than a half-century old on the one hand, and a thoroughly changed economy on the other--is that we live in a meritocracy...and not a meritocracy of pure and democratic talent, one of the sort that anyone who respects individual difference and achievement (and that even includes me!) can reasonably approve of. No, a meritocracy that has reified itself with all the social and institutional advantages of class on its side, a meritocracy which sets rules--rules about the superiority of some kinds of work over others, rules about the importance of one kind of education over another, rules about what qualifies as "progress" in the bright light of globalization and technology and all the rest...and what, well, doesn't. StrengthsQuest is, ultimately, one of a thousand ways out there in which highly educated and probably genuinely compassionate individuals try to take the hard limits and long-since-built-in qualities of higher education, and turn them into something whereby one can massage all the breakdowns, all the varieties, all the dissents, all the denials both within and from our meritocratic system; in other words, a way to tell everyone to come as they are, because they can be part of a big, borderless, endless project of empowerment. Which is, of course, a wonderful siren song to many. But to Professor X's students--well, I'd say that they'd probably rather just have a chance for good, steady employment (and offered with a minimum of condescension, if you please).

There was a time when I struggled with this tangle of issues a fair amount--mostly, it was back when I was teacher at Arkansas State University, trying to figure out what I, the Highly Trained Political Theorist Only a Couple of Years Out of Grad School, had to offer the good students of northeast Arkansas, some of whom wanted to get out and go on to other things, but most of whom wanted a BA (so they could get the sort of work for which these days such is a requirement), and perhaps to pick up a little odd learning along the way. I tried to figure out what my own class perspective was on all this, and ultimately I had to kind of shrug my shoulders, acknowledge my own elitism and my own contribution to an educational system that is so thoroughly a product of a globalized and technology-amplified (not to mention cheap-oil-fueled) mindset that I might as well just find a niche where I could feed my family and continue to teach in the best way I could, balancing (and perhaps even occasionally combining) the classical aspirations for liberal learning or "Humanität" which I still held (and still hold today) on to on the one hand, and the populist needs of the people I increasingly felt my greatest allegiance to on the other. I wrote: "It's not easy being an academic, especially when it seems that the internal contradictions of the whole system--and, more especially, its complicated and sometimes near-absurd relationship to the socio-economic world of America today, where an education in the elite liberal arts or research-university sense is often irrelevant to the sort of jobs most people are able to obtain and sort of schooling options available to most of their children--are promising an inevitable and total collapse." I still believe that...though, I guess one could argue such a response dodges the hard burden of our mostly meritocratic reality; it is written, after all, for and about me and all the rest of us there-but-for-the-grace-of-God-go-I non- (or at least no-longer-) Professor-Xes of the world, while the focus ought to be on the students themselves, and what they should make of what higher education offers them, and of how America looks to reward those who navigate their way through it. One populist friend of mine--a much more serious dissenter from the modern liberal world than I--will have nothing to do with all these nostrums for massaging the meritocracy we have built...and which has, to some degree, grown out of control:

Most college grads learn almost zilch. Except how to be Dilbert-drones in an economy that demands wage-servitude in exchange for weekend-consumer-bliss. That plus a degree, which is seen as the golden ticket granting access to Wonka's factory of modern delights....The fact is, most people are dumber, less curious, lazier, and more pliable after college than they were when they started. The degree will also get you, if you're lucky, a pass to the middle class. You and your spouse will earn, together, again if you're lucky, around 80 grand a year. In addition to student loans, you will rack up consumer debt at an astonishing pace because you never learned the real cost of things, and you began your adult life partying on borrowed money. By the time you realize the fix you're in (and most don't realize it, or they suppress their realization with another trip to Best Buy), it's way too late to get out of it, unless you have really extraordinary spiritual resources and resolve in your soul, family, extended family. By the time you get around to having the 2 kids that your bondage permits you to have, you believe that feeding them back into this system is your obligation as parents to get them "on their way." There are, of course, exceptions to this rule. Random exceptions are scattered about and occur where students have the internal and external skills and resources to get educated despite the best efforts of their universities to prevent this from happening. There are also those who break free sooner or later after leaving college. The big systematic exception to the rule that the investment in higher-ed is shit are those who go on to careers which require a certain degree before public licensure will be granted by the state/profession. Primary examples include: doctors, lawyers, vets, clergy (most), architects, engineers (some), and probably a few others.

