"We are, generally, perfectly willing to accept that different human beings have profoundly different strengths and abilities."
Most people don't like to think and they especially don't like to think about uncomfortable things. Their default assumption is it's all fair and all due to hard work - that's the only difference between you and Taylor Swift or Sam Altman or Patrick Mahomes - they just worked harder.
What's funny is noone believes this at the individual level. Imagine if you stopped random people on the street and asked them, "Do you think if you dedicated your life to studying math for the next 10 years you could do win a Nobel Prize?" They would look at you like you were insane. Same for "If you trained throwing a football everyday could you play in the NFL?" or "If you practiced piano everyday could you be a concert pianist?'
I'm not sure about that because for this discussion we would be adding the very highest level of support. The finest coaches and tutors and professors and facilities and your parents were all in.
I think if you asked people if they had Tiger Wood's dad or Gronk's dad and they had a ball or club in their hand as soon as their arms cleared the birth canal - could it happen? A lot of people would say yes.
I could be wrong, but I don't think many people are that delusional. Anyone who has ever played sports has gone against someone who just had an insane amount of ability, and recognized that you could train your whole life and never do what they do. I think sports are especially good at humbling you, which is one reason I think it's very healthy and beneficial for kids to play sports.
Twin studies (e.g., De Moor et al., 2007; Tucker & Collins, 2012) show genetic influence on general traits like height or aerobic capacity, but skill proficiency (e.g., dribbling, ball control, tactical awareness) is far more dependent on practice environment. Even in areas like sprinting, where muscle fiber composition plays a role, training load and early exposure explain much of the variation between elite and non-elite performers.
A 2024 study with elite German athletes emphasizes that high performance stems from a mix—cognitive function, nutritional status, physical dynamics, training conditions, and social support—rather than any single genetic or physiological trait. See: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-024-76977-8.
Genetics may set limits or predispositions (eg I hate sports and have always had zero interest in putting any effort towards them) but environment, training, nutrition, psychology, and support networks play dominant roles in actual performance development.
In terms of the German study it says they were squad athletes which in America would mean on the team but not on the roster. So, in theory, they participated on the olympic trials but didn't make the team.
So yes, being the 2nd best gymnast in Germany vs. being 6th best and not making the team is down to coaching, nutrition, etc.
Right. Being designated a squad athlete means you’ve been officially recognized by the national federation as belonging to the elite pool for your sport. As you noted one can be a squad athlete without ever making the final Olympic roster. It’s about being in the pipeline of high-performance athletes.
In the US context, “on the squad but not on the roster” implies a kind of second-string status where you train with the team but don’t compete officially.
In the German context, “squad athlete” is more structural and bureaucratic: it’s about being formally enrolled in the national high-performance development system, not just whether you made a single competition’s team.
So, a German gymnast in the Bundeskader may have competed at Worlds or Europeans, or may have been one of the “next in line” but either way, their national federation has identified them as elite.
You’re right that finishing 2nd vs. 6th at high levels is a significant difference. It can mean making an Olympic team or not; getting a gold medal or not even being on the podium. But the German study’s choice of “squad athlete” also signals something broader: everyone in their sample had already crossed the threshold into elite status, with structured institutional backing.
Ask the average sports fan (which is to say a large chunk of the male population) whether they could play in the NBA or NFL. Or whether they could win a race with Usain Bolt. For some endeavors, it's just obvious that elite-tier competitors have won the genetic lottery.
As a teacher (and previously lecturer) I'm strongly inclined to agree with you, though I do think framing the argument as "Education doesn't work" is a little confusing and probably leads some people (who, in fairness, aren't reading carefully) to think you're talking about absolute gains rather than relative gains.
Also a teacher, and I had the same thought. Education absolutely DOES work: my AP Government students will end the year knowing far more about American government than they did the previous August.
However, education does not work for some of the other purposes that politicians and society in general have attempted to demand of it
Yeah, you're not wrong. But I have students fairly frequently all the time and say "I'm in a Geography class in college and it's so easy because of what we did in APHG!" and so some of it presumably stays
Some of it definitely stays. I took 4 semesters of French in college and then did nothing with it. Now 25+ years later I’m “relearning” it for fun and I was shocked at how much came flooding back once I started using and practicing it again.
If you had tested me I would not have done well but as I work to exercise it the French is coming back quickly.
Part of the issue is that it varies - you're in the top 20% having completed college in 4 years That doesn't mean things stick like that for someone in the bottom 20%.
Oh, my, yes: "the most reasonable conclusion to draw from Hacker’s work is that many students . . . do not possess the underlying ability necessary to succeed at that type and level of math." I am a whizbang with words, 98%+ on all written tests, but after the first two weeks of university calculus, I had to raise my hand in class for the first time . . . to ask for directions to the Humanities department to change my major.
So funny that you would mention that. I did in fact have a college calculus instructor who spoke English but was very difficult to understand. This was one class where I really struggled, and only kept up by watching his work on the chalkboard.
This is what I pay you for, Freddie, thank you for being so clear-headed about this topic.
I've been teaching for 16 years now and it boggles my mind that the band teacher can literally get on stage and say "We have the beginner, intermediate, and advanced band for you" and of course the baseball team can be divided into Varsity and JV, but I am not allowed to say that some kids are not smart enough to handle my AP classes because this means I don't BELIEVE IN THEM or am supporting TRACKING (always said in the tones people reserve for the words 'eugenics' or 'segregation').
I teach an Honors course that is basically pre-AP, and what I wouldn't give for some reasonable gatekeeping. I don't buy the argument that gatekeeping isn't "equitable"; currently what happens is that the wealthy, mostly white students at my school self-segregate into Honors so they can avoid everyone else, and I end up with classes with such a huge range of ability that I can't enforce true Honors standards without getting angry emails from parents who think I'm "too hard." No, your 10th grader is reading at a sixth grade level and can't use context clues to determine what "affirm" means in the question "does [text] affirm or challenge [idea]?" They would be happier in an on-level class. I would be happy to have them in my on-level class. My Honors curriculum is not the problem here.
If my school/district would impose some kind of gatekeeping, 1) the classes would probably be more racially and socioeconomically diverse anyway, and 2) the "Honors" label might actually mean something. But no, we can't just admit that not everyone is suited to advanced coursework. Or even just not ready YET. We have to let in everyone who expresses an interest.
(An admin at my school recently told a colleague that "everyone should be doing AP," which is an absolutely wild statement I still can't wrap my head around. Why on earth would that be true? What do you think AP is?)
Yes I've heard "everyone whould be doing AP" too! It's absurd. High school James K. 100% should not have been in AP Calculus. Nor should I have been on the basketball team, even the JV one. There's nothing remotely offensive about that
The flip side of "everyone should be doing AP" is "nobody should be doing AP". It's fascinating to see the progression from one to the other on political grounds once certain parties finally figure out that not everyone can handle the same level of coursework.
I have read this in all the iterations of this essay and in The Cult of Smart, and I wish it were true: "individual students have an inherent or intrinsic academic potential or propensity, not that group performance differences (racial or gender or whatever) are the result of inherent or intrinsic factors." However, I have never understood the following sentences that attempt to justify that position. But I now see what is actually happening: "I do believe we’ll eventually close those [racial/gender] gaps, precisely because I don’t think they’re the product of innate differences." It's a matter of belief and thinking (hoping) not the result of the research and evidence itself. I suppose it's a matter of believing/hoping that future research/societal development will overturn the current state. May it be so.
In terms of gender gaps 95% or airline pilots are men and 95% of elementary school teachers are women and, in this day and age, there are few barriers for each to enter either field. As far as we can tell there are mainly do to some significant innate preference differences.
I don't think that necessarily follows at all. I think there are massive feedback loops at play here. An extremely small starting difference can snowball as a career track gets male or female coded. Why would a man who otherwise likes working with children want to enter a field which is societally-coded as "for women", and, more practically, where they won't have any male peers. And vice versa.
No, I don't. But I also don't think the split is 95/5 "by nature". I think for most things, boys and girls have largely overlapping distributions where the median is a bit different. That median being different is probably not enough to explain the most skewed professions or behaviors, but they probably are if you account for a strong desire by men and women to conform to whatever the societal expectations of their gender are.
Remember, for a pretty long portion of history, almost all the teachers were men.
