Arguing Merits
As I get ready to start my second semester teaching at the University of Southern Mississippi, I have been thinking about my experiences and trying to read and think as broadly as I can about the task of teaching large and diverse student bodies in the present moment.
One writer I’ve found who addresses the challenges of public education from both pedagogy and policy perspectives is Freddie deBoer. I’m not the first to recommend him. His Substack newsletter is hugely popular, though there he goes a little too frequently for culture-war content than I would like, but a writer needs readers, and this is how you get the most readers at this moment, a topic for longer discussion. New York magazine recommended his book Cult of Smart as one of its 2020 must-reads, as would I.
The book makes a number of arguments, and one of the most that teachers should consider is how much factors outside their control impact how students learn at school.
DeBoer gives his main argument by comparing students to seeds: “We should strive for a world where all seeds grow in healthy, well-tended soil, out of a fundamental commitment to the equal moral value of all. But just as no plant can grow to its full potential height from poor soil, no amount of tending to the soil can make some seeds taller than some others,” and “to act as though every human being has the same potential in academic life is no more sensible than expecting every sapling to grow to the same height.”
In the book, deBoer continues using the seed metaphor to say that academic outcomes are overwhelmingly determined by genetics, a “hard” genetic determinist thesis advocated by the scholar Eric Turkheimer. However, deBoer concedes that it is difficult if not impossible to study human intelligence, learning, and life-outcomes with true scientific rigor because we can’t control experimental conditions.
In any case, my experience tells me that our influence as teachers is limited by a lot that’s out of our hands, whether it’s students’ genes or their broader familial and social situations. That is to say I share deBoer’s criticism of the thinking behind mainstream educational policy, which says that a combination of pedagogical heroism and student willpower can overcome literally any obstacle to learning.
De Boer roots this belief in Americans’ commitments to the idea of equal opportunity, that is, to meritocracy. Believers in meritocracy think that the extraordinary inequality of educational and socio-economic outcomes in contemporary American life only constitute a problem if they can be shown to be rooted in unequal opportunities.
Whereas conservatives are both normatively and epistemologically meritocratic— they believe we already have equal opportunity, and it makes this country great, liberals are only normatively committed. They see equal opportunity as a promise unfulfilled. Think Virginia Woolf’s famous passage about Shakespeare’s sister.
DeBoer falls outside the mainstream pro-meritocracy consensus. Speaking as a Marxist, he says “There is no a priori reason for society to privilege the interests of the talented, and no clear justification for a system of genetic aristocracy.”
He argues, and call me whatever you want, I agree, that the state and society need to dramatically intervene in our collective life to promote a much higher shared standard of living, much more equality of material outcomes, in housing, health care, and workplace governance.
DeBoer’s clearest normative commitment comes not from a Marxist thinker, but John Rawls, who argues that we should think about a just society through a thought experiment. Imagine we could design a society and polity collectively but didn’t know what race or gender we had to live as or what socioeconomic background we had before we were born.
Rawls’ bizarrely-made famous point is that legal and political equality require that we try to level out the unfair advantages some people have for no other reason than their birth. For de Boer, we should think about a society that is just as fair for the talented as the untalented.
DeBoer says it might be hard for blue Americans, who see themselves as egalitarians but would dread to be thought of as average, to accept that “There is no conflict in calling for political and social equality while denying that everyone is equal in ability, and no reason to presume that everyone needs to be equally capable of reasoning to participate in the the communal reasoning process.”
Here is the problem for me: DeBoer may be right there is no logical reason to connect equal rational powers to the public use of reason, but there is historical reason. As deBoer himself shows, the liberal thinkers as far back as Hobbes and Locke argued human beings are highly mutable because they are essentially equal prior to the accidental features of life in social systems.
Since the Enlightenment, voting rights have expanded alongside and were often conditioned upon the idea of universal education that progressive upper-class reformers intended to uplift the masses to their standard of thinking.
But it’s not limited to libs. No less than Leon Trotsky says that in a state of “Social construction and psycho-physical self-education,” we will see “The average human type will rise to the heights of an Aristotle, a Goethe, or, a Marx. And above this ridge new peaks will rise.”
What strikes me in the Trotsky quote is for all the radicalism, he is principally talking about acting on the masses to make them more like elites. This is for him a commitment to equality, but it’s not imagining what society or education might look like with different expressions of knowledge or learning, or what equality might look like if people cannot rise or fall through education any more than mountains.
This last possibility challenges de Boer’s faith in universal moral equality and dignity. If Turkheimer and others are correct, we cannot have a Rawlsian veil of ignorance, because standardized tests reveal profound differences in cognition that even the fairest wealthy social democracies have never altered. For de Boer, human beings’ equal socioeconomic needs confer equal socioeconomic rights by faith. In a society that doesn’t just tolerate but celebrates inequality, we’ll need to shorten the leap of faith.