Well, I turned the matter over in my mind, and then bethought myself of something I wrote eight years ago. I actually posted it here in April 2011, but I like it, and seven years is several generations in the blogosphere, so for those of you have joined this conversation since that time, here it is. The rest of you can pass the time qvelling over the summary canning of Rosanne Barr.
Some Heretical Thoughts on the Rat Race
for the Top Jobs
Robert Paul Wolff
A society is an articulated structure of roles occupied by,
and functions performed by, adult men and women. Every society, in order to continue in
existence, must endlessly reproduce itself by preparing the young to occupy or
perform those economic, governmental, religious, medical, legal, military roles
and functions, so that in time they can take the place of persons in their
parents’ generation. Some of this work
of social reproduction takes place in the family, some of it takes place in the
workplace, some of it is carried on by formal and informal social groupings and
organizations, and, especially in societies like ours, much of the work of
social reproduction is assigned to the schools.
In
an agricultural economy, young boys and girls learn to grow crops and tend
flocks. In a hunter/gatherer economy,
the young are taken along on foraging and hunting expeditions so that they can
acquire the skills necessary to obtain food.
In some societies, the young apprentice to carpenters, masons,
wheelwrights, or silversmiths. They
serve as pages to knights while they master the sword and mace. As acolytes, they learn the religious
mysteries of the temple. They are
articled to barristers so that they may be initiated into the arcana of the
law.
Now it happens, from time to time, that a young man or
woman comes along who has a special gift for one or another of the adult social
roles in his or her society. Some young
women take naturally to the sword; some young men have a special gift for
tending to the sick. Some people have
green thumbs. Others are able to craft
beautiful furniture with a chisel and saw. But no society can survive if it depends on a regular supply of outstandingly
talented young people. A little
reflection will make it clear that every society must define its adult social
and economic roles so that averagely
gifted young people can fill them.
How could it be otherwise?
If the food supply were to depend on the talents of outstanding
agronomists, the society would likely starve before those young Luther Burbanks
appeared. If the governance needed for
survival absolutely required the gifts of a Thomas Jefferson or an Elizabeth
Tudor, then a society would be doomed, for even if such a leader were to
appear, he or she would not likely be followed by another, and another, and
another. Sooner or later, and probably
sooner, a Millard Fillmore or George W. Bush would appear. The legal institutions of a society must be
so fashioned that lawyers of average ability can manage their essential
functions. The society will of course celebrate
an Oliver Wendell Holmes, should one appear, but it cannot depend on a regular
supply of jurisprudential giants.
The truth of these observations is reinforced by the fact
that almost every society systematically excludes large portions of its
population from whole ranges of adult roles and functions. Most societies before the present day
excluded women from the military, the law, medicine, government, and major
portions of the economy, and some still do.
Similar exclusions have regularly been imposed on groups identified by
race, class, religion, or ethnicity. The
effect of these exclusions is dramatically to decrease the pool from which young
people will be drawn to fill adult roles, thus making it ever more unlikely
that outstandingly talented boys and girls will be available. In effect, the more exclusionary a society
is, the more it depends on its institutions being manageable by average
talents.
In American society in recent decades, formal education has
taken the place of almost every other social mechanism for preparing the young
for adult life. The legal, medical,
business, and military spheres have come to rely on schooling and the
associated credentials and degrees to prepare young people and determine which
among them shall be assigned to one or another adult role or function.
There is nothing intrinsically wrong with society choosing
this way of reproducing itself, although listening to lectures and taking
written examinations is not always the best way to prepare for a productive
role in adult society. But the process
is powerfully warped and conditioned by an extraneous factor so pervasive that
many of us fail even to recognize it for what it is. I refer to the steeply pyramidal structure of
the rewards and privileges associated with the various roles our adult
society. To state the point simply, in
modern post-industrial societies, there are a relatively few really good jobs
with big salaries and great benefits, and lots of mediocre jobs with small
salaries and very few benefits. In a
society like ours here in America, the quality of life of a young person is
determined almost entirely by what sort of job he or she ends up in, and that,
in turn, is very considerably determined by the quantity of education he or she
obtains.
Now, the top jobs [corporate lawyer, corporate executive,
doctor, engineer, etc] are scarce, and their rewards are way out of proportion
to those associated with jobs lower down on the pyramid. Hence, there is a ferocious competition for
the scarce slots. Since we live in a
society that gives lip service to fairness, justice, and equality, those who
end up in the favored positions quite naturally tell themselves – and also tell
those who fail to make it – that their success is a reward for their extraordinary
accomplishment. Those at the top of the
pyramid, they tell themselves in self-congratulatory fashion, are the truly
gifted and exquisitely trained. But as
we observed above, this is cannot possibly be true. No society, not even ours, can survive if it
must rely on finding an endless supply of outstanding lawyers, doctors, or CEOs
to fill its top positions. The simple
truth is that despite the ferocity of the competition, those in the favored
roles are, by and large, only averagely competent at them . [Many years ago, a British child psychiatrist
observed that nature only requires that women be “pretty good” mothers in order
for their children to survive and flourish.