It's the gender equality paradox. Disparities in male and female career preferences persist across countries, regardless of culture. In addition, the more "equal" a country is (in terms of international rankings of gender equality), the larger the disparity between men and women in fields like engineering and nursing.
Hence the "Golden Skirt" phenomenon in countries such as Norway, which require 40% female corporate directors as a matter of law, but the number of women sufficiently experienced to be directors is rather small, relative to demand.
The upshot is that a few women basically serve as professional directors for dozens of companies, while charging exorbitant fees for this service, thus allowing the companies they serve to remain compliant.
Correct. Take teaching for example. Men dominated teaching from antiquity until the later 1900s. Then a shift took place. Mass education and mandatory schooling led to a surge in demand for teachers. Women could be hired for significantly lower wages. School boards and governments often explicitly recruited women for cost-saving. Moreover, Women were framed as natural nurturers, suited to guiding young children with patience and moral instruction. This aligned with the “cult of domesticity” which developed around that time and reinforced gender norms.
A couple good history monographs on the structural changes to how teaching was gendered:
The Teacher’s Voice: A Social History of Teaching in 20th-Century America, edited by Richard Altenbaug.
The Feminization of Teaching (in Baden, Germany) by J. Schmude (2019).
If you take just a very typical mixed-race American high school and talk to the small number of white kids whose state test scores would equate to a 70-80 IQ, you would immediately notice they have a profound learning disability. If you do the same thing with the much larger number of black kids whose scores equate to the same IQ range, you immediately notice that a significant number of them don't superficially appear to have the same profound issues. Rather, a significant number of them are just idiots that filled in every bubble as "C." Because they just don't give a fuck. Now what you want to think about that fact is up to you and certainly reasonable people have different explanations for it, but it is just unavoidable that some meaningful part of the explanation of the U.S. racial gap is attitudinal.
I actually think that's the real controversial part of this, at this point, that FdB doesn't get into. How much of socio economic and/or cultural inequities boils down to things like 'child lives with both father and mother, both of whom reinforce the importance of education, and other behaviors like attentiveness and punctuality' that probably also correlate with success vs 'child does not'?
Because if it's a lot, then the tough conclusion may be that there isn't a whole lot a small l liberal society can do about it. Even more difficult for those on the broader political left, would be that it isn't only the boot strap stuff from conservatives that loses explanatory power. So would the idea that racism, as traditionally understood, is playing a material role in all of this, and that any one particular family lifestyle or family structure is just as good as any other. In fact, such choices may indeed be quite consequential for children, not because it's turning excellent academic achievers into poor ones, but because it's handcuffing a disproportionate number who would otherwise have meh but closer to normal performance, and non stellar but broadly acceptable outcomes in life. My suspicion is that this is another one of those things that everyone knows but the ramifications are very tough to swallow.
Late to this but for posterity:This is wrong. Black kids with low iqs are much more functional than white kids with the same iq. Lots of research on this.
So you might think that the black kids are much smarter and were just entering "c" because they didn't care.But reality says you give that really low achieving low functional white kid, and that black kid an iq test, and they will score it the same.
Very important to grasp that there is not some huge group of underachieving black kids who are just goofing around or not learning to the degree they are capable.There might be a couple, but there's not a significant chunk. This is equally true for white kids.Hispanic kids and asian kids. In the vast majority of cases, a low achieving kid is, in fact, not very smart.
I’ve re-read your message several times. And then I re-read it out loud to no one in particular, and it still sounded like you don’t actually think I am wrong. You are agreeing that there is - superficially at least - some obvious difference between low functioning white kids with 70 IQs and not obviously low functioning black kids with 70 IQs. Stating that they will both score the same on an IQ test is just a restatement of the premise. I am unclear on the point you are failing to state with clarity.
ISTM that there are two useful paths forward here:
a. Once we get away from the obsession with closing gaps, ideally we can focus on improving absolute learning and retention and such. It's a perfectly good outcome to get the kids in the slow math track to learn how to do arithmetic with fractions, even though they're not actually ever going to get through a calculus class.
b. Similarly, we can try to get away from the pointless theater stuff that adds stress/busywork to kids. The goal is learning, not hours spent doing homework or whatever. Finding a way to get the same absolute learning with very little homework per day or a shorter school day or something would be a win, since otherwise we're just making kids miserable for no reason.
Perhaps we could also try to fix some of the secondary stuff that's broken in public schools (inappropriately mainstreamed kids shutting down class, inability to expel disruptive kids). Even though that probably won't close the gap.
Yes, while I largely agree with everything FdB writes in the education space, I do often think he overplays the relative-versus-absolute distinction. They are both important. It's a global economic environment. It's simply not true that relative academic performance is the only thing that matters. Investment in the U.S. would look different if 50% of the workforce were illiterate, even if there was no change in relative performance.
I think there's a big "AT THE MARGIN" comment implicit in these discussions, which I think Freddie was clear enough about.
In particular, I think widely available education is part of why we end up seeing kids tend to perform in a way consistent with their natural ability. Any child raised in my house was going to learn to read if they had the ability to learn, school or no school. A child raised in the home of someone illiterate was probably not going to learn to read without school, even if that child was naturally much smarter than my child. Sending every kid to school gives you a chance to catch the smart kids from lousy backgrounds who would otherwise not have had a chance to reach their potential.
It's like the way that intelligence is probably largely genetic in modern societies, *because we've mostly gotten rid of the stuff that suppressed intelligence for everyone.* In a world with widespread malnutrition and disease, where nobody has indoor plumbing or ever sees the inside of a schoolhouse, most variation in intelligence is probably about early environment--probably the people living places with endemic parasites (like the South with hookworm until the early 20th century!) just end up a little dumber than everyone else. But we try to make sure no children are starving, everyone gets their shots[1], everyone goes to school, etc., so that the smart kids from poor backgrounds get to develop their brains.
[1] Except in Florida, where they have measles outbreaks to own the libs.
Yes to all of this, and it is also the reason we see declining economic mobility over time in the developed world among non-immigrants. Where once there were large numbers of talented people trapped in relative poverty by parental poverty, geography or early pregnancy/familial obligation, all of those causes of poverty have significantly declined in advanced economies. Which is great...but it also means those remaining in poverty have more intractable issues.
My guess is that there's a lot of global poverty bad enough that it's depressing IQ scores. I imagine the median kid in Haiti right now is suffering a lot of bad things that will mess up his brain development, for example, and a Haiti with a functional government with safe water and good sewers and enough to eat and schools for everyone would lead to smarter people in the future. But I doubt there are many of those gains left to be found in first world countries.
I think a lot of people end up needing trigonometry or knowing how to work with fractions, particularly in the trades. And I very much believe that the default "higher math" that we expect of high school students should be basic probability and statistics rather than calculus. Having a basic understanding of statistics is much more valuable for almost everyone than learning calculus--if you need that, it's so you can get through multiple additional math classes that you will use. (You're not getting through an engineering or physics degree without mastering calculus, but that's because it's a building block for other things.) And I think it's much more accessible.
Look up the YouTube videos where craftsmen are cutting wood to fit into odd-shaped corners. No math needed. Fractions are probably required, but isn't that grade school math?
As for calc, I don't recall that being taught in my high school except at the AP/honors level. It certainly wasn't the default for most students.
I sense I won't convince you, but in general if you have do design something (even something as elementary as a ramp) on a construction site or home shop (very basic) trig becomes handy. My Father in law and I were building a new trailer gate to replace a busted one, and we busted out pocket calculators before applying the chop saw to the square stock we were going to work with. Especially when working with metal, it's nice, and cheaper, to measure twice and cut once, and usually some geometry plays into that. Reflected angles come up a lot too, though people don't use that phrase for it.
When Freddie does one of his statistics posts it makes me wish I'd done some more stats and some less calculus.
To be fair, there was a decent chance I'd go into a career where I needed the calculus, and couldn't just go back and learn years of it all at once.
But stats are the kind of thing you can use in real life, like every time Freddie takes apart some study. And it's possible to get a kid with interest in something non-academic like sports to want to learn it.