The question them becomes, if higher-ed is so obviously a royal rip-off [for most], why do we perpetuate it? We don't want to grow up...Along with this pressure comes the lie that says we owe the "best shot at success" to our kids. The best shot, of course, being the Wonka-Molech monster. Our closed-ness to the possibility of failure, either real failure, or simply "failure" to be "normal," is the force driving parents to spend enormous chunks of money so that if failure occurs, guilt is distanced as far as possible from the parent. The "failure-rate" at higher-ed institutions is so small from the disordered perspective of modernity because it is far easier to keep people from learning than it is to teach them anything....So what is the alternative?...[A]bandoning the higher-ed ship. Make the standard for admission for your own kids a full or near full scholarship. No one who can't get such a deal should be in, or should need (if they had a proper k-12 education), higher-ed. I will encourage my kids to develop skill, character, and a love of learning. If they show aptitude and desire, I will encourage them to apprentice in some kind of trade early on, and will be happy to spend what I might otherwise spend on college (50k on the low end) to set them up in business before they are 20. As for liberal learning, I consider that a life-time pursuit, and by the time they are 18, they will either have acquired a love for learning and the skills for self-teaching or they won't. Depending on their own level of motivation, they can pursue their own educational interests with guidance from good mentors and friendships. With that kind of head start, they'll likely run circles around their brainwashed debt-ridden un-skilled flabby weak-willed peers. Or they'll end up broke in the poor house. But better for them to be a regular old bum with a good story to tell than one of the mass of post-college consumer-bums that dwell in cubicles all across the country.

That's an even finer screed than Professor X's, though I can't sign on with all its righteous defiance. I have to admit that I like a lot of the modern, liberal, meritocratically enabled and empowered world--or, at least, like it enough that I'm unwilling to dump wholesale condemnation upon all those who sustain it (which includes, of course, me). The forms of equality and opportunity, in matters ranging from health to politics to leisure, which the modern world has made available is too great to list, and the post-WWII explosion in higher education played a not-insignificant role in all that. Nonetheless, my friend makes a strong claim, a claim which finds resonance in things my wife and I have been discussing for years, going all the way back to when we newlyweds living in Utah, she finishing up a degree in journalism (which by that point she didn't like, wished she hadn't chosen, and has never used--I'm actually the only one who has ever worked at a real-world newspaper), me beginning the first of my many years of graduate school. We talked about whether we would want our children to go through what we had, and we agreed that, if they truly wanted to, knowing full well what was involved, we would, though that doesn't mean we'd happily pay for it all (my wife's parents helped her with books and travel costs, but never gave her a dime towards tuition...and frankly, when you compare her undergraduate experience to mine, supported as it was by parents and scholarships all the way through, the differences in attitude and the sort of learning that really matters are obvious). Moreover, we thought about the alternative, about how we'd feel about our children not wanting to go our route, and we considered about how nice it would be to live in a world where apprenticeships and local economies were more vibrant, where people could exit the K-12 world with greater assurance that their dignity and vocational opportunities would likely remain intact. (And this was long before we were reading Wendell Berry!)

Given the fact that for a great many of us, that world has long since been lost, what remains? Can we, or our children, wait on the Great Localist Revolution? Or conversely, be guaranteed the chance to relocate to human-scale environments where land for growing and neighborhoods for working and learning are still plentiful? Well, I tend to think that Wichita, while definitely on the large end of the scale, still qualifies at least in part as an example of the latter, so perhaps our kids will be all right. But what about everyone else? What about Ms. L, about whom Professor X writes so poignantly? Ms. L, who "had done everything that American culture asked of her. She had gone back to school to better herself, and she expected to be rewarded for it, not slapped down. She had failed not, as some students do, by being absent too often or by blowing off assignments. She simply was not qualified for college." What can or should we do for or about her, and all those others who feel impelled to race across that bridge of "strengths" and "retraining" and who-knows-what-else to the 21st century? Telling them to wait on the revolution, or move (with their families? with their health care needs? with their non-existent savings accounts?) to some rural idyll and start farming, is simply cruel. I suppose that's why, when I first waded into the discussion of intelligence and education and meritocracy which Rod's post prompted, I alluded to our need--riffing here on Ross Douthat's and Reihan Salam's forthcoming book--to serve the "Sam's Club Socialists" out there: not because I buy into all of their arguments about the appropriateness of the Republican party at this historical moment to be a vehicle of all the needs and hopes of the Ms. L's of the world, but because we need to recognize and respect the need for a socially democratic and responsible politics which isn't tied to liberal nostrums of flat, borderless, endlessly massageable and reworkable world of opportunity. A politics that is conservative in a very crucial sense, in that it provides the requisite "socialist" policies (ranging from better health and daycare to stronger unions and better job protection) to conserve the possibility of greater personal, family, and local economic sovereignty and dignity, and thereby to help prevent the meritocracy which surrounds us from perpetuating ever greater social divisions--divisions based on education and culture as well as wealth--which all too many otherwise perfectly capable and hard-working people throw themselves vainly at college in a desperate hope of overcoming.

