Sometimes educators talk about “closing the achievement gap” which separates high and low performing students.\u00a0 There are documented gaps in educational outcomes on the basis of e.g. economic classes, race, etc.\u00a0 Some of these gaps lead to serious social problems down the road.\u00a0 But even if we somehow produced a society which had equal outcomes for every factor in the current Politically Correct List of Superficial Ways to Classify People\u2122, there would still be high-performing students and low-performing students.\u00a0 Educators don’t like this sort of situation, because they don’t want to feel like they are failing some of their students.<\/p>\n
Now, there are two ways to close a gap.\u00a0 One is to take the students who are doing badly, and teach them better.\u00a0 The other way is to take the students who are doing better, and teach them worse.\u00a0 Or at least, don’t pay any special attention to them, since the goal is to produce equality.\u00a0 This shows the danger of adopting equality as a goal.\u00a0 Inequality is defined as a difference between two people.\u00a0 Adopting equality as a goal means you are trying to benefit one person as compared to another<\/em>.\u00a0 If all better-off students were worse off, there would be less to feel bad about.<\/p>\n Instead, we ought to adopt the goal of benefiting all<\/em> students.\u00a0 But especially the ones who are most capable of benefiting from education.\u00a0 This is, primarily, the more intelligent and motivated students.\u00a0 People with (small “d”) democratic sensibilities don’t want to hear this.\u00a0 But as St. Lewis writes in an essay on “Democratic Education”:<\/p>\n Equality (outside mathematics) is a purely social conception. It applies to man as a political and economic animal.\u00a0 It has no place in the life of the mind.\u00a0 Beauty is not democratic; she reveals herself more to the few than to the many, more to the persistent and disciplined seekers than to the careless.\u00a0 Virtue is not democratic; she is achieved by those who pursue her more hotly than most men.\u00a0 Truth is not democratic; she demands special talents and special industry in those to whom she gives her favors.\u00a0 Political democracy is doomed if it tries to extend its demand for equality into these higher spheres.\u00a0 Ethical, intellectual, or aesthetic democracy is death.<\/p>\n A truly democratic education\u2014one which will preserve democracy\u2014must be, in its own field, ruthlessly aristocratic, shamelessly `high-brow’.\u00a0 In drawing up its curriculum it should always have chiefly in view the interests of the boy who wants to know and can know.\u00a0 (With very few exceptions, they are the same boy.\u00a0 The stupid boy, nearly always, is the boy who does not want<\/em> to know.)\u00a0 It must, in a certain sense, subordinate the needs of the many to the needs of the few, and it must subordinate the school to the university.\u00a0 Only thus can it be a nursery of those first-class intellects without which neither a democracy nor any other State can thrive.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n The goal of leaving No Child Left Behind<\/a> sounds enlightened, but leaving some children behind is in fact a necessary logical corollary of teaching children difficult subjects.\u00a0 If your only goal is not to abandon the children who are behind, then you will abandon those who are ahead: the ones who are actually interested in learning.\u00a0 Most people, believe it or not, forget most of what they were made to learn in school.\u00a0 The future philosophers, scientists, authors, judges, and so on will actually remember (part of) their education and apply it.<\/p>\n This is not to say that education is unimportant for the masses.\u00a0 A certain quantum of literacy and comprehension is necessary to survive in the world.\u00a0\u00a0 By definition, a democracy has votes, and a certain degree of education is necessary to vote wisely.\u00a0 When broad sections of society are deprived of a good education, and become a permanent underclass, society suffers.\u00a0 The heroic teachers who try to remedy this, by volunteering to teach failing students, are worthy of our respect.\u00a0 It is a valuable project, but it ought not to have such an exclusive monopoly on our thinking that we forget the need to teach those most capable of learning.<\/p>\n But aren’t those students going to be learning anyway, in pretty much whatever environment you put them in?\u00a0 To some extent, yes.\u00a0 But it makes a difference what you think is the point<\/em> of education.\u00a0 The current goal is to produce a system in which any student can succeed if they really try.\u00a0 This means lots of busywork, and a hefty amount of grade inflation (rewarding the consistently effortful, and punishing those who take chances on difficult subjects).\u00a0 It does not necessarily mean teaching critical thinking.\u00a0 Teaching people to be “good at school” can mean be a sort of slave-mentality, while the goal of a liberal arts education is to produce people who can think for themselves.