One should have at least some calc to understand stats...Hypothesis tests are much easier to get if you know, at least in a conceptual way, what an integral is. Even taking a weighted average makes more sense if you think about it using calc definitions. I don't know what they teach in AP Stat or other 'calc-free' stat for highschoolers, but I bet they introduce those concepts in some form rough and ready enough that students can use them, because they'd need them.
Maybe I'm just a romantic liberal, but I think if bartenders and garbage men were better versed in both of those things then America would be a much better place. If the goal is some kind of egalitarianism, that kind of includes decisionmaking egalitarianism, which means that one must start caring more about how the garbageman views international relations and also research funding. The half of the 'founding fathers comments on education' that Freddie didn't recite in his article was their belief that if a society is going to govern through broad franchise, the people doing the voting better be able to make good choices, something they connected to mass education and increased public knowledge. I still find that argument compelling...
Do you know who Yukio Mishima is? Off the top of your head, without consulting Google?
Or how about Po Chu-I?
How about partial differential equations?
Or maybe normalizing database tables?
The trend of the day is a) specialization followed by b) delegation, just because the amount of knowledge available to scholars has grown by orders of magnitude, even compared to the last century.
Take something like global warming: who exactly is our hypothetical bartender to trust? On one hand, you have a set of PhDs who insist that a warming planet is an existential threat, while another set of PhDs dispute that. It's naive to believe that high school calc will allow laymen to referee the game of warring experts.
Yep I know those things. I have a PhD, though, and am not a bartender.
I think if a bartender knew about those things too the world would be a better place. And Unfortunately for you, and your comments about naivete, the hypothetical bartender _is_ referreing the game of warring experts. In a discussion of climate would I rather they know that carbon dioxide is opaque to infrared light, a fun fact from multiple different highschool classes I've had? Yep. Pretty simple. It would be better.
Like what's your model instead? Bartenders can't vote?
If you understand partial diff eq and read Yukio Mishima, then you're in a tiny minority (his Noh plays, or his modern novels?). How about the history of the Ottoman Empire as it relates to the current distribution of ethnic minorities in Iran? That could be kind of important for negotiating with the Iranians in the current day. My point is that "experts" exist for a reason, namely that the sum total of knowledge is far too great for any single individual to absorb, and real familiarity with a subject these days requires specialization. You may feel that calc should be a required subject in high school. What do you say to those individuals whose focus is on literature or history, who would argue that familiarity with Talleyrand or Kingsley Amis is essential?
As for your carbon dioxide example, give me a break. The first lesson is that the real world is not the laboratory. The question isn't whether carbon dioxide is opaque--the question is what carbon dioxide does in the real world, where ocean absorption, sulfides, etc. are factors. I don't know anybody who would argue that a mere high school diploma is sufficient to work as a climate scientist. That's obviously ridiculous on its face.
Our hypothetical bartender, confronted with the question of global warming, has to do what everyone else does. Who should you trust in the debate over Russia's shift in diplomatic relations with Azerbaijan? What effect will tariffs have on the US economy? Laymen need to devise some unscientific metric for determining which batch of dueling experts they find more credible.
That doesn't mean they don't get to vote, however. I would say that the real lesson here is that we are all uninformed voters, while the myth of the informed voter is just a myth. If you'd like to prove me wrong, feel free to explain Putin's sudden shift in relations with Armenia and Azerbaijan.
a. In America, we are still focused on judging schools on their absolute test scores, this leaves us stuck on the "closing gaps" debate even if many people are ready to move on. In contrast, England has what they call a Progress 8 score, schools are judged on the progress students make over time rather than on absolute levels.
b. A very American approach to rigor. In most countries students get most of their grades from external exams and teaching is designed to help students get the highest possible grades in those exams. Very little of this busywork and hoop jumping that American kids are subjected to, the main reason American students can never seem to compete with many of their foreign counterparts.
ISTR that international tests end up making the US look pretty good when you account for race. That is, American black, white, asian and hispanic kids do well compared to international black, white, asian, and hispanic kids, but if you compare American kids generically to, say, Japanese or Finish kids, they don't do as well.
American students are quite capable so the difference might not come out in something like PISA or TIMMS. However, a third of British students pass the equivalent of 6 AP courses at the end of high school. When it comes to actual curriculum, American students are not getting through the work. If you have actually seen the different systems close up, it is obvious that American students face an inflated workload relative to academic outcomes.
Excellent piece Freddie. One thing, it would seem that the model used back in the 1960's when I was in school was the old "tracking" model. The really "smart" kids went on the to the advanced placement college track, the middling smart kids went to the community college track, and the rest just muddled through with a diploma and vo-tech school or at least shop class along the way.
The problem with that has ever been political. Parents and their votes.
When my mother went to college - a state university, did it admit everyone perhaps? - because while I do not think she ever took a scholastic aptitude test, I judge she would score 1000 or less* partly due to her mind being an iron chest that will admit no math or science whatsoever - anyway, she left after her junior year to get married as many or most girls did at that school.
In fact, that was a sort of cutoff in her mind going in. In the sorority house, it was “sad” to be left on the shelf, attending college in your senior year.
Whether this led to choosing the best possible husband at a tender age is doubtful as family history turned out, but I’m not sure a more sober choice was in the cards. Anyway, I have to be gene-selfishly good with it.
And then little more than a year later, she was a mother, which was all she had wanted to be in the first place.
It is curious to look back and observe that for one-half the population, the meritocratic race you decry - did not exist within living memory.
That’s one thing we could make happen again, for the 95% …
Smart? Try pretty! That’s a cool thing to be!
When I was a kid I enjoyed watching the Miss America pageant. She never mentioned then that she had competed for the Miss _______ title in her state. She had to borrow a swimsuit for it; middle class people didn’t swim much when she was growing up. Fear of polio.
*If the test could be confined to her beloved subjects, history, especially American history, and the decorative arts, especially American furniture - she would blow us all away; yes, she’s a member of the DAR and that was quite a bit of work, that’s her achievement test. Later on she finished her senior coursework by correspondence course; she retrospectively had begun to feel bad her parents had paid for her to attend college and no degree. Not for any other more practical reason. She loved her college and its traditions and football team and wanted to be a graduate of it.
It does seem to me, having grown up with a mother of that same vintage, and being a product of the American public school system in the 1960's and '70's, that before the great education freak-out of the 1980's there were multiple paths to achieving a reasonably successful life. Academics was just one path. Our high school required everybody to take math for 3 years to graduate, but algebra/geometry/trig was just one way to do it. There was a path called "business math" that taught things like how to make change, how to estimate the amount of paint you would need to cover rooms of various dimensions, basic small business bookkeeping, and double-entry accounting. No abstract concepts--everything tied to practical day to day problems. The great separation of the sheep and the goats happened at the end of 7th grade based on an assessment test that determined whether you were placed in algebra in 8th grade or general math. I don't remember anybody being particularly alarmed if they didn't get into 8th grade algebra--because you would still have some pretty useful math skills if you took the practical track in high school.
In 1983, "A Nation at Risk" was published and that started the migration to a very narrow set of metrics for measuring educational success and beating up on schools for not being able to magically transform a kid with an IQ of 95 to a scholar.
Being the cynical product of that era, I have always suspected that the whole thing was a deliberate strategy to destroy the American tradition of universal free public education. They played the long game and it's paying off.
The 80s were weird in that suddenly all parents wanted their kids to go to law school for some reason. I had 2 girl cousins who did so and never that I’m aware of practiced their profession a single day.
ETA: I was a true black sheep and disappeared from my family’s life for awhile. Later on, Mother let slip that my father had lied to their friends and told them I was off in law school for those years lol.
I come from silly people and no mistake, but they are super-conventional and unimaginative and so that lie tells you something about the absurd aspirations of the period.
Freddie, I think you are missing a couple of things here. As a basic premise, there is a huge body of “knowledge, learning, skill set acquisition” that can be taught in school and that can be learned by most people. Practically everyone, for example, can tie their shoes and learn basic hygiene. Virtually everyone can learn to read and write and perform math through long division, fractions and even basic geometry. Ditto the basic rules of citizenship, our history, how generally constitutional democracy functions, balancing a checkbook, basic household skills, etc, all of which can and should be taught in school.
There are measurable performance levels that most students, properly instructed and motivated, can achieve and these levels are essential to achieving basic functionality in life. The question is: are our schools teaching them?