The students I'll be teaching in my First Year Experience classes won't be particularly desperate...but, if current odds hold, probably at least half of them will be there because public education passed the buck, and because there were too few practical, hands-on vocations--or too few people supporting, and too few policies encouraging the responsible pursuit of, those vocations--available to show them avenues that would be genuinely better suited to their "strengths." A good society, I think, need not be one where everyone excels and everyone is smart in the same ways; a good society is one that gives recognition and respect (and a decent wage) to everyone person of good will who works hard at their vocation, no matter what side of the cognitive or environmental divide they fall on. At best, as a college teacher--one who sustains the system as much as I question it and wish for something better--I can only gesture at the possibility of doing more than just massaging one's "strengths set" or one's resume to attempt to slip past the meritocratic divisions in our society. I can remind my students of how much worse it be, and try to teach them to value the local and the communal and those laws and traditions which empower such. And I can let them know about those who reject the whole system, and find their own way. I won't bring down American higher education, and I wouldn't want it to. But a little awareness of the options, a little familiarity with all the other ways besides reaching for that BA that people can--or at least ought to be able to--find themselves a place to be, is no small thing.

Education, Equality and Sam's Club Socialists

There's a great deal that could be said about, and argued with, regarding the points made in Ross Douthat's short post on the Republican and Democratic coalitions today, and the long and reflective post Rod Dreher wrote about education yesterday, but I'll just focus as succinctly as I can (ha!) on a small place where they overlap. Here's Ross digesting some data that had been crunched over at the National Review:

[T]he GOP is now a working-class party (with class defined by education and culture more than income, just to be clear; there are plenty of skilled craftsmen who make more money than teachers and journalists and academics), and that it needs to start acting like one if it's going to rebuild its shattered majority.

And here's Rod, thinking through the possibilities of justice in a world where the "romanticism" of universal education and equality are dying away, to be replaced with, presumably, a world dominated by the meritocratic empowerment of the rootless and ambitious:

Personally, I don't see anything wrong with designing an educational system that recognizes plainly that all people are not equally gifted. As I've said before here, in the Netherlands, social attitudes are very egalitarian, but the Dutch see no value in pretending that everybody is equally intelligent, or intelligent in the same ways. They test kids and put them on one of three different tracks, depending on their capabilities. Kids who are not cut out for college-level work are not expected to do college-prep work in high school; rather, they prepare for vocational and trade work. Why is this bad? (N.B., the Dutch welfare-state economy redistributes material rewards in a more egalitarian manner, taking the edge off social differences)....

It is surely better to live in truth than dwell in the therapeutic fiction that all kids are capable of being above average in school, or that everyone should go to college. [Christopher] Lasch would no doubt disagree, but I don't believe that everyone in a given locality should go to the same schools, or sit in the same classrooms, if they aren't capable of doing the work. We need a system of education that's more based on the needs and capabilities of actual people....Let's agree that the idea of sending nuclear physicists out to work in the soybean fields is insane, and, in turn, that keeping a boy who has the potential to be a nuclear physicist down on the farm out of a sense of tradition is also pretty unjust. Let's also agree that an educational system that denies real and substantial differences between human beings is a sham....And finally, let's agree--well, you may not agree, but this is what I think--that the meritocratic system and its assumptions are great destroyers of institutions and customs that we need for human thriving.

How can these positions be reconciled? Through taxes? Quota systems doling out special privileges based on class, race or other criteria? Agreeing to live with a certain amount of injustice and inefficiency for the sake of helping those less genetically gifted save face (and which forces the genetically gifted to realize that their advances depend largely on unearned merit, via the genetic lottery)? Paying higher salaries to men and women who earn their living with their strong backs and nimble fingers? (Didn't unions do that, once upon a time, before we turned on them?) If socialism is not only unjust, but a foolish way to organize one's society and economy, does that imply that pure capitalist meritocracy is the most just, smartest way to organize one's society and economy? And if not, where is the compromise to be struck?

