Affirmative inaction
So the dusky-feathered vultures of the Supreme Court have done away with affirmative action in college admissions. Of course their reasons were all the wrong ones, but on the whole I think this is a good thing. The theory of affirmative action always was that somehow meritocracy could be tinkered with and improved by representation, but surely the point is to get rid of meritocracy altogether.
Meritocracy has been pretty much the grounding theory of education in my lifetime, but anybody who’s seen much of its meritorious product knows that it doesn’t deliver. Your average Harvard grad is a self-satisfied chucklehead, and your average Yale grad works for the CIA.
So here’s a suggestion for college admissions: Just roll the dice. Okay, if you want to have some minimum standard — an entrance exam, say — administer it, set the bar nice and low, allow people to re-take it if they don’t make the cut, and then, from among those who got a passing grade, choose your freshman class at random. Like buying a lottery ticket; everybody understands that that’s fair.
Interesting to speculate about what this would do to “representation”. I’m not a bit sure that it wouldn’t give more representational results than the current Ptolemaic nightmare, with centric and eccentric scribbl’d o’er, and all kinds of opaque subjective judgements by admissions committees.
It’s funny for me to hear myself suggesting ways to improve the educational system, since I fundamentally hate it so much that I would just like to tear it down, and especially the elite sector. Raze Harvard and Yale and Princeton to the ground and build nice row houses where they once stood, with a tram line down the middle of the street. The public institutions are little better these days, either.
I think the problem with “affirmative action” is that it made a false promise, namely that with this tweak “meritocracy” would result in levelling-up. Obviously, it hasn’t.
One might of course also ask a broader question: is our social ideal a world in which there are proportionately as many black billionaires as white ones, and ditto for homeless people? Because that’s what “meritocracy” comes down to.
Jason! Finally, the reader li'l Mike deserves!
do the future managerial elite of a country like Cambodia learn about "the killing fields" in school? it doesn't help to grease the wheels of success. but the farmers and kids have a different relationship to Cambodia's history, don't they? but what does it to do a person to be picking rice, then lose a limb and have little or no idea WHY this has happened? while the elite cultivate indifference to their country's own past experience?
speaking of selling one's soul to gain the world, i'm working with a kid in China on TOEFL, the new and improved version. There are plenty of examples to be found in these standardized tests, but the 1st reading problem for TOEFL at the ETS website on their practice test is a stellar example of the chicanery of the educational system. The essay for the students is about "bycatch" in the fishing industry. The sole purpose of the essay is to convince students that adults with their new toys are trying to address the problem of overfishing. There are two mathematical errors in the essay, the first of which might be written off as a typo, if this were an essay from a foreign student. But this is educational testing service and fuck them. The 2nd error is more of an error of selectively presenting numbers to trick kids into the false belief by implying that their elders care and that they show they care because of the new gizmos on today's fishing fleets. yes kids, they care about the bees, too.