I have long been a fan of Freddie deBoer. He is a master of persuasive prose, and he has been perceptive about many of the corrosive practices within the online left. I can remember blog posts I read back in 2014 that felt overheated at the time, but now feel prophetic.
So I was thrilled to learn that deBoer had written a book on a topic that is deeply meaningful to me: Education!
DeBoer’s book, The Cult of Smart, came out this summer. I found it to be provocative and thoughtful, and I felt that it was worth a deeper dive into the work. So I am going to blog about it, chapter by chapter. Feel free to read along with me!
Introduction
In the introduction, deBoer lays out his definition of the Cult of Smart, a sort of totalizing conflation of intelligence with human worth. It’s the Cult of Smart that convinced dozens of wealthy parents to break the law, risking jail to ensure that their children got into selective universities. Those kids, after all, would have fared just fine at a less competitive public university. But when one’s alma mater is a synecdoche for their value to society, every rung on the US News and World Report ladder matters.
If this book were simply a diagnosis and castigation of the Cult of Smart, it would be worth it. But Freddie goes a step further. The Cult of Smart is not just problematic because it views people’s academic success as synonymous with their human worth; it is also problematic because there are real differences between the academic ability of different people, and these differences cannot be entirely erased by even the most successful educational system. Therefore, using intelligence as our economic and social sorting mechanism is cruel to the people who do not have the ability to succeed academically.
Here he lays out his objection to the Cult of Smart in fuller detail:
Many people deride our meritocracy for not really working for the poor, for people of color, for women; they see structural impediments to these groups as preventing real meritocracy from flourishing. But I would put it to you a different way: What could be crueler than an actual meritocracy, a meritocracy fulfilled?
This complaint is, to put it mildly, controversial. As deBoer notes in the introduction, many people have used academic differences as an avenue to spread racist ideas about black people and other ethnic minorities.
DeBoer is extremely, even repetitively, insistent that he shares my concerns about the way social science is abused to make racist claims about intelligence. His focus is on differences in intelligence within groups, even extremely similar groups. As he says,
You can have two students who are the same age, the same race, the same gender, from the same socioeconomic status, with similar family compositions, who live on the same street, who even have the same teachers…Yet for all their demographic and educational similarity, these kids will see profound inequality in their academic outcomes.
One point he makes worth noting - even if you disagree with deBoer’s insistence that differences in natural academic ability exist, you cannot deny that, for whatever reason, people do end up graduating from high school with vastly different levels academic ability, even demographically similar students from the same schools. As a result, any system that awards money, health, and success based on academic ability is inherently cruel to those who, for whatever reason, graduate school without the requisite level of skill. No matter its source, the difference between people’s academic ability demonstrates why the Cult of Smart is a cruel ideology.
My Reaction
I think this introduction is one of the best parts of the book. Many authors are happy to critique the culture that excessively values academic achievement in America, but few are willing to criticize the fundamental assumptions about intelligence that form the foundation upon which the Cult of Smart has been built.
DeBoer is an excellent polemicist, and he makes his case cogently and briskly. As we’ll find in later chapters, he does make efforts to be careful in his factual claims, which I appreciate. And similarly, I’ll reflect on his arguments, and whether I think they hold up, more thoroughly once we get to the heart of the book.
Deboer includes a good deal of personal biography in this introduction, which I found interesting as a longtime fan of his work. I wonder, though, how interesting it would be for someone who came to the book with no prior knowledge of him as an author. Some of his anecdotes are helpful, and he certainly demonstrates his bona fides as a leftist, but it felt a bit indulgent at times. How much time in a book on education do we need to spend on Ned Lamont’s failed run for senator in Connecticut?
One anecdote, though, is worth spending some time on: deBoer’s encounter with a weed-out class in the engineering department of the university where he teaches. For those unfamiliar, a weed-out class is a 100-level class that is intended to be too challenging for most students, often used in STEM majors to dissuade students from continuing in the major.
DeBoer initially is shocked by the practice of weeding out students, but as he states, “what once seemed like cruelty to me was in fact an act of mercy, an artifact of a pragmatic and necessary acknowledgement that not all students possess the underlying ability necessary to flourish in some fields.”
I teach entry-level math at a public university, and this is not the prevailing attitude among the administrators who look at our pass rates. I’ll admit that I feel ambivalent about this. I do feel like my university can be an on-ramp to academic success for students who are matriculating from dysfunctional school districts. I don’t want to close the door on their career prospects right away with a brutal weed-out course. At the same time, I have seen students take and fail the same math course three or four times, simply because they want to major in a subject that requires math that they cannot get a handle on. Letting them run into that same brick wall again and again feels cruel to me, as well.
I figured I’d close with some short quotations from the intro. These are each, in my opinion, good examples both of deBoer’s prose and the core of his argument in the introduction. I don’t agree with everything here, as I’ll share in subsequent posts, but I think anyone who is interested in the book should get a sense of deBoer’s ideas from this set of quotations.
There is another lesson to be learned from Operation Varsity Blues, perhaps a harder lesson to learn.
An outside observer might ask a basic question: Why had the students not simply studied harder? They seemed to have every advantage. They socioeconomic status affects academic performance is a settled matter in out national educational discussions. Clearly the parents had the resources to give them extra help, such as thorough tutoring or test prep classes. Surely a little more elbow grease could have prevented this whole scandal, right?
In a word, no.
No one doubts that not all people have the same natural talent for athletics. Few would argue that I could have ever been an Olympic sprinter, even with the best coaches and most advanced training techniques. I simply lack the natural talent. I might, through great effort and with the best coaching, have reached speeds far above what I could achieve beforehand. But I could never have been a world class sprinter, could probably never have even been a real contender on the high school level. Everyone understands that, in the domain of athletics, we are most certainly not born equal in ability. But this thinking is anathema when applied to academic aptitude.
The most consistent reaction to my arguments on these subjects is confusion - confusion over how they can coexist with my politics. I am a Marxist: I believe in revolutionary socialism and in the equal value of all human beings. The progressive belief in equality would seem at first glance to conflict with my commitment to equality. But this mistakes moral equality, political equality, and equality of value with equality of ability…
A belief that all people deserve material security and comfort can coexist with the belief that we all have different genetic endowments and thus different abilities. More than coexist: a belief in the role of genetics fits with left-wing belief far more comfortably than the alternative. It is the left, after all, that stresses the vagaries of chance, that insists that factors we can’t control play an outsize role in determining our life outcomes. In insisting in the power of genetics to shape our academic lives, and thus our economic lives, I am simply taking left-wing thought to its next logical conclusion.
Next week, I’ll reflect on Chapter 1, where deBoer lays out the Cult of Smart’s warping effect on our educational system.