Currently reading: The Cult of Smart by Fredrik deBoer 📚
I learned about this book listening to Jesse Singal and Katie Herzog’s highly entertaining and sometimes insigntful “Blocked and Reported” podcast. Jesse did a pretty extensive interview with Freddie deBoer. I’m still in the early pages of the book, but here is the gist of it based on the interview and the first quarter of the book:
Academic achievement and accomplishment is prized about all else in our society today. It’s the source of both prestige and leverage for economic advancement.
It’s long been claimed by the establishment that academic achievement and accomplishment are inhibited primarily by structural inequalities and institutional mediocrity within education, or by a lack of will or self-confidence on the part of particular students. The solutions being enacted are to “fix” education and to inculcate within students the belief that they can accomplish anything by virtue of developing the work-ethic or “grit” to follow through with whatever goals they choose for themselves.
I think it’s worth lingering a moment on the notion of “fixing” education, because Freddie is quite persuasive when he describes the way that education isn’t primarily broken due to a lack of accountability, laziness, or structural racism, but because it’s being tasked with accomplishing two diametrically opposed goals: to be an engine of equality (meaning the advancement of the underpriviledged toward equality with people with priviledge) and a system to sort students on the basis of their merit, as measured by academic achievement. Logically, it’s impossible for any institution to do both of these things, and the better it accomplishes one of them, the more ineffective it will be at the other.
Freddie claims that the most significant inhibitor of academic achievement is innate academic ability. However, discussion of this is a political and institutional third rail. Freddie has forshadowed that he’ll go into some discussion of the evidence that genetics is the most reliable determinant of academic ability. I haven’t read any kind of discussion of this topic before, so I’m quite looking forward to seeing the argument he puts forth here.
This book has captured my attention because it is very well aligned with my frustrations as a teacher. The standard for academic achievement to graduate high school has been pushed higher and higher over the last twenty years. Last year I decided to take the FSA (Florida Standard Assessment) for myself to see what it would be like for my students who were trying to pass it, and was taken aback by just how rigorous it was. Several of the reading passages and question sets were ones that I would certainly have been puzzled by in high school. And, not to brag, but I earned a perfect score on the reading portion of the SAT when I took it in 1999. Indeed, if I hadn’t learned in college of the relationship between Romeo and Juliet and Pyramus and Thisbe college, I would have been completely stymied by one question set. The expectation that all students must be able to perform at a very high academic level in order to graduate is in ascendency in the state education system. Indeed, it seems like the goal is for all high school graduates to be “college ready” with this assessment being the primary accountability measure. So where does this leave students who do not have the ability to succeed in college? In misery. Day after day they struggle through classes that are trying to help them achieve at level beyond their abilities and they are told that their failure to be successful is that they aren’t trying hard enough. What a nightmare. And teachers are also told that their students’ failure to be successful because they aren’t trying hard enough. Or are incompetent. Or don’t really care about their students. Or harbor unconscious bias.
Not great for morale.
The book is provocative beyond just its discussion of education though, because the entire economic organization of society is predicated on the notion that education is the pathway to advancement, and the fairness of that system is reliant on our efforts to give all students an equal shot at success. But if success is going to be mainly determined at the end of the day by innate talent, then all the leveling of the playing field will do is create a different set of winners and losers, where again the losers find themselves in that position by no fault of their own. How is that a just society?