You are generally correct that higher level performance is determined by ability, that not all have that ability (hence the word ‘higher’), and that genes are a huge driver of that ability, just as they are of many other characteristics. Adjusting for individual variability (motivation, health, environmental factors), higher achievers are better able to overcome bad teaching. Everyone else, not so much.
The crime is that educators don’t educate. They have been co-opted politically and are no longer a profession. Let’s have that conversation.
"Virtually everyone can learn to read and write and perform math through long division, fractions and even basic geometry."
What you need to grasp is many folks on the left of the bell curve have poor long term retention. With tremendous effort you can maybe teach them fractions such that they get a 90% on the exam. If you ask them in 6 months what's 5/8 + 2/16 they aren't going to be able to figure it out because they simply don't remember.
You seem convinced this was never taught. In many cases it was taught the kid passed the test but it was all soon forgotten.
I agree with just about every individual point, but I think sometimes you make a more sweeping characterization of the prevailing point of view than is warranted, and it risks strawmanning it. I think you are right and this argument is valuable. And I 100% agree with the "cult of smart" issue of treating intelligence as a character virtue. AND I agree that the principle of equity is often used as a bludgeon by elites to justify their own positions.
But I (a) don't think that is entirely dominant and (b) there are many forms of equity which are themselves forms of absolute vs. relative learning (e.g., finding ways to get the super smart but unmotivated kid from a family that doesn't value education to engage). IQ has risen pretty substantially across the population, the overall quality of human capital is pretty high on a historical basis (though I worry about it sometimes in the current couple of decades), and a lot of the thrust around educational innovation and spending is done with that in mind.
Thanks for the shout-out to "The Genetic Lottery."
I can add one more data point related to this argument: Our new analysis of the association between years of schooling and an educational attainment polygenic score (EA-PGS) in East vs. West Germany, before vs. after reunification. We found (contrary to my expectations) that the EA-PGS was just as strongly associated with educational attainment in East Germans as in West Germans before German reunification. The strongest genetic association was actually seen in East Germans in the aftermath of reunification. In other words, not even socialism can make genetically-associated individual differences in schooling go away (and huge social upheavals might make individual differences even more influential). Our paper concluded:
"Our study provides evidence that individual genetic predictors, previously developed in Western democratic countries, were associated with educational attainment even in the state-socialist educational system of East Germany. This tempers expectations that genetically influenced differences in educational performance will be readily eliminated by incremental changes in educational policy within free-market democracies. Tackling the downstream individual and intergenerational inequities in income, health, and life opportunities that arise from differences in educational attainment thus remains of utmost importance to foster social justice and coherence in meritocratic-oriented societies."
A Russian acquaintance* of mine met her future husband as a teenager at summer camp in the former USSR. “We went for walks in the evening,” she remembered happily. That summer camp was math camp.
Long before the craze for such things in the US (it was easy for me to keep abreast because I lived near the schools so sometimes the bandit signs were practically in my yard (GrrrlsCoding Camp, Math Camp, Science Camp, Magic Camp, etc. - the nadir in my view, that truly made my heart sink, was Handwriting Camp)).
There absolutely was a test for that math camp.
*Her father was a scientist of some sort. I had several times asked her - out of politeness, but also just an effort at conversation when somebody doesn’t yet have much fluency in your language, you fall back on such things to keep conversation going - where in Russia she came from. It took me a while to grasp that she was trying to tell me it was a place without a name. Finally one evening, on one of our walks - maybe I’m a little Rus because I like an evening walk too, it was one of the things that made her a little bit sad about America, which, in general, she appreciated very much, that there was no street life, no promenading in the evening, in our SFH neighborhood - she took a “chalk rock” and sketched a map of the USSR and roughly placed on it where she had grown up. No name; a town around a chemical factory. A few moments more of stilted explanation and I was again on the wrong track. A pharmaceutical factory?
I think the best argument for a progressive taxes on people like me is that, through no effort or merit on my part, I was born with skills others will never have.
It's a great essay and I especially like the last section. Universal education is one of the greatest political victories of the left, and we should be proud that every student is able to attend school, learn to read, and explore their talents. This achievement is not lessened by the fact that some students have more innate abilities than others.
You bring a lot of clarity to this issue and I share your hope that we can achieve economic equality through economic redistribution, and have school focus on enriching students and improving absolute performance at all points in the distribution of student performance, rather than trying to have education produce economic equality.
I will keep subscribing to read your education posts alone! I just read through this entire essay instead of working on the syllabus that I am supposed to be finishing, despite having read your book and being familiar with the arguments. Every time I read these arguments I am more convinced that educational discourse in the USA is subject to mass delusion.
My kids go to a public high school that is very mixed racially and socioeconomically (over 50% Latino and reduced / free lunch qualified, many ESL students, but also students from wealthy families like our kids). A common local narrative is that you have to be insane to send your kids to this failing school district if you have other options. We live next to literally some of the wealthiest communities in the world, and people are convinced that those towns have "great" schools and we have terrible schools. It is painfully obvious to anyone that the main difference is the demographics of the students. You have to be in the top 5%+ of income to even live in those towns. Our oldest kid has about the same SAT score, GPA, difficulty of coursework, etc as his parents had in high school. Go figure.
I wonder where special education fits in to these arguments. Districts around the country are being crushed by increasing special ed costs, particularly out of district placements and para-educators that can easily cost several times more than it costs to educate the average non-sped student. The relevant laws call for "free appropriate public education" in the "least restrictive environment", along with the need for an individualized education plan (IEP). Are these expenditures yielding educational gains for these students? Given the argument FdB has marshaled here, I have to doubt that they broadly are. I'm sure there are specific interventions for specific conditions like dyslexia that are exceptions. But overall? Especially for severely disabled students, what families likely need more than expensive educational interventions is someone to help take care of their child in a safe setting during the day.
"Given that educational outcomes are largely immutable and heavily influenced by accidents of birth and circumstance, it’s immoral for those outcomes to be used in social sorting processes that can result in a lack of opportunity and poverty"
This is where you lose me. We award opportunity to those who can best perform, which in many contexts is correlated with this immutable thing we call intelligence. This is like arguing it's immoral fill a professional team with the best athletes because their capabilities are often accidental and immutable. If we want young people to work to better themselves and achieve excellence in one form or another, I can't think of a worse own-goal than dulling or removing the rewards for achievement.
1) The counterweight against "the lowest amount" is that there is always the alternative of earning 0$. If you cannot afford both rent and food, at least it's better to be able to afford one.
If our hypothetical brain surgeon feels that cheaper lettuce (or lawn care, or nanny services) justifies importing illegal foreign labor that depresses the wages for native born citizens, what are the associated follow-on effects?
2) No one really has a problem with (real) meritocracy. What everyone objects to is the distortion of that system. David Brooks wrote that the top 20% of the economy is busily engaged in attempting to secure their economic advantage by pulling up the drawbridge for everyone else. Not only does that obviously impact class mobility, but it seems to me that it also involves attempts to blunt the political influence of blue-collar workers. Surely that's part of the reason why Trump has been met with such hysteria among the ranks of white collar professionals.
As an appreciator of the art of editing, I'd put out there that I think this is the best version of this long-form piece you've put together. Some combination of making explicit things that were implicit and reorganizing the piece both made it flow better and made the shape of your argument much clearer much more quickly.
"We are, generally, perfectly willing to accept that different human beings have profoundly different strengths and abilities."
Most people don't like to think and they especially don't like to think about uncomfortable things. Their default assumption is it's all fair and all due to hard work - that's the only difference between you and Taylor Swift or Sam Altman or Patrick Mahomes - they just worked harder.
What's funny is noone believes this at the individual level. Imagine if you stopped random people on the street and asked them, "Do you think if you dedicated your life to studying math for the next 10 years you could do win a Nobel Prize?" They would look at you like you were insane. Same for "If you trained throwing a football everyday could you play in the NFL?" or "If you practiced piano everyday could you be a concert pianist?'
I'm not sure about that because for this discussion we would be adding the very highest level of support. The finest coaches and tutors and professors and facilities and your parents were all in.
I think if you asked people if they had Tiger Wood's dad or Gronk's dad and they had a ball or club in their hand as soon as their arms cleared the birth canal - could it happen? A lot of people would say yes.
