Education and Hierarchies

At her newsletter, Jennifer Berkshire has an excellent post this week-- I'm here to say two things. "Go read it" and "Yes, and..."

In "The Brutal Logic Behind Dismantling the Department of Education," Berkshire points out that much of the dismantling is aimed at outcomes like getting fewer students to attend college. There are a variety of reasons for this, including the idea that colleges were captured by crazy left-wingers in the seventies (e.g. Chris Rufo's "Laying Siege to the Institutions" speech) and the notion that going to college is distracting women from the important work of being baby-makers (e.g. the Heritage Foundation's wacky theories). 

Berkshire points to the Curtis Yarvin theory that we need a techno-monarch, and that requires us to demolish the "cathedral,' the set of institutions that make ordinary people believe they Know Stuff and don't need to be ruled over.

But I think the heart of the matter is captured by Berkshire in this portion of the post:

The creepiest story I read this week had nothing to do with education but with the effort to rebuild the US semiconductor industry known as the CHIPS program. Employees in the CHIPS program office have been undergoing a now-familiar ritual: demonstrating their intellectual worth and abilities to Trump officials.

In late February, Michael Grimes, a senior official at the Department of Commerce and former investment banker at Morgan Stanley, conducted brief interviews with employees of the CHIPS Program Office, which oversees the grants.

In interactions some described as “demeaning,” Mr. Grimes asked employees to justify their intellect by providing test results from the SAT or an IQ test, said four people familiar with the evaluations. Some were asked to do math problems, like calculate the value of four to the fourth power or long division.

What does demanding IQ or SAT test results from engineers have to do with the dismantling of the Department of Education? Everything. If you start from the assumption that IQ is, not just fixed, but genetically determined, as many Trump intellectuals do, there is little case to be made for public schools that try to equalize outcomes—it can’t be done. Far better to shovel cashes at the would-be ‘cognitive elite’ (an apt description of vouchers for the well-to-do, when you think about it) than to redistribute resources to the ‘lessers.’ It’s a bleak and brutal view of the world and one that holds increasing sway on the right.

I've been talking for years about the idea that Betters and Lessers drive much ed reform. When Betsy DeVos talks about letting parents and students find the right fit for an education, what she means is that students should get the education that is appropriate for their station. No higher education for you future meat widgets!

The underlying idea is that people are not equal and that "merit" is a measure of how much Right Thinking a person does. But the important part is that there are natural hierarchies in the world and to try to lift the Lessers up from their rightful place on the bottom rungs of society's ladder is an unnatural offense against God and man. Using social safety nets or other programs to try to make their lives suck less is simply standing between them and the natural, deserved consequences of their lack of merit-- after all, if they didn't deserve to be poor, they wouldn't be poor. Life is supposed to be hard for the Lessers, and trying to make it less hard is an offense against God and man. And it is doubly offensive when we tax the Betters to fund this stuff.

For these folks, education is not supposed to be about uplift, but about sorting and suiting people for their proper place in society. This sorting could be done more efficiently if the sorting happened before they even got to school, if, in fact, the school system itself was already set up with several tiers so that Betters and Lessers could have their own schools.

I've argued for years that the free market is a lousy match for public education because the free market picks winners and loser, not just among vendors, but among customers. But for a certain type of person, that's a feature, not a bug. The Lessers shouldn't get a big fancy school with lots of programs because all they need is enough math and reading to make them employable at the Burger Store. 

Public schools also offend Betters sensibilities by trying to uphold civil rights. Berkshire nails this:

At the heart of the Trumpist intellectual project is a relatively straight-forward argument. The civil rights revolution in this country went too far and it’s time to start rolling it back. As Jack Schneider and I argue in our recent book, The Education Wars, the role that public schools have historically played in advancing civil rights makes them particularly vulnerable in this moment of intense backlash. It’s why the administration has moved with such ferocity against the most recent effort to extend civil rights through the schools—to transgender students. And it’s why the cuts to the Department of Education have fallen so heavily on its civil rights enforcement role. Of the agency's civil rights offices across the country, only five are still open.

 For some of these folks, civil rights are NOT for every human being who draws breath. Civil rights are only for those who deserve them by merit and by station and by Right Thinking. 

The idea of public education as a means of uplift for every student, undergirded by a system that protects and honors the civil rights of every person simply has no place in a certain view of the nation. And that certain view is currently in charge.