As the great education machine rumbles into action, from preschool to graduate school, parents, teachers and students collect supplies from backpacks to BMWs according to age and bracing or another year of intellectual labor and political infighting. All parents naturally want their children to be successful and try to get them into gifted and talented programs or good colleges. The usual battles about college admissions and assessment standards are being fought all over again, plus some new ones caused by recent scandals and culture war skirmishes. It’s like a gigantic game of musical chairs — who will sit at the front of the class and who will be left standing?
When Thomas Jefferson applied to enter William and Mary College in 1760, there was only one admission requirement (apart from being white and male): “Let no blockhead or lazy fellow be admitted.” A blockhead was a young man who had no Greek or Latin. Not a word about legacy admissions, or even high school football scores.
Jefferson qualified easily, excelled in all his studies, and went on to become President of the United States and author of the Declaration of Independence—a straight-A student all the way.
In Jefferson’s time, higher education was designed to produce a political and cultural elite, and it did. That’s why blockheads and lazy fellows had to be excluded. In our time, and especially since the 19th century, the purpose of higher education has become more ambitious. Blockheads and lazy fellows are not excluded (I was a teacher for many years, so I know this), and so the system has expanded enormously and is vastly more democratic.
But education is still essentially a sorting device to train and place young people into their social class positions – lawyers here, lawn care there. On a more idealistic level, it is also supposed to give students the knowledge and thinking skills they need to play an active part in our democracy. That would be a perfect meritocracy. If it really worked like that, we would be governed by a talented elite of highly intelligent, highly civilized, and democratically minded men and women. You may have noticed this is not the case.
There are many things that confuse the simple equation between educational success and worldly success. The conservative columnist David Brooks pointed out in a recent essay what may seem obvious, that intellectual talent is not all you need. There are other rungs on the upward ladder labeled ambition, competitiveness, self-confidence, energy, passion, health, and even ruthlessness and the will to power. These are not on the curriculum in regular educational establishments, even in the Gifted and Talented program, but they can all be learned in the university of life.
We ask more of the education system than it can possibly deliver. What it does deliver is a mirror image of the nation with all its strengths and weaknesses, where genius sometimes goes unrecognized, and blockheads are sometimes winners. It may not be a meritocracy of the elites, but it is certainly a democracy of some kind, but only because we put such vast resources into education. To quote Thomas Jefferson: “The cornerstone of democracy rests on the foundation of an educated electorate.”