I could be wrong, but I don't think many people are that delusional. Anyone who has ever played sports has gone against someone who just had an insane amount of ability, and recognized that you could train your whole life and never do what they do. I think sports are especially good at humbling you, which is one reason I think it's very healthy and beneficial for kids to play sports.
Twin studies (e.g., De Moor et al., 2007; Tucker & Collins, 2012) show genetic influence on general traits like height or aerobic capacity, but skill proficiency (e.g., dribbling, ball control, tactical awareness) is far more dependent on practice environment. Even in areas like sprinting, where muscle fiber composition plays a role, training load and early exposure explain much of the variation between elite and non-elite performers.
A 2024 study with elite German athletes emphasizes that high performance stems from a mix—cognitive function, nutritional status, physical dynamics, training conditions, and social support—rather than any single genetic or physiological trait. See: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-024-76977-8.
Genetics may set limits or predispositions (eg I hate sports and have always had zero interest in putting any effort towards them) but environment, training, nutrition, psychology, and support networks play dominant roles in actual performance development.
In terms of the German study it says they were squad athletes which in America would mean on the team but not on the roster. So, in theory, they participated on the olympic trials but didn't make the team.
So yes, being the 2nd best gymnast in Germany vs. being 6th best and not making the team is down to coaching, nutrition, etc.
Right. Being designated a squad athlete means you’ve been officially recognized by the national federation as belonging to the elite pool for your sport. As you noted one can be a squad athlete without ever making the final Olympic roster. It’s about being in the pipeline of high-performance athletes.
In the US context, “on the squad but not on the roster” implies a kind of second-string status where you train with the team but don’t compete officially.
In the German context, “squad athlete” is more structural and bureaucratic: it’s about being formally enrolled in the national high-performance development system, not just whether you made a single competition’s team.
So, a German gymnast in the Bundeskader may have competed at Worlds or Europeans, or may have been one of the “next in line” but either way, their national federation has identified them as elite.
You’re right that finishing 2nd vs. 6th at high levels is a significant difference. It can mean making an Olympic team or not; getting a gold medal or not even being on the podium. But the German study’s choice of “squad athlete” also signals something broader: everyone in their sample had already crossed the threshold into elite status, with structured institutional backing.
I think it's awfully tough to get into the NBA if you're only 5'5", or to play in the NFL if you only weigh 120 lbs.
That's certainly true - but for people who don't want to confront unpleasant realities it's easier to pretend life is fair.
Ask the average sports fan (which is to say a large chunk of the male population) whether they could play in the NBA or NFL. Or whether they could win a race with Usain Bolt. For some endeavors, it's just obvious that elite-tier competitors have won the genetic lottery.
As a teacher (and previously lecturer) I'm strongly inclined to agree with you, though I do think framing the argument as "Education doesn't work" is a little confusing and probably leads some people (who, in fairness, aren't reading carefully) to think you're talking about absolute gains rather than relative gains.
Also a teacher, and I had the same thought. Education absolutely DOES work: my AP Government students will end the year knowing far more about American government than they did the previous August.
However, education does not work for some of the other purposes that politicians and society in general have attempted to demand of it
"my AP Government students will end the year knowing far more about American government than they did the previous August."
What Freddie might mention is very low persistence of knowledge. If you test those students again in 5 years almost all of it will be gone.
Yeah, you're not wrong. But I have students fairly frequently all the time and say "I'm in a Geography class in college and it's so easy because of what we did in APHG!" and so some of it presumably stays
Some of it definitely stays. I took 4 semesters of French in college and then did nothing with it. Now 25+ years later I’m “relearning” it for fun and I was shocked at how much came flooding back once I started using and practicing it again.
If you had tested me I would not have done well but as I work to exercise it the French is coming back quickly.
Part of the issue is that it varies - you're in the top 20% having completed college in 4 years That doesn't mean things stick like that for someone in the bottom 20%.
Oh, my, yes: "the most reasonable conclusion to draw from Hacker’s work is that many students . . . do not possess the underlying ability necessary to succeed at that type and level of math." I am a whizbang with words, 98%+ on all written tests, but after the first two weeks of university calculus, I had to raise my hand in class for the first time . . . to ask for directions to the Humanities department to change my major.
Agreed. Composition and writing in general always came easy for me, but anything above basic college algebra might as well be in Braille to me.
As designed. Calculus is used to weed students out of the hard sciences. Like Organic Chem does in medical majors...
The plan worked beautifully. Although I hate to think having an instructor who did not speak English was part of the plan.
So funny that you would mention that. I did in fact have a college calculus instructor who spoke English but was very difficult to understand. This was one class where I really struggled, and only kept up by watching his work on the chalkboard.
This is what I pay you for, Freddie, thank you for being so clear-headed about this topic.
I've been teaching for 16 years now and it boggles my mind that the band teacher can literally get on stage and say "We have the beginner, intermediate, and advanced band for you" and of course the baseball team can be divided into Varsity and JV, but I am not allowed to say that some kids are not smart enough to handle my AP classes because this means I don't BELIEVE IN THEM or am supporting TRACKING (always said in the tones people reserve for the words 'eugenics' or 'segregation').
I teach an Honors course that is basically pre-AP, and what I wouldn't give for some reasonable gatekeeping. I don't buy the argument that gatekeeping isn't "equitable"; currently what happens is that the wealthy, mostly white students at my school self-segregate into Honors so they can avoid everyone else, and I end up with classes with such a huge range of ability that I can't enforce true Honors standards without getting angry emails from parents who think I'm "too hard." No, your 10th grader is reading at a sixth grade level and can't use context clues to determine what "affirm" means in the question "does [text] affirm or challenge [idea]?" They would be happier in an on-level class. I would be happy to have them in my on-level class. My Honors curriculum is not the problem here.
If my school/district would impose some kind of gatekeeping, 1) the classes would probably be more racially and socioeconomically diverse anyway, and 2) the "Honors" label might actually mean something. But no, we can't just admit that not everyone is suited to advanced coursework. Or even just not ready YET. We have to let in everyone who expresses an interest.
(An admin at my school recently told a colleague that "everyone should be doing AP," which is an absolutely wild statement I still can't wrap my head around. Why on earth would that be true? What do you think AP is?)
Yes I've heard "everyone whould be doing AP" too! It's absurd. High school James K. 100% should not have been in AP Calculus. Nor should I have been on the basketball team, even the JV one. There's nothing remotely offensive about that
The flip side of "everyone should be doing AP" is "nobody should be doing AP". It's fascinating to see the progression from one to the other on political grounds once certain parties finally figure out that not everyone can handle the same level of coursework.
Everyone should do AP because it improves our measurement on Newsweek high school rankings.
Heh, I actually talk about this exact thing when I teach my students about Goodhart's law.
I have read this in all the iterations of this essay and in The Cult of Smart, and I wish it were true: "individual students have an inherent or intrinsic academic potential or propensity, not that group performance differences (racial or gender or whatever) are the result of inherent or intrinsic factors." However, I have never understood the following sentences that attempt to justify that position. But I now see what is actually happening: "I do believe we’ll eventually close those [racial/gender] gaps, precisely because I don’t think they’re the product of innate differences." It's a matter of belief and thinking (hoping) not the result of the research and evidence itself. I suppose it's a matter of believing/hoping that future research/societal development will overturn the current state. May it be so.
In terms of gender gaps 95% or airline pilots are men and 95% of elementary school teachers are women and, in this day and age, there are few barriers for each to enter either field. As far as we can tell there are mainly do to some significant innate preference differences.
I don't think that necessarily follows at all. I think there are massive feedback loops at play here. An extremely small starting difference can snowball as a career track gets male or female coded. Why would a man who otherwise likes working with children want to enter a field which is societally-coded as "for women", and, more practically, where they won't have any male peers. And vice versa.
Do you think little boys and little girls equally dream of being airline pilots or kindergarten teachers?
I go back to the joke about the very progressive parent giving her son a doll and him kinking the leg and running around pretending it was a gun.
No, I don't. But I also don't think the split is 95/5 "by nature". I think for most things, boys and girls have largely overlapping distributions where the median is a bit different. That median being different is probably not enough to explain the most skewed professions or behaviors, but they probably are if you account for a strong desire by men and women to conform to whatever the societal expectations of their gender are.
