Intelligence, education and meritocracy

Charles Murray writes that "educational romanticism" -- the idea that every child can learn equally well -- has been a fad of both the Right and the Left for a long, long time, and now it might well be starting to die. Excerpt:

The good news is that educational romanticism is surely teetering on the edge of collapse. I am optimistic for three reasons. First, the data keep piling up. It takes a while for empiricism to discredit cherished beliefs, but No Child Left Behind may prove to have done us a favor by putting so much emphasis on test scores and thereby focusing attention on how hard it is to budge those scores. Second, we no longer live in a romantic age. Educational romanticism was born of forces that have lost most of their power, and façades collapse when the motives for maintaining those façades weaken. Third, hardly anybody really believes in educational romanticism even now. No one but the most starry-eyed denies in private the reality of differences in intellectual ability that we are powerless to change with K-12 education. People are unwilling to talk about those differences in public, but it is a classic emperor’s-clothes scenario waiting for someone to point out the obvious. Starting that process can be as simple as more articles like this one.

For the good of our children, educational romanticism needs to collapse, and quickly. Its effects play out in the lives of young people in devastating ways. The fourth-grader who has trouble sounding out simple words and his classmate who is reading A Tale of Two Cities for fun sit in the same classroom day after miserable day, the one so frustrated by tasks he cannot do and the other so bored that both are near tears. The eighth-grader who cannot make sense of algebra but has an almost mystical knack with machines is told to stick with the college prep track, because to be a success in life he must go to college and get a B.A. The senior with terrific SAT scores gets away with turning in rubbish on his term papers because to make special demands on the gifted would be elitist. They are all products of an educational system that cannot make itself talk openly about the implications of diverse educational limits.

Yes, we can't do this because it deeply violates our belief in egalitarianism. But it's true.

A personal anecdote: When I showed up 25 years ago this fall for my 11th grade year at LSMSA, it was apparently assumed by the directors of this advanced school that all the kids there were equally gifted and capable in all subjects. I thought I was, because I made straight A's in my previous high school, though I had to work harder in math. At LSMSA, I ended up in an Algebra II/precalculus class with more than a few bona fide math geniuses. And I quickly understood that I was not as smart as those guys, at least not in math. I wasn't even close. I couldn't keep up. At all. It was like putting a Honda Civic onto a Formula 1 racing course. I had no business in that classroom, and my presence there was a drag on most of the other students, who could keep up. I ended up so depressed and anxious that I quit going to class, and failed the course. Mind you, I wasn't a bad math student before that class, but I wasn't up to the standards of that class. I lost a lot of self-confidence from that experience, and developed an intense phobia of math.

Could I have worked harder than I did? Absolutely. But I did not have the intellectual capabilities to thrive in that classroom. And you know, there's nothing wrong with that. Better to know that about oneself, I think, rather than labor under false pretenses.

In his essay, Murray argues that research decisively shows that with the rare exception of the worst urban schools, family environment is the only thing that really moves test scores one way or another. Otherwise, they're fairly fixed. 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).

I'm generally with Murray in hoping we can do away with the lies we tell ourselves to justify social engineering nonsense like No Child Left Behind. But there are problems, obviously, with a society built on meritocracy alone. If intelligence is based largely on the genetic lottery, what role is there for justice in such a society? As Jeremy Beer says in his essay in "Wendell Berry: Life and Work," the welfare state tries to compensate for the discrepancies through "massive redistribution, artificial competitive boosts to the less naturally gifted, and so forth." This attempt to level the playing field creates a whole host of problems, Beer rightly observes.

What is the traditionalist response? Beer quotes Wendell Berry essentially agreeing with Charles Murray. Berry:

Young people are told, "You can be anything you want to be." Every student is given to understand that he or she is being prepared for "leadership." All of this is a lie. ...You can't be everything you want to be; nobody can. Everybody can't be a leader; not everybody even wants to be. And these lies are not innocent. They lead to disappointment. They lead good young people to think that if they have an ordinary job, if they work with their hands, if they are farmers or housewives or mechanics or carpenters, they are no good."

Is it the case that our meritocratic society is responsible for the rootlessness that is destroying social capital? Beer says yes:

...in order for talent to triumph, it must be mobile. Thus, the better the meritocracy, the more mobility -- both geographic and social -- is required, until talent is able to flow freely to where it can command the highest price (i.e., the most prestige, the highest status, the most money, the most power, and so on). A perfect market for talent is the dream and goal of liberal individualism: nothing must stand in the way of the rise of talent to primacy -- not the state, not intermediate institutions, not religion, not tradition, not families.

Beer goes on to discuss Christopher Lasch's pungent observations that the meritocratic elite believes it got its rewards solely on the basis of merit, and thus creates a new aristocracy, one that believes it has a natural right to rule every bit as unquestioned as the old-style aristocrats. Unlike the old aristos, though, the meritocrats tend not to believe that with their privileged status come duties to people and places, and to tradition. Lasch: "The talented retain many of the vices of aristocracy without its virtues."

So where does all this leave us? I'm not sure.

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. 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.

On the other hand, the traditionalist critique is hard to come to terms with. My grandfather was a factory worker. My father was the first in his family to go to college, and he paid for it with the GI Bill. Though my dad came to resent his college education -- many was the day that he'd sit behind his desk, wishing he was outside working construction or doing practical engineering work, which was what gave him joy -- it propelled us into the middle class. Now, would it have been a more just world if my father would have had no choice but to go into the factory, as his father had done, and I would have ended up on the factory floor too? I don't think so.

Yet no small number of the more academically promising kids I grew up with have left our hometown, to go as far as our talents would take us, as they used to say. Many of us -- and think about how true this might be for you too, reader -- live in places far from where we grew up. We don't really know our neighbors, not well, and we might not get to know them because the meritocracy might require us to up and move in a year or two. We associate with other meritocrats, many of whom are equally rootless. Reading Beer's essay made me think about how easy it is for meritocrats to take the Thomas Friedman view of the world, and assume that a world constructed according to our meritocratic values is only natural and just (see Poulos contra this mindset). We aren't loyal to the places we live, only the ideas that define our class. I've pointed out to my colleagues on the editorial board at my paper that not one of us -- with the possible exception of me -- actually has to live with the negative consequences of illegal immigration, and what it does to a particular place, its culture and its way of life. These things are abstractions to us. They are abstractions to most meritocrats, because we are not conditioned to think that way.

But: what's the alternative? 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 (Murray says that the US educational system now is where the Soviet economic system was in 1990, in terms of teetering on the brink). 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?

Thoughts, readers? I do believe that this discussion will head toward Alan Ehrenhalt's "The Lost City" territory, in which we realize that the things we miss about the old days are only recoverable by giving up a certain amount of mobility and personal freedom, which we're not prepared to do.