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, includingthe 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 arrangement 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.
Here’s where we start to part company. Much of what Brooks is focused on pertains almost exclusively to the tiny top of the social pyramid, the part that’s competing hard to get its kids into the twenty or so colleges whose diplomas it cherishes even as the vast majority of college-going Americans matriculate at non-selective state schools within fifty miles of home. Does he really think the obsessions of a few percent have transformed a K–12 complex serving 55 million kids?
Far more leverage on that vast enterprise has been exerted by state and federal policies—most famously No Child Left Behind—that have sought for almost four decades to boost achievement across the board while reducing achievement gaps between student groups, all this prompted not by an obsession to get into Princeton, but by ample evidence from PISA exams, from A Nation at Risk, and from the National Assessment of Educational Progress that America’s national prosperity, national security, and domestic equity (and tranquility) hinge on doing this better.
It’s true that such policies have emphasized testing to go along with higher academic standards, and it’s often said by teachers that those tests and prepping pupils for them serve to cramp their style and narrow the curriculum. While there’s no doubt that U.S schools focus much more on reading, math, and science than on history, art, and poetry, it’s no bad thing for states to push for higher achievement across the board and to start that heavy lift with literacy and numeracy.
As for classroom joy, it would be swell to have more of it, but can David Brooks really point to some golden era when American kids viewed the best part of school as anything other than the 3 p.m. closing bell?
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What would he have us do differently? His proposals begin with identifying what he terms the “six deadly sins of the meritocracy,” namely: “the system overrates intelligence; success in school is not the same as success in life; the game is rigged; the meritocracy has created an American caste system; the meritocracy has damaged the psyches of the American elite; and the meritocracy has provoked a populist backlash that is tearing society apart.”
Wow! Whew! At this point—about halfway through Brooks’s essay—one might expect him to erect a guillotine, summon up a firing squad, quote Karl Marx, or at least urge lottery-based entry to everything from CalTech to McKinsey & Company, from neurosurgery to the ranks of general and admiral, to Rhodes Scholars and poets laureate. Surely we should demolish (or use random admission to) Stuyvesant High School, as well as David’s alma mater, the Ivy-adjacent University of Chicago.
But no, he doesn’t recommend anything crazy. What he does instead—which I view as well-intentioned, partly right, but also a bit naïve and out of touch—is to “redefine merit around four crucial qualities” that he dubs “curiosity,” “a sense of drive and mission,” “social intelligence,” and “agility,” all of which are indeed valuable because all are important elements of highly successful human beings in pretty much every field of study and line of work. Fostering them, all four of them, is an important part of what effective schools and great teachers have always done. But—I’m getting to some big buts, at least as regards the K–12 enterprise—focusing bigtime on those qualities rather than what we’ve been focused on, we education reformers, for the past few decades, will lead to new and different problems while producing more collateral damage. Here goes:
- Formal education can indeed help foster those qualities, but it’s far beyond the capacity of teachers and schools to instill them in kids or even do a great deal to develop them. Some are probably innate, qualities we’re born with in varying quantity. And schools occupy a surprisingly small slice of children’s lives, while most of the forces that foster (or squelch) these qualities operate outside school: at home, in the neighborhood, in the culture, on the Little League field, and so on. What’s more—I’ve had this argument with the “social-emotional learning” crowd for ages—too much time and attention by schools to fostering these qualities within their limited time with kids will squeeze and shrink the attention given to grammar, multiplication, phonics, chemical reactions, key historical events, poetry, the solar system, and the causes of the Civil War. You may contend that those things aren’t important, but I contend that solidly imparting them to kids is the foremost job of schooling—and practically impossible to acquire anywhere else.
- The quartet of qualities that Brooks prizes is exceptionally hard to measure, meaning that it’s all but impossible to know in any useful way how effective is a teacher or school at fostering them or to report to parents (or colleges, employers, etc.) how well a given child is faring at developing them. They can only be gauged subjectively—the polite term is holistically—and that’s time consuming, expensive, deeply vulnerable to uneven criteria, and subject to manipulation and corruption. Test scores, for all their shortcomings, come closer to objectivity, fairness, and integrity. While efforts are underway to devise workable metrics for what ETS and Carnegie term “skills for the future,” they don’t exist today.
- Further tamping down on competition for better grades and higher scores, as Brooks would do, in pursuit of those worthy qualities and skills, will worsen grade inflation while eroding the strongest motivators that kids have to strive—to win the race, to get elected, to get a part in the play, to make it onto the team, to secure a prize, to make the honor roll, to be selected valedictorian—at a time when today’s K–12 system is already dangerously far down that route. It will make it even harder for our modest and beleaguered “gifted and talented” programs to enroll more kids and for those trying to get more—and more different—kids into Advanced Placement and International Baccalaureate classrooms to get school systems to take the steps needed to ensure that more kids are well-prepared for the demands of such coursework. I’m sure David Brooks doesn’t intend this, but the only ways schools know how to implement the kinds of recommendations he’s making are to reduce rigor, lower standards, and serve up more of what Rick Hess has recently termed “sugar-coated” education.
- Perhaps this needn’t be said, but every previous era of “kinder, gentler” education in America has led to a post-Sputnik-type panic over the country’s loss of expertise or a “Nation at Risk” alarm about dumbed down high school graduates. Even fewer kids will be academically prepared to succeed in college. More will drop out. And, in point of fact, when one asks educators and policy leaders from other countries what they admire about American education, it’s nearly always the creativity and independent thinking that our system already fosters—or at least doesn’t squelch! And when you ask American educators what they admire about, say, Asian education, it’s nearly always the other countries’ prowess in ensuring that their students are literate and numerate.
Finally, why did I say that Brooks’s argument is a little dated? He right that our push for everyone to go to college—the best possible college—has ill-served a great many young Americans and we need a revival of attention to high-class career education and other alternative pathways for young people, as well as far stronger preparation for college for those who really want to go there. But that revival is underway, even thriving in some places, if not as newsworthy as how many applicants Stanford is now rejecting. Almost every day brings news of another employer that’s quit requiring college degrees or stopped putting a premium on credentials from elite institutions—many of which are also struggling with internal governance, free-speech, hyper-woke, and student safety issues. And you’d do well to check out such high-quality alternatives to college-prep as the regional technical schools of Massachusetts. See what Sinclair Community College is up to in Dayton. Have a look at WorkTexas in Houston. There are many more. This movement needs nurturing, for sure. But it’s underway.
I have immense admiration for David Brooks, and as I said up top, I nearly always agree with him. But his prescription for American education needs to go back to school.