Remember, for a pretty long portion of history, almost all the teachers were men.
Ideally what do you think the distributions would be? 55:45?
“almost all the teachers were men”
And their charges were not little girls. Or indeed most children.
It's the gender equality paradox. Disparities in male and female career preferences persist across countries, regardless of culture. In addition, the more "equal" a country is (in terms of international rankings of gender equality), the larger the disparity between men and women in fields like engineering and nursing.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TjsRzQFehyE
Hence the "Golden Skirt" phenomenon in countries such as Norway, which require 40% female corporate directors as a matter of law, but the number of women sufficiently experienced to be directors is rather small, relative to demand.
The upshot is that a few women basically serve as professional directors for dozens of companies, while charging exorbitant fees for this service, thus allowing the companies they serve to remain compliant.
More like ‘Black Gold’ Skirt. How much we owe purely to the stuff in the ground.
Correct. Take teaching for example. Men dominated teaching from antiquity until the later 1900s. Then a shift took place. Mass education and mandatory schooling led to a surge in demand for teachers. Women could be hired for significantly lower wages. School boards and governments often explicitly recruited women for cost-saving. Moreover, Women were framed as natural nurturers, suited to guiding young children with patience and moral instruction. This aligned with the “cult of domesticity” which developed around that time and reinforced gender norms.
A couple good history monographs on the structural changes to how teaching was gendered:
The Teacher’s Voice: A Social History of Teaching in 20th-Century America, edited by Richard Altenbaug.
The Feminization of Teaching (in Baden, Germany) by J. Schmude (2019).
If you take just a very typical mixed-race American high school and talk to the small number of white kids whose state test scores would equate to a 70-80 IQ, you would immediately notice they have a profound learning disability. If you do the same thing with the much larger number of black kids whose scores equate to the same IQ range, you immediately notice that a significant number of them don't superficially appear to have the same profound issues. Rather, a significant number of them are just idiots that filled in every bubble as "C." Because they just don't give a fuck. Now what you want to think about that fact is up to you and certainly reasonable people have different explanations for it, but it is just unavoidable that some meaningful part of the explanation of the U.S. racial gap is attitudinal.
I actually think that's the real controversial part of this, at this point, that FdB doesn't get into. How much of socio economic and/or cultural inequities boils down to things like 'child lives with both father and mother, both of whom reinforce the importance of education, and other behaviors like attentiveness and punctuality' that probably also correlate with success vs 'child does not'?
Because if it's a lot, then the tough conclusion may be that there isn't a whole lot a small l liberal society can do about it. Even more difficult for those on the broader political left, would be that it isn't only the boot strap stuff from conservatives that loses explanatory power. So would the idea that racism, as traditionally understood, is playing a material role in all of this, and that any one particular family lifestyle or family structure is just as good as any other. In fact, such choices may indeed be quite consequential for children, not because it's turning excellent academic achievers into poor ones, but because it's handcuffing a disproportionate number who would otherwise have meh but closer to normal performance, and non stellar but broadly acceptable outcomes in life. My suspicion is that this is another one of those things that everyone knows but the ramifications are very tough to swallow.
Late to this but for posterity:This is wrong. Black kids with low iqs are much more functional than white kids with the same iq. Lots of research on this.
So you might think that the black kids are much smarter and were just entering "c" because they didn't care.But reality says you give that really low achieving low functional white kid, and that black kid an iq test, and they will score it the same.
Very important to grasp that there is not some huge group of underachieving black kids who are just goofing around or not learning to the degree they are capable.There might be a couple, but there's not a significant chunk. This is equally true for white kids.Hispanic kids and asian kids. In the vast majority of cases, a low achieving kid is, in fact, not very smart.
I’ve re-read your message several times. And then I re-read it out loud to no one in particular, and it still sounded like you don’t actually think I am wrong. You are agreeing that there is - superficially at least - some obvious difference between low functioning white kids with 70 IQs and not obviously low functioning black kids with 70 IQs. Stating that they will both score the same on an IQ test is just a restatement of the premise. I am unclear on the point you are failing to state with clarity.
ISTM that there are two useful paths forward here:
a. Once we get away from the obsession with closing gaps, ideally we can focus on improving absolute learning and retention and such. It's a perfectly good outcome to get the kids in the slow math track to learn how to do arithmetic with fractions, even though they're not actually ever going to get through a calculus class.
b. Similarly, we can try to get away from the pointless theater stuff that adds stress/busywork to kids. The goal is learning, not hours spent doing homework or whatever. Finding a way to get the same absolute learning with very little homework per day or a shorter school day or something would be a win, since otherwise we're just making kids miserable for no reason.
Perhaps we could also try to fix some of the secondary stuff that's broken in public schools (inappropriately mainstreamed kids shutting down class, inability to expel disruptive kids). Even though that probably won't close the gap.
Yes, while I largely agree with everything FdB writes in the education space, I do often think he overplays the relative-versus-absolute distinction. They are both important. It's a global economic environment. It's simply not true that relative academic performance is the only thing that matters. Investment in the U.S. would look different if 50% of the workforce were illiterate, even if there was no change in relative performance.
I think there's a big "AT THE MARGIN" comment implicit in these discussions, which I think Freddie was clear enough about.
In particular, I think widely available education is part of why we end up seeing kids tend to perform in a way consistent with their natural ability. Any child raised in my house was going to learn to read if they had the ability to learn, school or no school. A child raised in the home of someone illiterate was probably not going to learn to read without school, even if that child was naturally much smarter than my child. Sending every kid to school gives you a chance to catch the smart kids from lousy backgrounds who would otherwise not have had a chance to reach their potential.
It's like the way that intelligence is probably largely genetic in modern societies, *because we've mostly gotten rid of the stuff that suppressed intelligence for everyone.* In a world with widespread malnutrition and disease, where nobody has indoor plumbing or ever sees the inside of a schoolhouse, most variation in intelligence is probably about early environment--probably the people living places with endemic parasites (like the South with hookworm until the early 20th century!) just end up a little dumber than everyone else. But we try to make sure no children are starving, everyone gets their shots[1], everyone goes to school, etc., so that the smart kids from poor backgrounds get to develop their brains.
[1] Except in Florida, where they have measles outbreaks to own the libs.
Yes to all of this, and it is also the reason we see declining economic mobility over time in the developed world among non-immigrants. Where once there were large numbers of talented people trapped in relative poverty by parental poverty, geography or early pregnancy/familial obligation, all of those causes of poverty have significantly declined in advanced economies. Which is great...but it also means those remaining in poverty have more intractable issues.
My guess is that there's a lot of global poverty bad enough that it's depressing IQ scores. I imagine the median kid in Haiti right now is suffering a lot of bad things that will mess up his brain development, for example, and a Haiti with a functional government with safe water and good sewers and enough to eat and schools for everyone would lead to smarter people in the future. But I doubt there are many of those gains left to be found in first world countries.
Poverty in my city, Detroit, can be quite extreme. I am certain there are still IQ depressing factors active in such neighborhoods.
Once you get past basic literacy, the benefits drop off quickly. How much math or history does a bartender or garbage man really need?
I think a lot of people end up needing trigonometry or knowing how to work with fractions, particularly in the trades. And I very much believe that the default "higher math" that we expect of high school students should be basic probability and statistics rather than calculus. Having a basic understanding of statistics is much more valuable for almost everyone than learning calculus--if you need that, it's so you can get through multiple additional math classes that you will use. (You're not getting through an engineering or physics degree without mastering calculus, but that's because it's a building block for other things.) And I think it's much more accessible.
Look up the YouTube videos where craftsmen are cutting wood to fit into odd-shaped corners. No math needed. Fractions are probably required, but isn't that grade school math?
As for calc, I don't recall that being taught in my high school except at the AP/honors level. It certainly wasn't the default for most students.
I sense I won't convince you, but in general if you have do design something (even something as elementary as a ramp) on a construction site or home shop (very basic) trig becomes handy. My Father in law and I were building a new trailer gate to replace a busted one, and we busted out pocket calculators before applying the chop saw to the square stock we were going to work with. Especially when working with metal, it's nice, and cheaper, to measure twice and cut once, and usually some geometry plays into that. Reflected angles come up a lot too, though people don't use that phrase for it.
If I had to design a ramp, then I would sketch it out. But I majored in physics in college, so I am an overeducated dweeb.