As I said, much that could be--and should be!--argued with here. Rod is, I think, a little too easily swayed by the kind of meritocratic (and libertarian) individualism which dresses itself up with I.Q. testing data or school test scores and presents itself as an old-fashioned conservative "realism" dumping cold water on supposedly irresponsible liberal efforts to "deny" nature or the family--the kind of conservative strategy Charles Murray has specialized in for years--but at least he's smart enough to recognize the underlying philosophy, and be wary of its dangers. Lasch--who had extremely harsh things to say about our therapeutic culture--was not a fan of the ideal of universal public schooling because he subscribed to a dreamy "educational romanticism" which Murray easily mocks; rather, he embraced it because he believed in "equality" as a political--a classically republican, a populist and communitarian--ideal necessary for American democracy to work. We need to be able to learn how to share power, to share sovereignty, within our localities and within this nation, if true self-government is going to succeed, and schooling is an essential part of that. Obviously, this doesn't mean equal in the sense of "equally intelligent, or intelligent in the same ways"; it means equality in much more limited, much more specific and concrete, and therefore (I think, anyway) much more practical and valuable sense. It means recognizing that education is, first and foremost, a kind of socialization, and therefore pertinent to citizenship (there's a reason why Brown vs. Board of Education was arguably the most essential step in the development of civil rights movement of the 1950s and 60s). Our problem--ok, ok, one of our many problems--is that education for a great many people in our late-modern, late-capitalist world has become overwhelmingly tied not to citizenship, not to building affection or social trust or even basic vocational capabilities, but to enabling the middle and upper-classes to pass along tickets to the perpetuation of their class, their cultural and educational niche. Which is what brings us around to Ross's (debatable, but still worth considering) point: that today's "conservative" party--whatever that means--is a party that increasingly draws a fair number of its voters from those who either have not, or at least have not fully, taken advantage of this particular meritocratic privilege encoded in our society. Which means that, if "conservatism" (again, however defined) is going to find a political home in America's (ridiculous, but that's an argument for another day) two-party system, then the Republicans need to find some way to reach out to those (obviously, overwhelmingly white) voters who--for reasons of family or religion or genetic failure or meritocratic competition or personal choice--have dissented from or failed to ascend to some of those privileged places society. (Obviously, we're not simply talking about money here; we're talking about the particular slots reserved for the "new class", the "mandarins", the "symbolic analysts", the professionals (and bloggers?) that dominate the culture in our media-saturated world...though given the way families pass along advantages to their children, relative monetary success is pretty much a given here as well.)

So, let's cut to the chase: we have an social and economic environment in America today which is undermining the ideal of public education, one of the great egalitarian social inventions of twentieth century, in part because that invention has often foolishly embraced a notion of "equality" that can be easily derided and attacked, and therefore it has come to be seen by many as an institution that either doesn't work, doesn't actually serve or respect the real talents and real needs of the people who support it with their taxes, or both. What is to be done? In the short run, perhaps dozens of different things, some no doubt more or less effective or economical or plausible than others. In the long run, as I see it, only one thing matters: helping people realize that "conservative" interests--by which I mean, most simply, those interests grounded in the limits and rhythms of community and tradition and family and locality, those interests which point out (whether they realize it or not) that real social justice and equality involves getting over or beyond or past class, rather than the liberal dream of lifting all people up to the same one--are not at all well-served by Murray's "libertarian realism," however nicely tough-minded it may sound. Rather they are served by...well, I suspect by at least some of the sort of things Ross and Riehan Salam have been working out for years, some of the things which Rod says you can see in Amsterdam, and which I've observed about Sweden. Things that many conservatives would denounce as "socialist," though that's what they are--legislation involving child and health-leave policies, health care access, different forms of trade and job protection, empowered unions, family-friendly salaries, and more. These are all things that might prevent economic and cultural differences from hardening into social and political ones, thus making it more likely that better, more respectful, more local, but still essentially egalitarian projects like public schools might someday be treated as more than a passing (or dying) fad by the American people.

The likelihood that the Republican party will start drawing out from the inchoate and disorganized self-identifying conservative population of America a bunch Sam's Club socialists is about as likely as my hopes that the Democratic party will suddenly turn into a home for a bunch of populist Christian democratic "left conservatives," I know. But hey, a man can dream.

