[Freddie deBoer] Human Capital is Real, and Some People Are Smarter Than Other People: until we acknowledge that, there can be no coherent discussion of education

When I set out to write my book, I knew the idea of intrinsic or inherent academic talent, an innate predisposition to succeed or fail, would be controversial, and was prepared for that controversy. The repeated reassurances that the book rejected race science, which annoyed some readers so deeply, were in part an attempt to ward off deliberate misunderstandings of what I was saying. (That is, that individual talents can vary thanks to genetics without that implying that group differences are genetic.) What I was consistently surprised by, though, was the number of people who responded to my book by insisting that there is no such thing as a summative difference in intelligence or academic ability - that is, that not only are there no inherent predispositions towards being good or bad at school, no one even becomes better or worse, no one is smarter than another. There are no measurable differences in what we know or can do intellectually. Or, in some tellings, no one knows what smart is, it’s some sort of ineffable quality we can’t pin down, or the very idea of “smart” is a racist Western imperialist hegemonic heteronormative con.

I find this all unhelpful. Narrow down as specifically as you can and no one can persist in denying that there are differences in summative ability. Can anyone really claim that I can do calculus as well as a math professor who teaches it? Because I can’t do calculus at all! Of course people have different things they know she understand and can do intellectually. I’m not naturally talented at math. I don't like it but it's true. And easily quantifiable. If there were no such distinctions school would not exist.

But the will to obscure this fact is strong. In many fields, the academics at the top are busily abstracting and mystifying success, the better to insist that no one is bad at what you study. (My old field, writing studies, is filled with academics who believe there is no such thing as being better or worse at writing, which makes you wonder why anyone is paying their salaries.) Every day academics declare that grade are a capitalist plot, tests evil, and the very idea of assessment offensive. But there really are things that you can know and not know in life, and some of them, such as reading, are really important. And in fact we are very good indeed at creating instruments that measure whether you can read or write or do algebra. It’s just that their results are socially inconvenient.

If the concern is saying that there are attributes and abilities in life that matter that are not academic or connected to intelligence, and that they should be taken seriously and rewarded, the news is good, as this is perhaps the core argument of my book. If the concern is saying that being smart is an unhealthy obsession in our society and too essential to having material security, the news is good, as that is perhaps the other way to state the core argument of my book. But I don’t understand why we would pretend that academic or intellectual ability doesn’t exist, and act as though that attitude is a prerequisite to be a progressive person who desires equality of rights, dignity, and human value. As I never get tired of pointing out, traditional left thinkers like Marx never pretended that all of us are equal in our abilities. (“From each according to his abilities” implies the opposite!) What the left pushes for is equality of human value, including across - perhaps especially across - differences in talent. Equal value, equal dignity, and equal right to demand the minimum conditions needed for human flourishing.

We can lawyer about the concept of intrinsic ability as much as we want. (For the record, acknowledging that genes and environment both play important roles in education, and that there are complex interactions between them, does not imply that outcomes are therefore mutable.) We live in a world where some people can do things, intellectually, that are monetarily rewarded and socially valuable, and some people can’t. Our attempts to spread these abilities universally have been an abject failure. Because each of us has a nature, and while we’re all good at something, we’re not all good at the same things, and capitalism most certainly does not reward all gifts equally, and so much the worse for us. (Indeed, this is the very reason redistribution is necessary.) Yes, intelligence is multivariate and complex and exists in many dimensions. But so is love, and no one pretends that love therefore does not exist. We are already asking the impossible of our education system, expecting it to reward excellence and create equality at the same time. Let’s not burden it even further by pretending we don’t know some people are better and some at worse at school.