I'm writing in reaction to this piece, Wait, How Did You Get Into College? (How first-generation students learn about the myth of meritocracy.) It rubbed me the wrong way on two counts. (1) It understated how widespread this myth is, so made too much of an identification with the legacy admits (kids with very rich parents who are alums) because that is topical now and not enough with the much broader gaming of the system that the upper middle class kids and their parents go through, perhaps since these kids were in elementary school. Surely Professor Capó Crucet is aware of this gaming now. I doubt things are that different in this dimension between Nebraska and Illinois, though maybe it is more apparent if you teach Economics than if you teach English. (2) It equated the meritorious student with the hard working student, without fleshing out the question - hard working at what? I am more than a generation older than Professor Capó Crucet, but am also a Cornell alum. When I was in high school I don't recall being very hard working at school at all. Yet I was an excellent student. So I had a visceral reaction to that line in the piece. Was it really necessary to assert that?
I want to elaborate on both of these points, as I've written a lot about each of them. But before I do I think this disclaimer is necessary. I had several advantages that may have mattered for my learning during grade school. I was from a middle class family and lived in a neighborhood where school was nurturing, as much by other kids who were my classmates as by the classes themselves. I had very good teachers in elementary school. (I finished 6th grade in 1966.) We tend to ignore this factor, but the women's movement really hadn't started yet, so many talented women were teachers. Subsequent generations of students didn't get this benefit. And my dad was a lawyer while my mom taught foreign languages, eventually becoming a French teacher in high school (not the one I attended). Family games included chess and bridge. So I grew up in a fairly literate household and that must have mattered too.
On the gaming the system regarding school, perhaps most people will associate that with Amy Chua's Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother. I haven't read it so I want to go to more direct evidence that I have. In spring 2015, I had a discussion group with three students who took my Econ class the prior fall. They were all East Asian - two from China, one from South Korea. I have a piece in Inside Higher Ed that describes this experience in some detail. These students told some pretty graphic stories about their high school experiences and about being disciplined out of following their own curiosity in favor of focusing exclusively on the assigned materials and performing well on the upcoming tests. Armed with what I learned in this discussion group, and some other conversations with Chinese-American students, I assume there is some moderation of this extreme form of "philosophy" regarding education, simply by associating with other students who don't have Asian ancestry, but honoring one's parents is a very strong trait, even among Asian-American students, so this disciplined approach to learning - elders do know best as to what is good for the kid - has to be an important factor in the kid's development.
But I don't want to convey that culture is the entire explanation. There is a different explanation entirely, as given by Richard Reeves in Stop Pretending You're Not Rich, where the nouveau riche get their kids into well regarded magnet schools or shell out big bucks for ritzy prep schools, to pass along their advantage to their children, all the while claiming the system is meritocratic, so they deserve what's coming to them. These people tend to subscribe to the Just World Theory, even as they manipulate the system to their own advantage.
Perhaps there are still other explanations, such as arguing that some defensive response is needed merely to react to the gaming behavior by others. If GPA and standardized test scores matter for admission to college, doesn't a responsible parent have to acknowledge that and then do something about it? I'm more than willing to admit the systemic explanations are many and complex. Let me push on to the consequences. This is the most graphic piece I've read on the matter, The Silicon Valley Suicides. And this is the most thorough diagnosis of the problem, though I didn't completely buy into the proposed solution (which might appeal to English majors, but did not to this Economist), Excellent Sheep. I did write a piece in response to that book, I was not a sheep. Were you? I think it is worthwhile for each person who has been through college to ask how they were in high school, and then in college. Were they caught up in the paper chase? If so, why? If not, why not?
Then there is the kid's own personal philosophy about learning. On this, Carol Dweck has done us a service with her Mindset: The New Psychology of Success. Those who have the growth mindset will put in what it takes to master the subject at hand. In contrast, those with the fixed mindset will have a ready-built excuse at hand - I'm not good at that. Such a predisposition ends up blocking putting in the necessary time for real learning. But when such kids view school as a passport, they still want to get good grades, so they find a different way through. They memorize the lecture notes, which they then regurgitate on the exams. Unfortunately, they are largely unchanged by the process and most of what they memorized is forgotten as it is not put to immediate use. The increased reliance on adjuncts in undergraduate instruction exacerbates the problem, as they have incentive to teach to the test. That much of the explanation is straightforward enough.
Does the growth mindset require hard work to enable it? That's trickier. There is a different psychological concept called Flow, though I prefer Maslow's term, self-actualization. Either way, there is a notion of a peak experience, in which high performance manifests with no apparent effort. So, it is conceptually possible to grow without it feeling like hard work, but other times it will be a slug. What is not possible is to expect growth without engaging in growth promoting activities. (While I'm going for the gag line here, writing the first draft of this piece is self-actualization, proofreading it later is a slug.)
Now let me bring this back down to my own experience and my way of thinking about school as work or play. My best explanation of this is in a piece called PLAs Please. The essay is a plea for self-directed learning and when I was a kid in the 1960s, I discovered that in elementary school (or perhaps a teacher or two showed it to me), after which I never let go. School forms a different relationship with a kid who is largely self-directed in his own learning, than it does in a different kid, who allows school to set the agenda, the so-called excellent sheep mentioned above.
My own strong bias is to not reward kids who are not setting their own direction with admission to elite universities, even if they have the apparent credentials. What is called hard work, but is effort put in to advance somebody else's view of how the kid should go about learning, should not be rewarded. Playing the credential game, just for the sake of perpetuating the meritocracy myth, is something we should try to prevent.
Now let me return to the situation relevant for when Professor Capó Crucet was in high school and getting ready to apply for college. I know that at the U of Illinois (there are campuses in Urbana-Champaign, Chicago, and Springfield) there is an issue about getting low income students from the Chicago area to consider attending the Urbana-Champaign campus. Many with reasonable academic credentials don't even apply. Recent efforts have been made to counteract this tendency. I don't know whether those efforts have been effective or not. I do know, from mentoring some African-American students, that it is hard to be on my campus while being racially isolated, the only black kid in the class. I don't have the same experience as a mentor, but I suspect it is similar for the Latino/a student. In any event, credentials may matter more in this setting for Professor Capó Crucet, when she was a college student, than I would otherwise acknowledge. The question - do you belong here? - is nontrivial to answer in a compelling way.
I hope that in itself doesn't refute everything else I argued above. But maybe it does. Let me close on a different note.
I tend to come to my conclusions based on my own experience, and then to generalize from there. But I was a very large kid, so my experiences may not have been typical. Indeed, I was an outlier in many different ways. After the first marking period in junior high school, I found out I had the highest GPA in the 7th grade. It wasn't something I aspired to; it just happened. From then on, I had the reputation of being a top student. In many different ways, I would have preferred to be closer to the average and blend in better as a result. Yet I couldn't stop being me. Learning was a way I found for self-expression. My hope is that students today would make a similar discovery, even if they have to kowtow to the system more now than I had to 50+ years ago.
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