The Cult of Smart

This thought provoking book asks deep, transformational questions about the American educational system and whether it truly serves all students. The thesis of the book is that not everyone is "smart," and that's okay. Intelligence is inherited, and no matter how much particular students try to make good grades, they will still come up short. The book includes an excellent history of recent American educational initiatives - useful to those of us too young to remember them or who didn't have children in public schools in the late twentieth century.

As a mother of a dyslexic child who struggles with school (but who is nonetheless quite "smart" when it comes to non-academic endeavors), this book resonated with me. I agreed with most of his criticisms of the current system. I really wished the author had spent more time on possible solutions to the problems, however. There's a huge need for more vocational education and job training, along with services for children and teens with learning disabilities. I would have liked more content on these needs.

Instead, the author bent over backwards to assure us of his liberal credentials and spent the last part of the book on Marxism. I think if he had stuck to reforms of the educational system, he would have been more likely to get consensus - not to mention readers - from those of more moderate and even conservative leanings.

The basic thrust of The Cult of Smart is that we are, as a society, unwilling to admit that people cannot reach the same echelons of intelligence through good education and sheer grit. People are just different, and we already acknowledge this in other spaces, such as athletic ability. The author repeatedly emphasizes that this is not based on race.

As a consequence of this, we put most of our blame on already beleaguered public school systems and teachers, which doesn't help anyone but wastes billions of dollars and causes endless frustration through additional testing, etc. And we never seem to learn. But "no educational miracle is coming," and there's "no technology that will save our schools, no neoliberal reform that will raise of children out of the grips of poverty, no new model that will suddenly turn struggling students into flourishing ones."

I think there are some really powerful ideas here. Here are some of my favorites:
-We focus our educational reform efforts like someone looking for keys under a street light-- because our political levers most easily impact teachers and public schools, that's what we tend to fiddle with instead of serious attempts to address root causes.
-"There is no conflict in calling for political and social equality while denying that everyone is equal in ability."
-We tend to think of diplomas of having value in and of themselves rather than as a symbol of learning. As deBoer puts it so well, "Diplomas have themselves been confused with the educational benefits that they are supposed to signal."
-Degrees are a relative advantage rather than an absolute one-- the more people who have them, the less valuable they are.
-We should consider loosening standards. While abstract mathematics are critical for human development, not everyone has to know them for a productive and happy life.

The author makes no secret of his Marxism, and I think this outlook uniquely equips him to make some astute points about our current society. For example, in the ninth chapter, he remarks that "in contemporary society, we have more ways to be a loser than to be a winner" and he's certainly right. However, I think the last quarter of the book, and particularly the concluding vision of a Marxist utopia, is going to alienate a fair number of otherwise sympathetic readers. I say this as someone who is also pretty far left.

My other big objection is that I didn't see mention of the benefit of this white lie about everyone being equal in intellectual potential: there are so many socioeconomic and other barriers to success that could be addressed first, and acknowledging that people just aren't equal in this space could make it really easy to justify not taking action at all.

I'm rating this book 4 stars because, while I didn't agree with everything in it, I really enjoyed engaging with the ideas, and I left with a long list of other books and other resources to read. I hope that that others don't write the book off simply because of its Marxist leanings and it becomes an integral part of discussions surrounding educational reform.

If you like this book, or like the idea of it, you may also enjoy Paul Tough's The Years that Matter Most: How College Makes or Breaks Us.

The Cult of Smart is a thought provoking book about education and the system that claims it is doing what is right by students. Fredrik deBoer makes some interesting points about the system and the focus of outcomes in the US education system. As an educator, I find some truth in this book.

This is a very good book in many ways. The problem is that it attempts to be good in too many ways, and thereby loses overall coherence. To see this, consider some of what's covered:

-One way to think about its thesis is that it's taking Rawls' point about how even natural ability isn't grounds for differential results since even that is unearned. deBoer wishes to stage a Marxist intervention in contemporary American cultural politics, according to which the Left starts taking "natural ability" seriously, since the massive role of genetics in determining intelligence is now securely established. He's quick to argue that racial and sex-based genetic differences have no evidece - rather he's interested in how ability differs between individuals. Of course institutional racism and classism is real and depresses certain groups' performances, but even if these evils ended, meritocracy would still be fundamentally unfair because of the unmerited distribution of talent.

-There's some needed conceptual criticism about how relative and absolute standards being mixed willy nilly in talk of education. After all, if everyone improved, there would be no relative improvement. And if there's social mobility, some people will have to lose for some people to gain. Clearly there's no easy educational route to equality.

-Along the way, there's an insightful takedown of charter school advocacy (they supposedly game the metrics of success by kicking out low performaing students and closing down low performing charter schools). He also makes the interesting point that perhaps the reason that so many people harp about school reform has more to do with how it's easily controllable, rather than because schools actually much of an effect.

-There's a wealth of data and studies including about how once natural ability is held constant where a person goes to school matters very little, about how coaching matters very little for standarized testing, etc.

-There's some ideas from political philosophy, such as positive vs. negative freedom, and well as Rawls' veil of ignorance.

-The second-last chapter deals with "realistic reforms" (universal childcare and afterschool care, lowering legal dropout age to 12, eliminating charter schools, loosening standards so more people can graduate). The thrust of the argument is that we need to stop considering education a comphrehensive indicator of a person's value. Instead, realizing that school isn't for everyone and that different people have different needs and abilities, you make it work for people as they are, instead of hoping to radically transform each person in a mould that assumes the value of college.

-The last chapter is very unmoored from the rest of the book, where he basically argues for the platform of Barnie Sanders (as a step towards a more Marxist social arrangement). The point I think if that once you stop thinking of the value of a person as tied to how well they do to in the education system, you can value them as they are in all their pluralistic particularities. So healthcare, money, etc., should be guarenteed to them just because they are, rather than because they went to Harvard. Fair enough, but did we need the whole book and all the talk of genetics for this? Clearly enough people can endorse much of this chapter without having to have worked through the rest of it.

And that's the problem - the book is a great read, he's clearly a thoughtful and careful writer, I'm largely in agreement with much of what he says. It's also counter-intuitive enough to not be boring. But by the end, there are just so many threads that it seems a little muddled. Given that what he argues for in the end is the Rawlsian merit position and the Marxist political position, and given that people easily argue for both of those without any of the genetics/education reform talk, why combine these things? It just seems like a strange combination in a single text to me.

Apart from this, I also did have concerns about timeliness. Given the deeply entrenched inequalities in race, class, global distribution, etc., so often legitimated by notions of natural difference, simply saying you want to reclaim a notion like "natural ability" for the left strikes me as deeply insufficient. So while the philosophical argument about the perniciousness about meritocracy is good and important, I don't think enough attention was given to how notions like "natural ability" can be wrested from the far-right, or even kept securely non-racist.

Is every child in America receiving the same quality education? Are there some advantages that certain kids have over others? The author really delves into the flaws in our current system. As someone that works in a school, I found that he got a lot of these facts accurate. Whether you agree or disagree with the author on how to improve the current educational system, we can all agree that changes need to be made. This is a book that anyone with children in school or who works in education should read.

As an educator, I try to read as much as I can about education reform. We know the truth, but no one adapts or wants to change. This was absolutely fascinating. I bought a paper copy for my school.