If indeed cognitive capacity is an inheritable trait, how then should we feel about education? Can school work overcome our native stupidity? At the most general level, of course, nearly everyone can benefit from one from of education or another. It is a truism that both democracy and capitalism needs an educated citizenry, and as a matter of policy and priority, most states provide for public education at the elementary, the secondary, and at the collegiate levels. Education too holds a more or less unique place in the ideological dispute over social justice. School work creates opportunities, and both ideological camps accept that getting an education is a necessary, though hardly sufficient, prerequisite for a human being to reach their full potential. Both camps accept that an educated citizenry is necessary, not only to informed decisions at the polling booth, but also for their full participation within the economic and social life of their communities. We believe, or we want to believe, that school work overcomes native stupidity to the degree necessary, and if students stick it out, it does so more or less universally. School work, in short, is no different than any other sort of work and is subject to the same mythologies that inform our attitudes about work. It is inextricably redemptive and remunerative. Those that apply themselves to their studies, those who burn the midnight oil and work hard at them, as most students do, those developed habits of mind and heart will not only save one from a life of penury, but will reward one with happiness and success, however one might want to measure happiness and success.
There is some truth to the mythologies, else they wouldn't survive as mythologies, and we in higher education are fond of trucking out the statistics that show higher life time earnings for those who achieve higher forms of education. We worry over "retention" and tsk-tsk the fate of those who fade from the education system, in high school, in college, ostensibly before reaching their full potential. We worry even more profoundly if we accept the results of recent research into employment, the suggestion that nearly 66% of the adult population needs some form of collegiate education, whether technical or academic if the US is to maintain a viable economy. We worry, and we tinker, but part of the on-going dissatisfaction with the education systems might have little or nothing to do with the system per se. It will always subject to ever more tinkering and correction, and there are few political bodies that do not feel some urge to propose simplistic solutions to intractable problems. Rather, the on-going dissatisfaction might have more to do with the failed promise of education itself, and the on-going denial that its failure may be as inevitable as entropy. If cognitive capacity is heritable, and if there are limits to the degree that school work can over-come native deficiencies, the education system may well be failing to produce the desired results, not because it is systemically broken, but because it is being asked to do what it cannot do -- change the cognitive capacity of students. I taught in an open access institution, a community college, and had a broad cross section of students of all abilities. To buck myself up, with all the enthusiasm I could muster, I would say to my wife before going off to teach, "I am off to fight the forces of ignorance and apathy," and to a certain extent I could address both. I could give them facts to bank, and for some I could even be inspiring, but for those students who lacked the cognitive capacity for collegiate work, for the creative analytical and synthetic work that will be more and more in demand in the emergent economy, I could not begin to exercise capacities they lacked. They were often fine young men and women, personable and sincere and willing enough to work hard, but their hard work produced little or no appreciable difference in the past and would produce little or no appreciable difference in the future. Too often, they lacked the discernment to even grasp the difference between their own work and the work of their more capable peers.
To be continued.
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