Evolutionary Destiny - Intelligence, The Bell Curve, And Making Way For The Best And The Brightest

Christopher Manning had been able to figure things out by the time he was two.  He could help his mother put together the Ikea table she was struggling to assemble, he got the drift of language, parsed English grammar and even managed the conditional, and understood cause and effect, risk and reward, and cost-benefit by the time he was three.

 

He slept little, keeping his parents up past eleven, could be a pill at times, but soon got the picture - throwing tantrums was simply a waste of valuable time when there was so much to learn. 

Other such bright children might have focused their intelligence and become musical prodigies, but Christopher's mind was too far-reaching and curious for the exploration and mastery of just one thing.  He might become more focused when older, but for now, the world was a marvelously complex puzzle to be solved. 

 

By the time he entered kindergarten, he was already able to read, and play chess, so boredom made him a restless, often irritable child.  His parents spoke with the teacher who patiently explained that public school was for all children, and it was her job to bring the less able up to the standard of the rest.  'We live in a democratic society', she snipped at Mr. and Mrs. Manning, parents who thought their child was the center of the universe. 

She had been promoted from one of the District's worst schools deep in the heart of the inner city to the Wilson School, one of the city's best.  Located in a solidly white, upper middle class, professional ward, Wilson defied the city's homogenizing, 'democratic' reforms which allocated millions on special education and little on the gifted and talented. Parents compensated for this bias and made way for their bright, ambitious children through aggressive PTA involvement and parent advocacy. 

The many lawyers in the neighborhood saw to it that parental investment in resource teachers was protected, and the brightest children could learn quickly at math, reading, science, and logic. 

The liberal city council, the even more progressive school board, and the teachers' union mounted their own defense of cooperative learning and advantages for the less able, and won a court battle in which the presiding judge ruled that such parental involvement went far beyond cooperation and invaded the right of the city to mandate educational programs it saw fit to administer. 

So, the Mannings took their son out of Wilson and enrolled him in a special elementary school in Virginia, a feeder for the Thomas Jefferson School for Math and Science, one of the countries best-known, and best-performing competitive public schools. 

Christopher thrived there, for it was a place where there were no artificial barriers to ability.  If a child like him was able to read at a fifth grade level, he was matched with others of the same ability and grouped accordingly.  The same went for math, science, and logic. 

Competition was encouraged at the school - the usual public school emphasis on self-esteem, coloring within the lines, multiple intelligences was completely absent, and children were taught to reach beyond what they thought possible and to test their abilities against others. The familiar 'Good job!' support of the mediocre was absent and stars were given only for the highest, objective achievement. 

The school of course came under criticism for its approach to learning, for instilling an elitist sense of privilege among the all white and Asian students enrolled there.  How would they ever learn empathy, consideration, and acceptance of those in society who had fewer advantages? If tax dollars were to be spent, then they should be apportioned according to need, not privilege. 

The principal of the school was not just an educational administrator, but politically connected; and despite the overwhelmingly liberal cast of the county, he was able to maintain an even keel and keep the naysayers at bay.  He was convinced that it was the best and brightest who should benefit most from tax dollars, for they would be the ones who would contribute most to society. 

He held his own against charges of white supremacy, elitism and racism.  He was eloquent in his advocacy for the most gifted and used to best advantage his political connections with the biggest investors in the burgeoning high-tech corridor of the county whose children were attending his school. 

In the next election, the county turned surprisingly Republican and conservative.  Virginia's southern and southwestern counties had always voted Republican but for different reasons.  Rural 'bass boat' Republicanism was not the kind emerging in Northern Virginia where it was focused on just the issues of excellence, individualism, and opportunity promoted by the principal.  The county was by no means a conservative enclave, but it at least emerged from its uniformly progressive cocoon. 

Christopher's school of course was not the only public school in the nation which had refused the cant and specious obligations of the advocates of progressive education. Not surprisingly 'competitive' schools in Texas and Florida proliferated where conservative government openly supported them. 

'Only the best for Texas' was the rallying cry of one of the state's conservative legislators, a man up from poverty in West Texas whose tenure in the state legislator was only a stepping stone to higher office.  He had taken nothing from the public trough, never once had his family relied on welfare, food stamps, or public 'generosity'.  He had made his way thanks to native intelligence, ambition, and energy; and the thousands of children like him, born at the right end of the bell curve, should not have to suffer the indignity of being told they were just like everyone else, thrown into a lumpen proletariat of mediocrity. 

The movement, thanks to Florida and Texas educators gained traction, and despite the opposition - there was nothing that infuriated progressives more than favoring the best not the least - the program expanded. 

This was helped by recent Supreme Court rulings restricting affirmative action, the most racially biased, corrosive, and destructive initiative in American higher education.  Thousands of unqualified students were admitted to universities and colleges, failed miserably despite intensive remedial education, and dropped out in debt and with no qualifications for entry into society.  These students had taken the places of those more qualified and with more social and academic potential. 

Since those rulings, schools like Christopher's were no longer under the same scrutiny and suffered less political opprobrium.  It was increasingly recognized that favoring the best and the brightest was indeed in America's interest - in everyone's interest. 

Christopher who had begun to lose his interest in study because of the depressing, enforced educational communitarianism of his old school, brightened immediately in his new, fostering environment.  In due course he went on to Thomas Jefferson, MIT, and Stanford's post-graduate program in advanced mathematics.  He never looked back. 

Thanks to the experience of Christopher Manning and the principal of the high-end public school in Virginia, the move to privatize K-12 education gained attention and currency.  The public system as currently configured was beneficial to no one.  In the District of Columbia alone, the truancy rate was over 50 percent, barely 25 percent of students read and did math at grade level, and the parents of more able students had either watched their children suffer or found the means to transfer them. 

Won't privatization lead to a sink hole of impoverished, low-performing public schools where the most able students have fled to better offerings leaving the least able alone?  Yes, but that sink hole will not be any worse or deeper than it now is.  There will always be a bell curve and the best and the brightest will always be at one end and the least able on the other.  All the best intentions of liberal educators cannot change that calculus. 

Christopher Manning prospered and so did everyone around him.  He was one of Darwin's fittest, and society, part of that evolutionary algorithm responded.