"Middleclassness," Martin Luther King, and the Obama Campaign

A couple of weeks ago, Rod Dreher, Caleb Stegall, a couple of other nonconformist conservatives and myself were carrying on an e-mail conversation about Barack Obama and the Afrocentric Christian church he attends, Trinity United Church of Christ, led for the past thirty-five years by Reverend Jeremiah Wright, an unapologetic and evangelical black nationalist. The question was, given that so much of Obama's appeal lays in, as I mentioned before, this inchoate sense that he's speaking an admittedly progressive language which is nonetheless more communal, multiracial, and republican than what one gets from typical liberals (and which thus is therefore somewhat more appealing to certain cultural conservatives than anything they're likely to hear from a Clinton), does his membership in and endorsement of a church which is certainly somewhat exclusionary, or even racist (Louis Farrakhan has had a relationship with Wright that stretches back to the 1980s, and was recently honored as a "giant of the African American religious experience" by a magazine published by Wright's daughter), put a lie to everything Obama supposedly represents? How should those concerned about conserving our common culture think about a presidential candidate comfortable with a church which makes racialist appeals to economic and cultural sovereignty, and associates with racists who do the same?

Well, I had an idea for a post while we were talking about all this, perhaps not coincidentally right around Martin Luther King's Day. I never finished the post though, and kind of let the issue slide. But now Noah Millman's thoughts--brought to my attention by Rod--have brought me back around to thinking about this, and I want to finish up my post before it loses all relevance entirely.

First of all, the racism charge. I don't make any apologies for Farrakhan, and the many times times he's been caught making antisemitic statements over the years; he's been schooled in, and has never separated himself from, a paranoid, weird, even hateful worldview. But associating with Farrakhan, and praising the kind of self-reliance, pride, and community-building his preaching invokes, does not make you a member of the Nation of Islam, or even necessarily an advocate of it. I was in Washington DC during the Million Man March, way back in 1995, and sure, there was a lot of dubious and even borderline contemptuous rhetoric heard that day, from Farrahkan and all the rest. But frankly, I found the whole thing—-complete outsider and foreigner to their collective project that I was—-rather inspiring just the same. The anger of the speakers that day was mixed with positive messages about responsibility and dignity, about remembering all that which their ancestors and progenitors had accomplished, and about conserving and building up that which remained of those accomplishments. As Noah notes in his description of the arguably "exclusivist" (even racist) elements in some Jewish talk, and as Alan Ehrenhalt noted years ago in his defense of the localist, communitarian priorities which held together neighborhoods in 1950s Chicago, many such positive arguments practially depend upon a certain amount of exclusion, of collective self-identification and unity. This isn't an excuse for racism (and it should be noted that Obama has rejected his church's association with Farrakhan and some of his more outrageous statements), but for myself at least, if the point of the message is one of identity, community, and dignity, then I figure I can handle of little bit of non-violent racism along the way. (And hey, if it comes from a guy capable of getting sampled on a Wynton Marsalis recording....well, so much the better.)

Second, and perhaps more challengingly to conservatives, there is Rev. Wright's assessment of "middleclassness" as an aspiration that draws black men and women, really the whole black family and community, into a socio-economic trap, and thus as something to be avoided. Granted that there's more than a whiff of liberation theology and Marxism about this, and progressive as Obama may be on certain issues, he really doesn't come off, policy-wise anyway, as anything other that a smart, conventional liberal. But that just means that, rather than suspecting Obama of being some sort of secret Africal-American communist sleeper agent, one might choose instead to ponder the context in which a black pastor, speaking to a mostly poor and lower-middle-class black Christian audience (with a few hanger-ons like the Obamas), trying to build up black solidarity in a Christian way in the midst of a materialistic, not particularly egalitarian or Christian society, would be led to attack "middleclassness." Obama himself reads it as a straightforward liberal Christian message straight out of the Gospels: a reminder to stay close to the less fortunate amongst your community, and to remember that "to whom much is given, much is required." It most certainly is that; but it is something more to. Read the church's "Black Value System" that Rev. Wright and TUCC uses, and see how he connects the disavowal of middleclassness to a disavowal of the meritocratic (and thus always at least potentially elitist and nonparticipatory and undemocratic) values which hold sway in a capitalist state like our, a state determined above all to discover the most talented individuals out there, and enable (and encourage) them to professionally and socially make lifestyle choices so as to seal themselves off from the rest of their community. This is Christopher Lasch all the way, as Rod has already noted. Quoting Caleb here:

It is important to keep in mind that “middleclass” in this sense primarily denominates an upwardly mobile class (and the victim/ressentment classes it leaves behind) that has a deeply ingrained mental servitude to a hyper-materialism that is one part crude Marxism (oppressor/oppressed) and one part crude capitalism (irrational belief in the end of scarcity and dependence on increasingly destabilizing cycles of creative destruction)--Christopher Lasch described this class very well. “Middleclass” in this sense does not mean stable, localist, traditional communities.

That pretty much nails it; in responding positively to Wright's warning against middle-class mores, Obama was responding to upward-and-onward meritocracy that creates too-often self-justifying gaps between our differences as individuals, rather than a community in which all individuals, bound by something other than the race to keep up with the Joneses, can feel some solidarity. And this distinction is important: please note that there is nothing here which would prevent those concerned about racial justice from embracing middle-class ethics and practices, at least in the sense "middle-class" was once understood, back before deregulation and globalization and cheap oil gave us what Edward Luttwak has properly called "turbo-capitalism"; it is not as though being authentic to one's race or ethnicity or community permanently sets one apart from any system of economic responsibility and success. Granted, there have been rabble-rousers who have claimed this...but Martin Luther King--who, it goes without saying, was no slouch at community-building and seeking unity through religion and work and self-identification either--would have had little patience which such thinking, as (once again) Lasch explained well, in The True and Only Heaven:

The movement achieved its greatest success wherever it could build on a solid foundation of indigenous institutions and on the middle-class ethic of thrift and responsibility that made them work. Recognizing the importance of an institutional infrastructure in the struggle to achieve dignity and independence, King urged the black community to organize cooperative credit unions, finance companies, and grocery stores. Boycotts of segregated businesses, he pointed out, not only undermined segregation but encouraged Negro enterprise, bringing “economic self-help and autonomy" to the “local community.” He preached the dignity of labor and the need to achieve “painstaking excellence” in the performance even of the humblest tasks. He reminded his followers that too many black people lived beyond their means, spent their money on “frivolities,” failed to maintain high standards of personal cleanliness, drank to excess, and made themselves objectionable by “loud and boisterous” behavior. "We must not let the fact that we are the victims of injustice lull us into abrogating responsibility for our own lives." If he had been accused of upholding petty-bourgeois values, King would probably have taken the accusation as a compliment....[A] more important difference between [the relative levels of success in the civil rights movement in] the North and the South lay in the demoralized, impoverished condition of the black community in cities like Chicago, which could not support a movement that relied so heavily on a self-sustaining network of black institutions, a solidly rooted petty-bourgeois culture, and the pervasive influence of the church. The movement sought to give black people a new dignity by making them active participants in the struggle against injustice, but it could succeed unless the materials of self-respect had already been to some extent achieved. As he toured the Northern ghettos after the first wave of riots, in 1965, King was staggered by the desperate poverty he found, but he was even more discouraged by the absence of institutions that would sustain the black community's morale (pgs. 394-395, 398-399).

There's so much more than could be unpacked in this story, of course. In some ways Martin Luther King, with his embrace of middle-class self-sufficiency, and Jeremiah Wright's rejection of so-called "middle-class" meritocracy, are both insufficient solutions (and don't get me started on Malcom X). King in time turned to greater federal intervention and social democracy, while Wright has come to embrace a level of racial defensiveness and contention that King would have never accepted. Obama, to be certain, won't be either one of them--though one could hope that he is inspired by the best, most traditional and civic and egalitarian elements of both. As more and more of us are discovering, Obama is an interesting case, someone both caught up by and carrying ideas and possibilities that may well be, at least in some small way, something new and needed in America today, something that can incorporate occasional imperfections and harshness in the expression of that which can actually build something worth participating in. Who knows whether he'd be able to carry it all the way through the general election, even assuming he gets that far, much less whether it would actually mean anything on the level of policy. But at the very least, there's more going on in the words of Obama, Rev. Wright, and the whole history of the black struggle behind them both, than simple racist exclusion. To think that is to fail to think through the long history they are a part of entirely; it is to fail to take King and all those who fought and thought and marched with him with the seriousness they deserve.