DECONSTRUCTING THE CULT OF SMART.

The American Conservative's Clayton Trutor reacts to Frederik deBoer's Cult of Smart (introduced here.)

In this often thoughtful and compelling work, deBoer sounds an awful lot like Charles Murray in Coming Apart and Real Education. Like Murray, deBoer is responding to the world that No Child Left Behind hath wrought.Moreover, deBoer shares Murray’s belief that educational resources ought to be deployed in pursuit of realistic and tangible goals for students who are not college material. The main difference between the two men’s educational philosophies arises primarily from their differing views of political economy.

A classroom teacher turned English PhD, deBoer opposes the equation of one’s scholastic skill with one’s value as a human being, a widespread view among the nation’s academically gifted aspirational classes, which he describes as “the cult of smart.” He regards the kinds of cognitive skills that are rewarded in the modern school system as largely genetically inherited and views the idea of scholastic meritocracy as a dynamo of social inequality. deBoer describes schools as not a key to success in life, as politicians from George W. Bush to Barack Obama have described it, but a lock which keeps students with lesser intellectual abilities from gaining access to the social and economic opportunities which educational attainment provides.

In his fire-and-brimstone introduction, deBoer buries the high-pressure “collegiate arms race” faced by university-bound high school students, the erroneous assumption that every student has the capacity for book learning, and the notion that a college education is the only path to a respectable and fulfilling adult life. The author also does a number on the group he regards as his real enemy within the American educational system—the self-replicating, progressive cultural elites first described in David Brooks’ Bobos in Paradise. deBoer blames them for walling off social mobility to much of society by taking up all the seats at the elite colleges, marrying only one another, and spending every waking hour within the confines of their cultural set—all the while signaling their cultural enlightenment and broadmindedness through performative social gestures.

That sounds like The Meritocracy Trap as well, with so many of those waking hours spent at college or at work with the other survivors of the positional arms race.  "While deBoer is trying to make the orthodox Marxist point that private inequalities seep into the public sphere, he instead makes as strong a case for the intricacy, imperfectability, and variety of human experience as anyone this side of Russell Kirk."

I have so many books to consider reading that I'll never lack for work.  Just heard about another one,  by the way: Tyranny of Merit, by Harvard's Michael Sandel. There's something smacks of archers-to-the-ramparts-pull-up-the-drawbridges in all these senior Ivy Leaguers decrying the very means and methods that got them there.