Do most workers or craftsmen bother with that? I am skeptical. In my own personal experience, the answer is no.
When Freddie does one of his statistics posts it makes me wish I'd done some more stats and some less calculus.
To be fair, there was a decent chance I'd go into a career where I needed the calculus, and couldn't just go back and learn years of it all at once.
But stats are the kind of thing you can use in real life, like every time Freddie takes apart some study. And it's possible to get a kid with interest in something non-academic like sports to want to learn it.
One should have at least some calc to understand stats...Hypothesis tests are much easier to get if you know, at least in a conceptual way, what an integral is. Even taking a weighted average makes more sense if you think about it using calc definitions. I don't know what they teach in AP Stat or other 'calc-free' stat for highschoolers, but I bet they introduce those concepts in some form rough and ready enough that students can use them, because they'd need them.
Maybe I'm just a romantic liberal, but I think if bartenders and garbage men were better versed in both of those things then America would be a much better place. If the goal is some kind of egalitarianism, that kind of includes decisionmaking egalitarianism, which means that one must start caring more about how the garbageman views international relations and also research funding. The half of the 'founding fathers comments on education' that Freddie didn't recite in his article was their belief that if a society is going to govern through broad franchise, the people doing the voting better be able to make good choices, something they connected to mass education and increased public knowledge. I still find that argument compelling...
Do you know who Yukio Mishima is? Off the top of your head, without consulting Google?
Or how about Po Chu-I?
How about partial differential equations?
Or maybe normalizing database tables?
The trend of the day is a) specialization followed by b) delegation, just because the amount of knowledge available to scholars has grown by orders of magnitude, even compared to the last century.
Take something like global warming: who exactly is our hypothetical bartender to trust? On one hand, you have a set of PhDs who insist that a warming planet is an existential threat, while another set of PhDs dispute that. It's naive to believe that high school calc will allow laymen to referee the game of warring experts.
Yep I know those things. I have a PhD, though, and am not a bartender.
I think if a bartender knew about those things too the world would be a better place. And Unfortunately for you, and your comments about naivete, the hypothetical bartender _is_ referreing the game of warring experts. In a discussion of climate would I rather they know that carbon dioxide is opaque to infrared light, a fun fact from multiple different highschool classes I've had? Yep. Pretty simple. It would be better.
Like what's your model instead? Bartenders can't vote?
If you understand partial diff eq and read Yukio Mishima, then you're in a tiny minority (his Noh plays, or his modern novels?). How about the history of the Ottoman Empire as it relates to the current distribution of ethnic minorities in Iran? That could be kind of important for negotiating with the Iranians in the current day. My point is that "experts" exist for a reason, namely that the sum total of knowledge is far too great for any single individual to absorb, and real familiarity with a subject these days requires specialization. You may feel that calc should be a required subject in high school. What do you say to those individuals whose focus is on literature or history, who would argue that familiarity with Talleyrand or Kingsley Amis is essential?
As for your carbon dioxide example, give me a break. The first lesson is that the real world is not the laboratory. The question isn't whether carbon dioxide is opaque--the question is what carbon dioxide does in the real world, where ocean absorption, sulfides, etc. are factors. I don't know anybody who would argue that a mere high school diploma is sufficient to work as a climate scientist. That's obviously ridiculous on its face.
Our hypothetical bartender, confronted with the question of global warming, has to do what everyone else does. Who should you trust in the debate over Russia's shift in diplomatic relations with Azerbaijan? What effect will tariffs have on the US economy? Laymen need to devise some unscientific metric for determining which batch of dueling experts they find more credible.
That doesn't mean they don't get to vote, however. I would say that the real lesson here is that we are all uninformed voters, while the myth of the informed voter is just a myth. If you'd like to prove me wrong, feel free to explain Putin's sudden shift in relations with Armenia and Azerbaijan.
a. In America, we are still focused on judging schools on their absolute test scores, this leaves us stuck on the "closing gaps" debate even if many people are ready to move on. In contrast, England has what they call a Progress 8 score, schools are judged on the progress students make over time rather than on absolute levels.
b. A very American approach to rigor. In most countries students get most of their grades from external exams and teaching is designed to help students get the highest possible grades in those exams. Very little of this busywork and hoop jumping that American kids are subjected to, the main reason American students can never seem to compete with many of their foreign counterparts.
ISTR that international tests end up making the US look pretty good when you account for race. That is, American black, white, asian and hispanic kids do well compared to international black, white, asian, and hispanic kids, but if you compare American kids generically to, say, Japanese or Finish kids, they don't do as well.
American students are quite capable so the difference might not come out in something like PISA or TIMMS. However, a third of British students pass the equivalent of 6 AP courses at the end of high school. When it comes to actual curriculum, American students are not getting through the work. If you have actually seen the different systems close up, it is obvious that American students face an inflated workload relative to academic outcomes.
Excellent piece Freddie. One thing, it would seem that the model used back in the 1960's when I was in school was the old "tracking" model. The really "smart" kids went on the to the advanced placement college track, the middling smart kids went to the community college track, and the rest just muddled through with a diploma and vo-tech school or at least shop class along the way.
The problem with that has ever been political. Parents and their votes.
When my mother went to college - a state university, did it admit everyone perhaps? - because while I do not think she ever took a scholastic aptitude test, I judge she would score 1000 or less* partly due to her mind being an iron chest that will admit no math or science whatsoever - anyway, she left after her junior year to get married as many or most girls did at that school.
In fact, that was a sort of cutoff in her mind going in. In the sorority house, it was “sad” to be left on the shelf, attending college in your senior year.
Whether this led to choosing the best possible husband at a tender age is doubtful as family history turned out, but I’m not sure a more sober choice was in the cards. Anyway, I have to be gene-selfishly good with it.
And then little more than a year later, she was a mother, which was all she had wanted to be in the first place.
It is curious to look back and observe that for one-half the population, the meritocratic race you decry - did not exist within living memory.
That’s one thing we could make happen again, for the 95% …
Smart? Try pretty! That’s a cool thing to be!
When I was a kid I enjoyed watching the Miss America pageant. She never mentioned then that she had competed for the Miss _______ title in her state. She had to borrow a swimsuit for it; middle class people didn’t swim much when she was growing up. Fear of polio.
*If the test could be confined to her beloved subjects, history, especially American history, and the decorative arts, especially American furniture - she would blow us all away; yes, she’s a member of the DAR and that was quite a bit of work, that’s her achievement test. Later on she finished her senior coursework by correspondence course; she retrospectively had begun to feel bad her parents had paid for her to attend college and no degree. Not for any other more practical reason. She loved her college and its traditions and football team and wanted to be a graduate of it.
It does seem to me, having grown up with a mother of that same vintage, and being a product of the American public school system in the 1960's and '70's, that before the great education freak-out of the 1980's there were multiple paths to achieving a reasonably successful life. Academics was just one path. Our high school required everybody to take math for 3 years to graduate, but algebra/geometry/trig was just one way to do it. There was a path called "business math" that taught things like how to make change, how to estimate the amount of paint you would need to cover rooms of various dimensions, basic small business bookkeeping, and double-entry accounting. No abstract concepts--everything tied to practical day to day problems. The great separation of the sheep and the goats happened at the end of 7th grade based on an assessment test that determined whether you were placed in algebra in 8th grade or general math. I don't remember anybody being particularly alarmed if they didn't get into 8th grade algebra--because you would still have some pretty useful math skills if you took the practical track in high school.
In 1983, "A Nation at Risk" was published and that started the migration to a very narrow set of metrics for measuring educational success and beating up on schools for not being able to magically transform a kid with an IQ of 95 to a scholar.
Being the cynical product of that era, I have always suspected that the whole thing was a deliberate strategy to destroy the American tradition of universal free public education. They played the long game and it's paying off.
The 80s were weird in that suddenly all parents wanted their kids to go to law school for some reason. I had 2 girl cousins who did so and never that I’m aware of practiced their profession a single day.
ETA: I was a true black sheep and disappeared from my family’s life for awhile. Later on, Mother let slip that my father had lied to their friends and told them I was off in law school for those years lol.
I come from silly people and no mistake, but they are super-conventional and unimaginative and so that lie tells you something about the absurd aspirations of the period.