This wise observation can be generalized to all of society’s
reproductive efforts.]
Enter “metrics” – Grades, the SAT ,
the LSAT, the GRE, the MCAT, and all the other impressively mathematical
devices for sifting and sorting young people, of allocating them to scarce
positions and justifying that allocation.
These measuring exercises play absolutely no role at all in preparing
young people for productive adult life. Indeed,
they do not even play any sort of role in preparing young people for the
education that is, in turn, supposed to prepare them for productive adult
life. Their sole purpose is to decide,
in an ostensibly objective and neutral fashion, which small number of boys and
girls will be allowed to ascend to the heights of the job pyramid.
Now, in a society that depends on sheepherding, all the
young boys and girls learn to herd sheep.
Some do it better than others, of course, but virtually all of them
learn how to tend sheep sufficiently well to become shepherds. If someone were to propose that the boys and
girls be tested every two years to determine their progress in sheepherding, he
would be laughed out of the village.
But in our society, every stage from infancy to young
adulthood is accompanied by batteries of “objective” [which is to say machine
graded] tests, and at crucial junctures – the completion of secondary school,
the transition to college, and later the transition to graduate study – success
on these tests, however that is defined, is treated as an absolute precondition
for advancement to the next, more exclusive, stage of education, and thus for
admission to the ever more lucrative jobs.
After this system has been in place for a while, it quite
naturally comes to be the case that the adults occupying the most favored
social roles turn out to be the ones who performed unusually well on the
various tests at each stage in their growing up. After all, since performance on the tests
determines whether they are admitted to the cushy jobs, it is self-evident that
those in the cushy jobs will be the ones who did well on the tests.
And now, by a
flagrant bit of circular logic, society concludes that success on those tests
is evidence of the outstanding ability absolutely required by the cushy jobs! This circular argument is virtually forced on
us by considerations of elementary fairness.
After all, if the cushy jobs do NOT require outstanding ability and
accomplishment, then how can we possibly justify their cushiness and their
scarcity? And if the tests do not
actually identify those special few capable of performing at the heights of the
economy and society, then how can we explain the fact that those at the top
have all done so well on the tests?
All of
this is dangerous and arrant nonsense. And it is the nonsense on which our entire
educational system rests. There is very
little evidence that success in pre-school, in elementary school, in high
school, on SAT exams, in college,
on GRE exams, and in graduate school is intimately linked with the ability
actually to perform well the jobs that
are won by these strings of successes.
It is of course true that the senior partners of the most prestigious
law firms graduated from the most prestigious law schools. How could it be otherwise? Those are the schools from which the law
firm’s young associates are recruited.
But has anyone ever done an objective, double-blind evaluation of the
work of such lawyers and of their counterparts at less prestigious firms who
graduated from less prestigious law schools?
We are no better able to carry out such evaluations of the performance
of lawyers, doctors, and corporate executives than we are to evaluate the
performance of auto mechanics. In the
end, the “evidence” of the superiority of those in the privileged positions is
the fact that they accumulated all the grades, degrees, and other markers that
we have chosen to use as filters in allocating scarce desirable positions to an
excess of applicants.
Since all of this flies in the face of received wisdom that
is as firmly entrenched in the collective mind of our society as the truth of
the theory of the bodily humours once was, I want to spend a few moments
elaborating on what I have just said.
Suppose, to continue my example, that we wish to test the hypothesis
that a high score on the LSAT, admission to one of the prestigious law schools,
and academic success in one's legal education are all good predictors of one's
eventual successful performance as a lawyer.
How would we actually test that hypothesis?
Well, the first thing we would have to do -- this is
absolutely fundamental to any scientific test -- is to define objective
measures of successful legal performance that are logically independent of the
LSAT scores, law school admission, and law school grades whose relationship to
that success we are trying to measure.
How could we do that? One thing
we might do is select a group of graduates of Harvard Law School now working at
prestigious New York or Washington law firms, all of whom, we may suppose, are former
clerks of Federal District or Appeals Court judges or Supreme Court Justices,
and count their percentage of successes in the multi-billion dollar corporate
law suits they have prosecuted. Then we
could collect the same figures for a comparison group of graduates of Suffolk
Law School working at small low-prestige Boston law firms. If the first group has a significantly higher
success rate than the second group, that might tell us something about the
objective merits of the LSAT and the prestigious law schools in identifying or
producing legal excellence.
