The Frivolity of Equality

Are some children born to be left behind?

Not you, obviously.

You meticulously colored between the lines in Kindergarten, using only appropriate colors, while the snot-nosed punks next to you drew poorly proportioned portraits of their insignificant family members. You were a book buddy in elementary school and managed to make it through middle school unscathed. When you hit high school, you treated it like the Darwinian battle-to-the-death that it was, sparing no one as you clawed your way to the top of the intellectual food chain.

You worked harder, and your hard work paid off.

Or maybe not.

Some kids were born to fall off the boat. You, on the other hand, were born to board the brains bandwagon and ride it to Ivyville. [Or perhaps you cashed in your Athletes Ride Free ticket for a tour on the track team train? I digress…]

Sure, your personal statement about your one week long life-changing volunteer-trip-slash-cultural-exchange to the Dominican Republic didn’t write itself. And your separate verbal and math SAT tutors didn’t pay for themselves either. But you were ahead long before you could even utter the words ‘Common App.’ You attend an institution that thousands were rejected from. In large part, that is because you, darling reader, are just plain smarter than they are.

Don’t be embarrassed. It’s not like you did much to deserve it. If anything, you should thank your parents. Or, more specifically, you should thank your parental units’ chromosomes from crossing over in the first-rate way they did.

It ain’t what you do. It’s your I.Q.

And your I.Q. makes everybody scared of you.

Or, at least scared to talk about you.

Nope, it’s just not P.C. to talk about intelligence these days. We can’t suggest that little Matt is slow, damn it! He was failed by the system when his second grade teacher forgot to stimulate his allegedly inborn love of reading. And don’t get me started on Alissa. She was doomed from day one. Her parents didn’t read Good Night Moon to her when she was a toddler! The intellectual damage was done before she hit pre-school.

I just can’t seem to reconcile the way we talk about education and the way we talk about every other physical and behavioral trait.

Our genetic code determines everything from hair color to the chance that we’ll drop dead of heart disease. My genes gave me unevenly pigmented skin [read: freckles] and attention to detail [read: obsessive behavior]. Your genes may have given you curvy calves … or below-average bone density … or cervical cancer.

So why is it so uncomfortable to suggest that raw biological traits were the principal contributors to your success thus far?

No, I’m not blind to the GROSS inadequacies that continue to tarnish the American education system. But that’s a whole separate topic. I simply think that, like every other fathomable human trait, aptitudes vary.

Come on, Mr./Ms. Advanced Algebra. Not 100 percent of people can be above average.

And the belief that they can contributed to one of W.’s most catastrophic policy failures: No Child Left Behind.

The newest players on the political stage have distanced themselves from NCLB, lauding their own utopian beliefs about education reform. Obama wants to implement ‘intervention strategies’ in middle schools to address the dropout crisis. Sounds good. McCain claims that “every child born in America is destined to compete with his or her peers around the world.” Isn’t that nice?

But, in the end, they are working on the same two misleading assumptions.

1: All children’s minds are created equal.

They are not.

2: Raw intelligence can be improved.

It cannot.

The result: The United States of America has one of the highest high school dropout rates in the industrialized world.

Are we just imbeciles?

What we need is a philosophical change in the way that we look at education.

Let’s face it, some kiddos weren’t born to study endocrinology, or make policy prescriptions, or debate Sartre. And that’s just fine. Sure, they deserve the chance to try it out. But if they decide it isn’t for them, there should be an alternative to saying sayonara to school entirely.

And that’s vocational training.

Because I’d rather have my child crown her 12 years of classroom toil with a hairdressing diploma than drop out in 10th grade because she didn’t pick up on symbolism in The Great Gatsby.

But how could we? Are we really ready to turn our sacred schools into mere conduits for job training?

[Two words: Hotel School].

A number of other countries have optional vocational training curriculums for older students. Australia is a useful model. In Australia, students aren’t forced into less academic tracks at an early age, or pushed into sought-after trades by state officials. Instead, the power of choice remains in the hands of the student.

But how will our cop-out co-eds know what’s good for them? High school is when a lot of students decide what post-secondary institution they want to attend. Why can’t we trust others to decide that they don’t want to attend at all?

In a kind of contradictory way, our push to raise standards is just dooming a whole bunch of fine folks to failure. To raise the standards, we need to lower them … Or at least change them in a substantive way.

We need to mandate equality where we can, and accept inequality where we have no choice.

In the meantime, the main point is this: we need to restructure the way we talk about education in this country. Sure, our candidates will not win votes by calling your little brother stupid. But forcing a struggling and humiliated 16-year-old chap to stick it out in A.P. history ‘for his own good’ is paternalistic, it’s economically wasteful, and it’s just plain mean. Instead of sucking that poor soul dry, why not give him the chance to excel in other ways?

And, in any event, I’m developing a sneaking suspicion that this whole history major thing may not turn out to be the wildly lucrative career platform I imagined it to be. When I’m rotting away in some rancid, decrepit apartment complex with only my intellectual pensées to nourish me, it’s that guy with ‘skills’ that will have the last laugh.

Katie Engelhart is a senior editor at The Sun. She can be reached at kengelhart@cornellsun.com [1] Don’t Kill the Messenger appears alternate Thursdays.