The Cult of Smart
How Our Broken Education System Perpetuates Social Injustice
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- 10,99 €
Publisher Description
Named one of Vulture’s Top 10 Best Books of 2020!
Leftist firebrand Fredrik deBoer exposes the lie at the heart of our educational system and demands top-to-bottom reform.
Everyone agrees that education is the key to creating a more just and equal world, and that our schools are broken and failing. Proposed reforms variously target incompetent teachers, corrupt union practices, or outdated curricula, but no one acknowledges a scientifically-proven fact that we all understand intuitively: Academic potential varies between individuals, and cannot be dramatically improved. In The Cult of Smart, educator and outspoken leftist Fredrik deBoer exposes this omission as the central flaw of our entire society, which has created and perpetuated an unjust class structure based on intellectual ability.
Since cognitive talent varies from person to person, our education system can never create equal opportunity for all. Instead, it teaches our children that hierarchy and competition are natural, and that human value should be based on intelligence. These ideas are counter to everything that the left believes, but until they acknowledge the existence of individual cognitive differences, progressives remain complicit in keeping the status quo in place.
This passionate, voice-driven manifesto demands that we embrace a new goal for education: equality of outcomes. We must create a world that has a place for everyone, not just the academically talented. But we’ll never achieve this dream until the Cult of Smart is destroyed.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
DeBoer, an academic assessment manager at Brooklyn College, indicts America's education system and the capitalist meritocracy it undergirds in this provocative yet muddled debut. Public schools don't ensure equality of opportunity or outcomes, deBoer explains, because they reward the talented few and punish the less academically gifted. Yet genetic inheritance largely determines intelligence, deBoer contends, meaning that "different students have profoundly different levels of underlying ability." Until educators acknowledge this range of cognitive potential and reframe classroom methods accordingly, he writes, Americans will be poorly served by reforms, such as charter schools and standardized testing, that blame teachers for student failure, and by the bipartisan consensus that education is the "great economic leveler." DeBoer hedges against the risk of racial bias by insisting that he's talking about "individual differences, not group differences" when it comes to intelligence levels, but his analysis of the supporting evidence is shallow, and his policy suggestions, including universal health care and free college, have more to do with "remak society from top to bottom" than fixing the specific problem of how to teach to varying cognitive abilities. Still, this passionate plea to reconsider "what it means to be a worthwhile person" gives policymakers and educators much to think about.