There
are two difficulties with assembling this body of data. The first is that on any big multi-billion
dollar corporate law suit, there are hordes of lawyers on each side, so that it
is really virtually impossible to identify the measurable contribution of a
single lawyer. The second problem is
that graduates of Suffolk Law School working at small low-prestige Boston firms
don't ever get to try multi-billion dollar corporate law suits, because the
corporations demand a team of lawyers from the most prestigious and expensive
law firm staffed by graduates of the most prestigious law schools, all of whom,
of course, have done very well indeed on the LSAT. I leave it to you to work out on your own the
comparable tests that would be required to measure the relevance of SATs, GREs,
MCATs, Ivy League degrees, and all the other markers by which we select young
men and women for the best paying jobs.
To be sure, there are times when the pressure of
circumstances impels us to look past the stigmata of educational success and
reach for some reliable measure of actual competence. One story may perhaps serve to point the
moral. Some years ago, the then Dean of
Yale Law School, a very bright, charming man named Tony Kronman, became engaged to be married, and on the
wedding day, his wife to be went to have her hair done at a local salon. There was some problem with the procedure [the
story as it has come to me does not include this detail], and the bride collapsed
in tears. When she called her fiancé, he
came steaming into the salon and proceeded to make a considerable scene. The upshot was that the New Haven police were
called and the Dean of Yale Law School was hauled off to the police
station. [One can only imagine the
malicious pleasure the police took in this.
Had they been the recipients of a Yale education, they might even have
called it schadenfreude.] When Dean Kronman was allowed his one phone
call, he chose to call his colleague Owen Fiss, one of the most brilliant and
respected Constitutional Law scholars in America. Kronman told Fiss where he was, and begged
Fiss to get him out in time for the wedding.
Fiss is reported to have replied, "Tony, I don't know what to
do. Call a lawyer." There are after all some objective measures of professional competence.
Let me repeat what I
have been asserting: Virtually all of
the boys and girls in our society are capable of learning how to perform
well-compensated jobs in a perfectly adequate fashion, and most of them could
perform creditably in even the most demanding jobs, if given half a chance and the
proper preparation.
I know that this is educational heresy in modern America Fort Dix New Jersey
On the first day of Basic, an angry, mean-looking sergeant
started to yell at me and he pretty much kept on yelling for the entire eight
weeks. Everything I did was wrong. I marched out of step, my salute was feeble,
my fatigues were messy, my shoes were not properly shined, my bed was not made
tight enough to bounce a quarter, and I did not stand up straight. He threatened to make me get up at three a.m. to GI the barracks if
things were out of place, to clean the latrines with a toothbrush, and to march
me until I dropped. He was not yelling
only at me, of course. He said he had
never seen a sorrier collection of recruits, and he doubted that any of us would
make it to the end of the eight weeks.
Somehow, miraculously, and to my great relief, I made it
through Basic, and so did every single
one of the men in my company! What is more, virtually every man and woman in
every eight week cycle in every year of the modern Army’s existence makes it
through Basic. You can count on the
fingers of one hand the recruits in any cycle who actually are drummed out of
the Army for failing to meet its strenuous, rigorous standards.
The explanation of this astonishing record of success, so
dramatically in contrast to the rather poor record of our country’s educational
institutions, is two-fold. First of all,
the Army, in its great wisdom, demands of its recruits only what long
experience has shown they are capable of.
Despite all my sergeant’s threats and harangues, all of his brow-beating
and chest-thumping, the tasks in Basic are aimed roughly at the lower end of
what is average for the recruits. The
Army’s task is to motivate us to do what it already knows we are capable of
doing, and to make us feel good about achieving what is, after all, an average
performance.
The second reason for an almost perfect rate of success is
that the Army holds those in charge responsible for the successful performance
of the men they command. If recruits
start dropping out of a Basic Training company, the Company commander will get
a black mark on his record that will effectively ruin his career. That angry sergeant yelling at me will be
raked over the coals by his commanding officer if I fail to do the requisite number
of push-ups. The result, of course, is
that those in charge do everything in their power to ensure the adequate
performance of those whom they command.
My second experience, which stands in complete contrast to
the first, occurred twenty-five years ago in South Africa, at the University of
Durban-Westville, an historically Black university which I visited regularly in
conjunction with a scholarship organization that I started called University
Scholarships for South African Students.
