Ah, David Brooks. Ordinarily, I’d start a piece in which I plan to (partially) disagree with him by stating that he’s a very smart guy—but what I’m going to push back at this time is his much-disseminated contention that America needs to rethink what “smart” means. Even though his own qualities would likely still qualify under his new formulation, I ought not take chances. Nowadays, he might not even want to be termed smart.
So let me instead begin by observing that David’s voluminous writings and frequent commentaries, whether in print or on PBS on Friday evenings or in myriad panels, conferences, speeches, and symposia, are nearly always well informed, well thought through, articulate, wise—and set forth clearly, with decency, some humor, a dash of humility, and a friendly smile.
What’s more, I usually agree with him.
But when he sets out to reinvent the American meritocracy and the education system that feeds into it, I can only accompany him partway, at which point I find his analysis and especially his proposed remedies off-base, slightly archaic, unrealistic, and potentially harmful.
You should definitely read his long piece in The Atlantic titled “How the Ivy League Broke America” and perhaps some of the various spinoffs—podcasts, interviews, news shows—it has already spawned. You may well find yourself, like me, agreeing with part of his analysis, especially the parts—echoing the recent election, as well as Charles Murray’s thesis in Coming Apart—about the deepening bifurcation of America into a college-educated population that hangs out with, and shares the values of, others like itself, and may look askance at the other population, which is less educated, often poorer, similarly inclined to clump together, and perhaps resentful of that first group.
America, like every country, has always had better educated and more prosperous elites, on the one hand, inclined to marry one another and produce children with good odds of remaining in that elite, and on the other hand, a large population with less schooling, less money, less status, and less chance of altering that situation for themselves or their progeny. No advanced society that I’m aware of has eradicated that situation, though some small, homogeneous Nordic lands have reduced the discrepancies.
What’s long distinguished the United States, however, the prototypical “land of opportunity,” is how many ways it has offered determined individuals and families by which to propel themselves into the “better educated and more prosperous” parts of its society. And its educational offerings—schools of all sorts, colleges of all sorts, apprenticeships, vocational programs, and workplace training opportunities, including the military—have played a key role, surely the largest role, in enabling such mobility. Never, though, has there been much mobility without aspiration, determination, and quite a lot of effort on the part of individuals and those who love them.
The mobility arrangements are numerous but complicated, imperfect, and sometimes just half-visible. All sorts of barriers have also gotten in the way, from discrimination and poverty to inadequate schools to limits imposed by guilds, unions, and professions.
So those arrangements have long needed a tune-up, and Brooks recounts, at considerable length, what he views as an education revolution—far more than a tune-up—that began in the 1950’s and was intended to improve those arrangements. He centers the tale on Harvard’s James B. Conant, who, with a few others, set out to overhaul entry into the country’s most elite universities, changing the focus from what Brooks terms “bloodlines and breeding” into “criteria centered on brainpower.” Conant, writes Brooks, hoped, by “shifting admissions criteria in this way . . . to realize Thomas Jefferson’s dream of an aristocracy of talent, culling the smartest people from all ranks of society” and fostering “more social mobility and less class conflict.”
Thus arose, for example, the Scholastic Aptitude Test, an earnest effort by Ivy colleges and psychometricians to level the playing field, such that a talented kid from public school in Cairo, Illinois, would have as good a shot at Yale as a Groton graduate whose parents lived in Greenwich, Connecticut.
It actually worked pretty well. Combined with civil rights breakthroughs, the rise of feminism, and a bunch of changing social attitudes, plus all manner of financial aid, the entering classes of selective, elite colleges and universities came a lot closer to “looking like America” than ever before, and a lot more of their duly credentialed graduates ended up diversifying—while also boosting the brain power of—myriad C suites, big-time finance, major-league science, the traditional professions, and the academy itself.
Much else changed, too. “The effect,” Brooks writes, “was transformational, as though someone had turned on a powerful magnet,” a talent-gauged-by-smartness magnet.
But, he goes on to contend—at this point we’re just five pages into the thirty-seven that came out of my printer—that big problems also followed. Brooks judges that the “highly competitive status race” that overcame K–12 education and parents in the wake of this transformation, especially parents bent on securing their own kids’ entry into the high-status colleges via the new criteria, caused widespread collateral damage. He sees the emphasis on testing, evaluating, and sorting kids—and holding schools and teachers to account for the academic performance of those kids—as taking pretty much all the joy out of childhood, the arts out of schools, the professionalism out of teaching, and the pleasure out of learning.
