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Re: Best and Brightest

By Robert Stacy McCain on 11.22.08 @ 1:03AM

Joseph, at some visceral level, my John Bender-like rage against the overprivileged and underexperienced is profoundly personal, and I recognize it as a Jets-vs.-Sharks kind of thing. In a town like D.C., overcrowded with Ivy Leaguers and people with multiple graduate degrees, sneering at snobs is de rigueur for a guy with a state-school B.A. It's about morale.

"Ivy" and "evil" aren't necessarily synonyms. The very best intern who ever passed through The Washington Times in my 10 years there was Laura Vanderkam of Princeton. Her first day, she got an assignment at 11 a.m. and filed 700 words by 2:30 p.m. Joe Curl -- now a White House correspondent but then an assistant national editor -- opened the story in the queue, read through it and said, "Damn. She can write." The story required almost no editing at all. An astonishing thing to any editor who's ever had to deal with journalism interns. (BTW, Laura is a homeschool alumna from Indiana.)

In the matter of SAT vs. GPA, Brooks is correct. Competition for top grades in high school has become insane, especially in posh suburban districts and at the tonier private schools, where there are lots of kids angling for elite university admissions. I mean, OK, if you're aiming for med school or planning a career as a research scientist, acquiring the grind mentality at an early age might be a necessary evil. But beyond that, a kid ought to have some kind of life outside of books and school. The world would be a better place if more of these "Young Leaders Of Tomorrow" types were spending their evenings and weekends working the grill at Burger King or stocking the shelves at Food Lion.

Intense academic pressure on bright kids is unnecessary and misguided. Take a smart kid who's going to score a 700+ verbal SAT no matter what. As long as he's going to school, doing the work, and staying out of trouble, he'll get into some good college somewhere and do just fine in life. And even if he starts running with a bad crowd, turns into a semi-hooligan and barely graduates high school (ahem), it's not the end of the world. If it weren't for underachievers, slackers and discipline cases, state universities would enroll only industrious bright-normals.

I'm not saying that smart kids should be allowed to skate through high school, but being a teenager is tough enough without a Harvard-Or-Die burden.

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been around the track| 11.22.08 @ 11:44AM

Without intending to sound arrogant or self-satisfied, my own children's educational experiences suggest a great deal of how students can and should maneuver through high school. Overbearing and critical parents will undermine anyone. Parents with bright children who guide, but don't push, will be rewarded greatly by their children's achievements--academic and personal.
Fortunately, my wife and I have been the latter and two people could not have more successful young adults than we do. Others we know who have been obsessed have had children who have faired less well, even those , like ours, wh have attented elite schools as undergrads and graduate/professional students.

Eirenic Rebel| 11.22.08 @ 1:17PM

I appreciate these posts of yours, both here and at your own site.

I've often wondered if there is really such thing as a natural A. By that I mean the innate ability to score an A with little, if any, effort.

The only time it every happened to me was in a literature class when I penned an imaginary account of the suicide of Judas Iscariot, note and all.

It really surprised my teacher, who had thought of me as quite an unremarkable student.

I don't harbor any envy of those more intelligent than me; it's a gift. One can be proud of intense effort and discipline, but it's as stupid to be proud of the gift of a great intellect as it is to be proud of great beauty.

Neither is in your control or in your power to create.

Back in October, the Boston Globe published a piece on grade inflation. It cited former senator Hank Brown who lamented that grade inflation "is a huge problem."

The piece was titled Doesn't Anybody Get a C Anymore? It begins:

"When did professors lose control of their grades? And when will their schools help them take it back?"

It continues:

"Harvard University is the poster campus for academic prestige - and for grade inflation, even though some of its top officials have warned about grade creep. About 15 percent of Harvard students got a B-plus or better in 1950, according to one study. In 2007, more than half of all Harvard grades were in the A range. Harvard declined to release more current data or officially comment for this article. At the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, the average GPA in 2007 was 3.19 (on a four-point scale), up from 3.02 a decade earlier. That "modest increase" simply reflects better students, UMass spokesman Ed Blaguszewski says in an e-mail. "Since our students have been increasingly well-prepared . . . it makes sense that their UMass grades have crept up. Essentially, the profile of the population has changed over time, so we don't consider this to be grade inflation."

"THAT'S CERTAINLY THE MOST COMMON ARGUMENT TO EXPLAIN AWAY grade inflation - smarter students naturally get higher grades. But is it that simple? Privately, many faculty members and administrators say colleges are unwilling to challenge and possibly off end students and their hovering, tuition-paying parents with some tough grade love. And without institutional backing, individual faculty members simply yield to whining students."

"But not everywhere. The most cited - and extreme - case of taking on grade inflation is at Princeton University, which in 2004 directed that A's account for less than 35 percent of undergraduate course grades. From 2004 to 2007, A's (A-plus, A, A-minus) accounted for 40.6 percent of undergraduate course grades, down from 47 percent in the period 2001 to 2004."

I went to Catholic schools, way back when. No Sister of Mercy or priest of the Thomas Order would have countenanced such a thing. They feared students not at all, and their parents even less.

I had an Arab priest who taught comparative religion. Our first assignment was to take on an atheist of our choice. I chose Bertrand Russell. I worked my a** off and I only got a B. He told me he wanted to give me an A because in my research I had unearthed that Russell had a case of halitosis that was so pronounced it was thought to have placed him at insuperable disadvantage with the fairer sex. He said he couldn't do it though, because the rest of my work in the essay wasn't tight enough. Even at the time, I so trusted Fr. A's judgment, that it would have never occurred to me to argue for an A.

In NRO's Uncommon Knowledge, Peter Robinson interviews Thomas Sowell who argues for separation of two worldviews: the constrained and the unconstrained.

Conservatives traditionally hold to a constrained view, recognizing the limitations of humans to better their natures, and building institutions and fashioning laws with that in mind.

The unconstrained view holds to the perfectibility of man, in large part, through messianic leaders and movements that can finally claim the right stuff to make the perfecting of man and history possible.

The unconstrained view is both historically and spiritually illiterate, and represents a point of bifurcation -a secular gnosticism- that is willfully insensate to the historical binding of mankind.

In one of Brooks' columns just before the election he wrote the following:

"(Obama) doesn't seem to need the audience's love. But they need his. The audiences hunger for his affection, while he is calm, appreciative and didactic."

"He doesn't have F.D.R.'s joyful nature or Reagan's happy outlook, but he is analytical. His family is bourgeois. His instinct is to flee the revolutionary gesture in favor of the six-point plan."

This tends towards the unconstrained view in that it simultaneously seeks to pristinate both messiah and mob.

We made great cars in the 50s. It's probably we grew greater intellects as well. It's not just deviancy that's been defined down.

Link for piece on grade inflation: http://tinyurl.com/4j9s8l