Freddie, I think you are missing a couple of things here. As a basic premise, there is a huge body of “knowledge, learning, skill set acquisition” that can be taught in school and that can be learned by most people. Practically everyone, for example, can tie their shoes and learn basic hygiene. Virtually everyone can learn to read and write and perform math through long division, fractions and even basic geometry. Ditto the basic rules of citizenship, our history, how generally constitutional democracy functions, balancing a checkbook, basic household skills, etc, all of which can and should be taught in school.
There are measurable performance levels that most students, properly instructed and motivated, can achieve and these levels are essential to achieving basic functionality in life. The question is: are our schools teaching them?
You are generally correct that higher level performance is determined by ability, that not all have that ability (hence the word ‘higher’), and that genes are a huge driver of that ability, just as they are of many other characteristics. Adjusting for individual variability (motivation, health, environmental factors), higher achievers are better able to overcome bad teaching. Everyone else, not so much.
The crime is that educators don’t educate. They have been co-opted politically and are no longer a profession. Let’s have that conversation.
"Virtually everyone can learn to read and write and perform math through long division, fractions and even basic geometry."
What you need to grasp is many folks on the left of the bell curve have poor long term retention. With tremendous effort you can maybe teach them fractions such that they get a 90% on the exam. If you ask them in 6 months what's 5/8 + 2/16 they aren't going to be able to figure it out because they simply don't remember.
You seem convinced this was never taught. In many cases it was taught the kid passed the test but it was all soon forgotten.
I agree with just about every individual point, but I think sometimes you make a more sweeping characterization of the prevailing point of view than is warranted, and it risks strawmanning it. I think you are right and this argument is valuable. And I 100% agree with the "cult of smart" issue of treating intelligence as a character virtue. AND I agree that the principle of equity is often used as a bludgeon by elites to justify their own positions.
But I (a) don't think that is entirely dominant and (b) there are many forms of equity which are themselves forms of absolute vs. relative learning (e.g., finding ways to get the super smart but unmotivated kid from a family that doesn't value education to engage). IQ has risen pretty substantially across the population, the overall quality of human capital is pretty high on a historical basis (though I worry about it sometimes in the current couple of decades), and a lot of the thrust around educational innovation and spending is done with that in mind.
Thanks for the shout-out to "The Genetic Lottery."
I can add one more data point related to this argument: Our new analysis of the association between years of schooling and an educational attainment polygenic score (EA-PGS) in East vs. West Germany, before vs. after reunification. We found (contrary to my expectations) that the EA-PGS was just as strongly associated with educational attainment in East Germans as in West Germans before German reunification. The strongest genetic association was actually seen in East Germans in the aftermath of reunification. In other words, not even socialism can make genetically-associated individual differences in schooling go away (and huge social upheavals might make individual differences even more influential). Our paper concluded:
"Our study provides evidence that individual genetic predictors, previously developed in Western democratic countries, were associated with educational attainment even in the state-socialist educational system of East Germany. This tempers expectations that genetically influenced differences in educational performance will be readily eliminated by incremental changes in educational policy within free-market democracies. Tackling the downstream individual and intergenerational inequities in income, health, and life opportunities that arise from differences in educational attainment thus remains of utmost importance to foster social justice and coherence in meritocratic-oriented societies."
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/09567976251350965
A Russian acquaintance* of mine met her future husband as a teenager at summer camp in the former USSR. “We went for walks in the evening,” she remembered happily. That summer camp was math camp.
Long before the craze for such things in the US (it was easy for me to keep abreast because I lived near the schools so sometimes the bandit signs were practically in my yard (GrrrlsCoding Camp, Math Camp, Science Camp, Magic Camp, etc. - the nadir in my view, that truly made my heart sink, was Handwriting Camp)).
There absolutely was a test for that math camp.
*Her father was a scientist of some sort. I had several times asked her - out of politeness, but also just an effort at conversation when somebody doesn’t yet have much fluency in your language, you fall back on such things to keep conversation going - where in Russia she came from. It took me a while to grasp that she was trying to tell me it was a place without a name. Finally one evening, on one of our walks - maybe I’m a little Rus because I like an evening walk too, it was one of the things that made her a little bit sad about America, which, in general, she appreciated very much, that there was no street life, no promenading in the evening, in our SFH neighborhood - she took a “chalk rock” and sketched a map of the USSR and roughly placed on it where she had grown up. No name; a town around a chemical factory. A few moments more of stilted explanation and I was again on the wrong track. A pharmaceutical factory?
No, no …
I think the best argument for a progressive taxes on people like me is that, through no effort or merit on my part, I was born with skills others will never have.
So glad when you turn your gaze to education. Sports……not so much.
I skip the sports ones because I live in a sports crazy place and need a respite.
It's a great essay and I especially like the last section. Universal education is one of the greatest political victories of the left, and we should be proud that every student is able to attend school, learn to read, and explore their talents. This achievement is not lessened by the fact that some students have more innate abilities than others.
You bring a lot of clarity to this issue and I share your hope that we can achieve economic equality through economic redistribution, and have school focus on enriching students and improving absolute performance at all points in the distribution of student performance, rather than trying to have education produce economic equality.
I will keep subscribing to read your education posts alone! I just read through this entire essay instead of working on the syllabus that I am supposed to be finishing, despite having read your book and being familiar with the arguments. Every time I read these arguments I am more convinced that educational discourse in the USA is subject to mass delusion.
My kids go to a public high school that is very mixed racially and socioeconomically (over 50% Latino and reduced / free lunch qualified, many ESL students, but also students from wealthy families like our kids). A common local narrative is that you have to be insane to send your kids to this failing school district if you have other options. We live next to literally some of the wealthiest communities in the world, and people are convinced that those towns have "great" schools and we have terrible schools. It is painfully obvious to anyone that the main difference is the demographics of the students. You have to be in the top 5%+ of income to even live in those towns. Our oldest kid has about the same SAT score, GPA, difficulty of coursework, etc as his parents had in high school. Go figure.
I wonder where special education fits in to these arguments. Districts around the country are being crushed by increasing special ed costs, particularly out of district placements and para-educators that can easily cost several times more than it costs to educate the average non-sped student. The relevant laws call for "free appropriate public education" in the "least restrictive environment", along with the need for an individualized education plan (IEP). Are these expenditures yielding educational gains for these students? Given the argument FdB has marshaled here, I have to doubt that they broadly are. I'm sure there are specific interventions for specific conditions like dyslexia that are exceptions. But overall? Especially for severely disabled students, what families likely need more than expensive educational interventions is someone to help take care of their child in a safe setting during the day.
"Given that educational outcomes are largely immutable and heavily influenced by accidents of birth and circumstance, it’s immoral for those outcomes to be used in social sorting processes that can result in a lack of opportunity and poverty"
This is where you lose me. We award opportunity to those who can best perform, which in many contexts is correlated with this immutable thing we call intelligence. This is like arguing it's immoral fill a professional team with the best athletes because their capabilities are often accidental and immutable. If we want young people to work to better themselves and achieve excellence in one form or another, I can't think of a worse own-goal than dulling or removing the rewards for achievement.
It's fine to sort people into neurosurgeons and garbage collectors. How much do you pay the garbage collectors, though?
The lowest amount needed to convince people to do it. Same with the surgeons.
1) The counterweight against "the lowest amount" is that there is always the alternative of earning 0$. If you cannot afford both rent and food, at least it's better to be able to afford one.
If our hypothetical brain surgeon feels that cheaper lettuce (or lawn care, or nanny services) justifies importing illegal foreign labor that depresses the wages for native born citizens, what are the associated follow-on effects?
2) No one really has a problem with (real) meritocracy. What everyone objects to is the distortion of that system. David Brooks wrote that the top 20% of the economy is busily engaged in attempting to secure their economic advantage by pulling up the drawbridge for everyone else. Not only does that obviously impact class mobility, but it seems to me that it also involves attempts to blunt the political influence of blue-collar workers. Surely that's part of the reason why Trump has been met with such hysteria among the ranks of white collar professionals.
As an appreciator of the art of editing, I'd put out there that I think this is the best version of this long-form piece you've put together. Some combination of making explicit things that were implicit and reorganizing the piece both made it flow better and made the shape of your argument much clearer much more quickly.