When the Culture War Comes for the Kids →
This is an odd article. Despite the annoying (and probably editor-chosen) headline, it’s engrossing, entertaining to read, sometimes laugh-out-loud funny. The quality of the prose is uncommonly good as newsmagazine articles go. The tensions it talks about are recognizable and important, although I’m skeptical they’re really changed so much in recent years.
But … the author seems to be in a “fish can’t see water” situation with some aspects of the topic. He talks about “meritocracy” as this thing he has has no particular faith in as a mechanism, but whose hoops he will cynically jump through if it’ll help his child. Yet he seems to believe – as the meritocracy does, but I at least don’t – that the academic experiences of very young children are actually very important in themselves, and not just important for their value in a subsequent competition.
He depicts the NYC school system as a bizarre world where kids and parents apply for selective preschools as though they’re applying for a job or college, and his averred attitude is like, “it’s super weird that 5-year-olds these days effectively have ‘resumes,’ but if the system will punish my child for not doing things that ‘look good on his resume,’ as a parent I will help him do those things, I guess.”
And yet he cares so much about every little nuance of his son’s experience at school, and his hypothetical experience at schools they apply to and then turn down or are rejected from. If he cared only about the meritocracy, he’d want to get his son into a school with a good enough name, and want him to get good grades and test scores, but he wouldn’t be concerned with the details of the assigned term projects, the educational philosophy (“the school’s pedagogy emphasized learning through doing”), the vegetable garden in the playground. It isn’t the meritocracy that’s making him talk like this, even with tongue perhaps partially lodged in cheek:
The school had delicious attributes. Two teachers in each class of 15 children; parents who were concert pianists or playwrights, not just investment bankers; the prospect later on of classes in Latin, poetry writing, puppetry, math theory [sic], taught by passionate scholars.
In short, he seems to have internalized the meritocracy’s notion that the school experiences of very young children have vast intrinsic significance.
It’s noteworthy that (unless I missed it) the article contains no discussion of the author’s own childhood. His identity as a parent, and as someone interested in education, crowd out his identity as an adult who was once a child himself, with very different priorities. Doesn’t he remember the childhood world where none of this mattered much, where homework was simply a chore, where the mind would frequently leave the teacher’s monologue behind to dwell on the sting of playground slights, the allure of new toys or daydream worlds? Does he remember forgetting like 70% of what he “learned” within a year or two, or was that just me?
As far as I can remember, my early schooling was largely glorified daycare. Things didn’t get “academically serious” until 4th grade, and that was only on accident: my teacher was self-serious and kind of a hardass, as dedicated to teaching me American history and civics as I was dedicated to ignoring them. One of her more elaborate conceits, which the article’s author would have loved, involved role-playing a debate over some 19th-century political issue [no, I can’t remember which]; the roles assigned to us included Henry Clay and, inexplicably, Thomas Hobbes, whose views the class handout dubiously summarized by saying he “believed all men were born evil.” (My father was very impressed: “I didn’t know who Thomas Hobbes was until college!”)
And things relaxed again in 5th grade. I could not for the life of me tell you anything I learned in 5th grade, although I vaguely remember some sort of project about insects; the only crisp memory from that year was a creative writing project, for which I scrawled a 20-page comedy-fantasy epic entitled “Legend of the Cheese-It” [sic], and I probably would have done that in my free time anyway if not prompted. I was in an accelerated program you had to test into, and yet as far as I can remember, many or even most of my classmates exhibited the same bored disengagement and idle whimsy. I mean, we were kids.
And just as the author describes, there were political squabbles over the curriculum, and strange and misguided policies enforced with heavy hand by school administrators. (The phrase “zero-tolerance” was wielded with zeal, to predictably perverse effect.) None of this is new, and all of it only mattered up to a point. We had inner and outer lives which the contrivances and absurdities of school unpleasantly interfered with but did not override in importance. If there were attempts to indoctrinate us politically, they merely confused us, and it was only a few years later that we entered into political consciousness on our own terms – generally via the concept, irresistible to the 12-year-old mind, that “George W. Bush is dumb.”
Most of the successful people I know remember school like this, I think? They do not trace their adult success back to the student-teacher ratio of their kindergartens, that’s for sure. I suspect the author is living in more of a New York engaged-parent bubble than he realizes.
And, too, I suspect he’s conflating the very top “heights” of the meritocracy, the paths that go through Harvard and Yale, with the mainstream of the meritocracy, the choices that will get you a shot at the middle class if not quite as fancy a pedigree. I’m sure the institutions with the highest-status names care about all sorts of odd things in their applicants, because there are so few slots for so many strivers, and they have to make distinctions somehow. But by the very same token, those institutions are subject to pathologies that make them less desirable. The brand name “Harvard” creates too many conflicting pressures for any one school to sustain; as just one example, superstar researchers must be hired to maintain the brand called “Harvard professor” within academia, but superstar researchers don’t makes the best teachers, which then dilutes the brand called “a Harvard education.” Things considered the best to have on your resume, and not merely good, tend to distort under that strain. The author seems to have observed this in action at the level of preschool (yes, preschool), kindergarten, middle school, but he hasn’t applied the lesson forward to the rest of his son’s future.
