Writer and academic Fredrik deBoer’s new book, The Cult of Smart, is a comparably “blasphemous” critique of the sorting mechanism that dictates the fates of the denizens of the contemporary United States. The education system, like Borges’s fictional lottery, is granted the power to determine status, wealth, and position; unlike the Lottery of Babylon, the results are permanent and irreversible. The twist is that this system presents itself as the opposite of a lottery. Its results, we are usually led to believe, are not random, but manifestations of the merit of those who participate. We are expected to see it as a system in which chance plays no essential part, such that when random accidents intervene, we regard them as distortions of the system rather than a basic feature.
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Much like a lottery, education is by definition a competitive system that sorts winners from losers. As long as we accept its role as a key determinant of social outcomes, the result will necessarily be inequality, and it will merely be a question of how this inequality is distributed by group. Those who insist that education is “the great equalizer,” deBoer argues, are either being dishonest or are suffering from the Lake Wobegon delusion that all children can be above average. As he writes: “not everyone can be a good student if the term ‘good’ has any meaning.” One proof of this is that as soon as some educational sorting mechanism ceases to effectively separate “good” from “bad” students, its much-vaunted benefits evaporate.
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In effect, if not in theory, recent education reforms from No Child Left Behind to the Common Core to various local school choice initiatives have aimed to help the same subgroup: academically gifted students who, as a result of poverty, historical discrimination, and other factors, cannot access the same paths to success as their privileged counterparts. Left out of the discussion entirely, on the other hand, are “meritocracy’s losers”: those who simply lack the talent and disposition to succeed in school, regardless of circumstances. Policy discussions either ignore these students, or else reframe their inborn inability to succeed as a lack of effort, thus retroactively justifying their failure in a game they would never be able to win.
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Having rejected “equality of opportunity” as a myth premised on a denial of the natural distribution of talents, deBoer goes to bat for the oft-derided notion of “equality of outcomes.” While “variation between individuals will inevitably result in inequality,” he argues that “equality of certain essential outcomes related to material security and political representation is a realizable and noble goal.” Some of his concrete proposals do not address education per se, but the decommodification of essential goods to ensure universal access to them, regardless of success in the meritocratic rat race. For instance, he spends seven pages advocating for Medicare for All.
From the article:
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