At the heart of America’s system of public education is a piece of humbug. It goes something like this: Every child has an equal capacity to excel in school, and scholastic effort is the chief means by which a young person may achieve a fulfilling and prosperous life. Fredrik deBoer, a prolific commentator and education policy expert, has written “The Cult of Smart: How Our Broken Education System Perpetuates Social Injustice” mainly to expose this doctrine as the well-meaning but destructive fiction it is.
That some children lack the intellectual aptitude to achieve anything but modest academic success ought to be obvious to any moderately observant person. That is not to say that academically deficient kids are stupid or lazy. A brief look at the list of gargantuan stupidities promoted by pre-eminent intellectuals over the past 300 years is sufficient to invalidate any correlation between academic aptitude and either wisdom or decency. The uneducated shopkeeper, if I may bang the populist drum for a moment, frequently has far more to contribute to human flourishing than any Ivy-educated mandarin. But, alas, the dominant outlook in American public education is militantly egalitarian and thus unable to permit any suggestion of intrinsic difference. Even to suggest the possibility that some kids are naturally better in school than others is enough to invite nervous warnings against bigotry and eugenicism.
Of course, some differences in scholastic achievement are attributable to socioeconomic circumstances, but not to the degree most education professionals suppose. “Students in abject poverty sometimes escape to lives of tremendous intellectual achievement,” Mr. deBoer notes, “and the children of affluence are sometimes dumb as rocks.”
If you are persuaded by his argument and you are a good American liberal, you are in trouble. Twenty-first-century liberalism, mistaking intellectual capacity for intrinsic moral worth, cannot abide the supposition that some students are naturally brighter than others. Conservatives are quite at home with this view, just as they are accustomed to the bogus accusations of racism that usually come with it. But Mr. deBoer is neither a liberal nor a conservative nor a libertarian. He is a Marxist. He isn’t a Marxist in the way academic literary critics call themselves Marxists—they believe in some form of historical materialism but aren’t interested in an actual revolution. When Mr. deBoer writes “I am a Marxist,” he means it. He uses the term “communist” favorably and unironically, and the latter part of the book attempts to envision “exactly what a socialist society would look like” (such a state of affairs having yet to come about in the 137 years since Marx’s death).
Fredrik deBoer.
Photo: Javier Oddo
The Cult of Smart
By Fredrik deBoer
All Points, 276 pages, $28.99
Readers of this newspaper, who mostly have a favorable view of capitalism and regard Marxism as an unqualified failure, may be tempted to stop reading here. But Mr. deBoer’s book deserves attention for the way in which the author honestly faces one of modern liberalism’s great inanities and addresses it using only the tenets of the political left. It is an extraordinary effort. I will try to summarize his thinking in a couple of sentences. Since many students, owing to both socioeconomic factors and reasons of intrinsic ability, simply can’t excel in the scholastic rat race and “knowledge economy” that liberal capitalism has created, the meritocratic aspiration itself must be abolished and replaced with radical redistributionism. And since kids from underprivileged backgrounds stand an extremely poor chance of achieving better economic circumstances, society’s duty is not to figure out ways to boost their chances in a capitalist system—that’s the dream of “education reformers,” to use Mr. deBoer’s derisive term—but to demolish the entire meritocratic system and give those kids equal economic circumstances to begin with.
Mr. deBoer defends public schools and education-related welfare programs on moral rather than utilitarian grounds. I don’t think I have ever read a scholar of the left concede, as Mr. deBoer does readily and to his credit, that after-school and pre-K programs do virtually nothing to improve educational outcomes. But he believes these programs ought to be dramatically expanded on the grounds that it is society’s duty to afford equal justice to all.
The author bears a special hatred for charter schools, but his attacks do him no credit. The point of charter schools is not, as he tendentiously has it, to “force traditional public schools to compete” and so to bring about “school closures and teacher firings”; it is to give some public schools maximum flexibility and so to distinguish the administrative and instructional practices that work from those that don’t. But since charters are premised on the idea that some schools perform their function better than others, Mr. deBoer feels he must discredit them. It’s too bad. I note that Thomas Sowell’s “Charter Schools and Their Enemies,” published in June, spends an entire chapter acknowledging the myriad differences among students in academic capabilities. You would think from Mr. deBoer’s account that only he has the courage to say such a thing.
Mr. deBoer claims repeatedly, for example, that charter schools achieve better rankings by systematically expelling students for disciplinary reasons and neglecting to replace them. Oh, please. For expulsions to work as a ploy for boosting rankings, charter administrators would need to know ahead of time which students will perform badly on standardized tests, when of course they know no such thing (see Mr. deBoer’s comment about some children of affluence being dumb as rocks). And the numbers don’t add up: To achieve higher rankings by getting rid of students, charters would have to expel vastly more students than they do.
Mr. deBoer rightly criticizes an education system that condemns the academically indifferent to second-rate status. You wonder, though, what the world would look like after the sort of revolution he proposes: a revolution in which the educated—it’s always the educated who carry out revolutions—assume the power to remake society. I prefer the Cult of Smart, for all its problems, to the Dictatorship of the Proletariat.
Mr. Swaim is an editorial-page writer for the Journal.
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