I was meeting with a self-assured, rather smug young White man who
chaired the university’s Economics Department and taught their big first year
introductory course. Data I had obtained
from the Registrar showed that in the previous year, only eleven percent of the
students taking the course had passed. I
expressed dismay at this appalling performance, and he agreed sadly, saying
that the Black students were very poorly prepared. I asked him what made him think he was a
teacher, if only one in ten of his students could pass his course. He was genuinely astonished at the suggestion
that he had any responsibility to help his students master the material. I suggested that if he were the head of a
hospital in which ninety percent of the patients died, he would be brought up
on charges as a quack, but he remained thoroughly unrepentant.
The lesson I glean from these two stories, and from a
lifetime in the Academy, is very simply this:
Any group of averagely intelligent young boys and girls, given the
proper support, socialization, assistance, and opportunity, can prepare
themselves to fill successfully one of the good jobs in American society. If a large proportion of the young people of
some racial, ethnic, religious, or gendered group are failing to do this, the
fault lies with the society, not with the boys and girls. Performance on so-called objective tests is neither
evidence of, nor a prerequisite for, the ability to succeed in contemporary
society. The boys and girls of every
city, town, or village in every society in the world are capable of becoming averagely
competent and productive members of their adult world. If they are failing to do so, it is the fault
of the adults in the society. With
attention, guidance, and with the
unshakable conviction on our part that they are going to succeed, they in fact
will succeed in becoming averagely
successful.
Our job as educators is to prepare young people to take
their place in the adult world -- all young people, not merely those who score
well on SATs or get high grades or attend prestigious and expensive
schools. It is not our job to weed out
the unfit, nor is it our job to raise the national scores on tests designed to
satisfy the ignorant prejudices of reactionary politicians. If our students fail, it is our fault, and
our responsibility. In our professional
lives as educators, we must act like Basic Training sergeants [without the
yelling], not like the Chair of the Durban-Westville Economics Department.
What does this mean, concretely? Since, as you will have gathered by now, I am
an inveterate story teller, I will end these remarks with two more stories that
suggest, anecdotally, how we ought to act toward our students. The first concerns a very promising young man
in the University of Massachusetts Afro-American Studies doctoral program that
I ran for its first dozen years. This
young man had done some extensive,, solid archival research, but was simply
unable to turn it into a dissertation. I
called him into my office, after several unproductive years had gone by, and
told him to bring me everything he had written.
He produced a hundred pages or so of alternative drafts of bits and
snatches of this and that chapter. I sat
him down and spent an hour or so sorting out the narrative structure of the
project, dividing it into chapters and cutting it off at about the halfway
mark, since what he had originally imagined was a long book, not a doctoral
dissertation. When all of this was
clear, I said to him: "I want you
to go home right now and write page one of chapter one. When you are done, send it to me as an email
attachment. I will read it and send back
any comments or corrections. Tomorrow,
you will send me page two, and I will respond in the same way. You will send me one page a day, every day of
the week, from now until you have a complete dissertation. If you start wandering off course, I will
alert you to that fact. If you are
getting ahead of your story, I will slow you down. One page a day is 30 pages a month. In eight months, you will be done." And so he was. He now has tenure and will soon publish his
dissertation as a book. That is the sort
of commitment to our students that I have in mind.
The second story, with which I will end, is about one of my
very favorite people, Esther Terry. When
these events occurred, Esther was the Chair of the Afro-American Studies
Department in which I was the Graduate Program Director. It was she who invited me to join the
department in 1990. Esther was a student
at Bennett College in Greensboro, North Carolina when she and other students
from Bennett and NCA&T carried out the famous Woolworth's Lunch Counter
sit-in that helped start the modern Civil Rights Movement.
One semester, Esther and our colleague Steve Tracy
co-taught an undergraduate course on Southern Literature. I happened to wander into Esther's office
just after the first class in the course had ended. While we were chatting, a young Black man
knocked on the open door. "Dr.
Terry," he said, "I was just in your class." "Yes," Esther said, "I
know." "I am afraid I am not
going to be able to take the course," he went on. "Why not?" Esther asked. "Because you have assigned a lot of
books and I just don't have the money to buy them." Without missing a beat, Esther said,
"Now look, young man, I want you to stay in the course. I have just had a fence put up around my
house. I want you to show up this
afternoon and start painting it. I will
pay you, and then you will be able to buy the books." With that, she took out some money as an
advance on his wages, and sent him off to by the first book they were to read
in the course.
Esther is a very shy woman, and does not like me to tell
that story. Indeed, if I had not been
there when it happened, I would never have known about it. But she has been doing things like that for forty
years, unbidden, without expecting or seeking recognition. She simply views it as a normal part of her
role as teacher. She is my model for what
a university professor should be, and it would make me very happy if she were
to become yours as well.