\u00a0 This involves a sort of paradox: you have to teach people to teach themselves.\u00a0 Ignoring a student’s needs is one way to try to encourage this, but it is not the best way.<\/p>\n Let me be autobiographical for a moment, just to give a concrete example. I hope that I am now old enough and fulfilled enough to be beyond any resentment, but I feel that a specific example will be helpful, and I am the example I know best.<\/p>\n In the area of mathematics, I was “left ahead” as a child for pretty much my entire school career before I started taking college classes.\u00a0 The teachers recognized my knowledge, but none of them did what was required to give me sufficiently advanced material.\u00a0 I suppose they probably had their hands full with the students who needed more help with the assigned curriculum.<\/p>\n Eventually, in the 7th grade, someone put me into the 8th grade Algebra class.\u00a0 It was too late\u2014I was already starting to do Calculus by then.\u00a0 I was too bored by the subject to do any homework, so the teacher failed me, even though she knew I knew all the material.\u00a0 She thought I was lazy and needed study skills, which was true, although this was hardly the correct motivator to produce them.\u00a0 I had to repeat the class again in 8th grade. \u00a0 I was mortified, but fortunately none of my classmates knew about the situation.\u00a0 I still didn’t do any homework (through guilt-ridden procrastination and deception, not through a firmly decided upon rebellion), but this time she recommended me into the Honors Geometry class in the 9th grade.<\/p>\n This time homework was only 10% of the grade, but the extremely formulaic and tedious standards for proofs docked me another 10% or so on the exams.\u00a0 (See A Mathematicians Lament<\/a> for an important critique of the way we teach Geometry and other mathematical subjects.)\u00a0 That got me to a C+.\u00a0 As a result I was looking at having to take the non<\/em>-honors version of the next course in the sequence Algebra II.\u00a0 (Los Altos High School had a policy against skipping classes).\u00a0 Bear in mind that, on my own, I was learning Maxwell’s equations,\u00a0 General Relativity, and Quantum Mechanics at this point.<\/p>\n There was a standardized test to overcome the C, but in a school full of overachievers it was deliberately designed to be impossible.\u00a0 Too many questions in too short of a time.\u00a0 I knew immediately, before getting the results, that it wasn’t going to fly.\u00a0 I was going to be steamrollered under the wheels of an formalistic bureaucracy which was unable to make a plain human diagnosis of the sort of student I was: lazy but brilliant.\u00a0 I was terrified that I would never receive the help I needed to succeed at what I already knew I wanted to do in life: theoretical physics.<\/p>\n \u00a0Some wandered in desert wastelands, So I cried out to the Lord to save me, and he rescued me from my afflictions.\u00a0 The instruments of his salvation were as follows: Although I complained of the inhuman bureaucracy, in fact there was an excellent academic counselor at the school who knew my situation and advised me to apply to the Foothill Middle College Program<\/a>, basically a way to flunk out of high school into the local community college. They only take Juniors and Seniors, so I had to skip my Sophomore year.\u00a0 No regrets!<\/p>\n When I went there, Foothill finally gave me an actual placement test, and I got the highest result and so placed into Calculus 1A (I made an arrangement with the prof to skip the classes and take the final: with Calculus 1B I finally got to new material).<\/p>\n My weird education story doesn’t end there, but this was a critical turning point.\u00a0 It happened because at some point certain educators cared enough design and implement a program for people like me.\u00a0 For this and many other gifts I give thanks to the Head Teacher<\/a>:<\/p>\n I love the Lord, for he heard my voice; Sometimes educators talk about “closing the achievement gap” which separates high and low performing students.\u00a0 There are documented gaps in educational outcomes on the basis of e.g. economic classes, race, etc.\u00a0 Some of these gaps lead to serious social problems … Continue reading
\nfinding no way to a city where they could settle.
\nThey were hungry and thirsty,
\nand their lives ebbed away.
\nThen they cried out to the Lord in their trouble,
\nand he delivered them from their distress.
\nHe led them by a straight way
\nto a city where they could settle.
\nLet them give thanks to the Lord for his unfailing love
\nand his wonderful deeds for mankind,
\nfor he satisfies the thirsty
\nand fills the hungry with good things.\u00a0
\n(Psalm 107:4-9.\u00a0 Read the whole thing!<\/a>)<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n
\nhe heard my cry for mercy.
\nBecause he turned his ear to me,
\nI will call on him as long as I live.
\n(Psalm 116:1-2<\/a>)<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"