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Pastimes : Neocon's Seminar Thread -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: TigerPaw who wrote (937)	9/8/2003 6:35:58 AM
From: GUSTAVE JAEGER	Respond to of 1112

Re: In the ancient Chinese reforms I understand they used written tests, but the answers were recopied so no handwriting could be identified and no names or other identifying marks were on the test until after it was graded and the selection (to the bureacracy) was made. The U.S. instead gives "points" for legacy [read: race]. Again, from the Lemann interview: Meritocracy and affirmative action are part of the same system. They were invented by the same people more or less. And the purpose of them is to create or engineer through testing and the higher education system an elite to sit atop the society. Meritocracy, what we call meritocracy, is a sort of a particular system of picking people for that elite on one set of abilities. Affirmative action is trying to twist the dials a bit to get more minority representation into the meritocracy--the meritocratic elite. So they're not opposites at all. They're sort of one system. And then the second system piggy backing on top of this first. Conant believed too many people were going to college in the 1930's. And consistently advocated cutting the number of people who went to college. So this system was not started by people who wanted to very broadly expand educational opportunity. It was started by people who wanted to create an educationally derived elite. That's the sort of kernel assumption in the system. No, this fight over affirmative action tends to be a fight between people who have bought into that assumption. The Shape of the River does not really question the premise that there should be a kind of anointed group who go to highly selective schools and are put on the track to something better than everybody else. It just says you should use affirmative action in choosing those people. But, you should still have the elite. The opponents of affirmative action say, don't use affirmative action. But, they, too, buy into the idea that's how you should have this kind of chosen elite in this country. The really radical position would be to say, 'You know what? We shouldn't have an educationally derived elite. That's not a good idea.' When John Adams got the letter from Jefferson saying this country should have a natural aristocracy. He wrote back and said, no, no, no, that's a bad idea. Because, the point is not that it's a natural aristocracy, but that it's an aristocracy. This is a democracy. It's not supposed to have an aristocracy. So, as long as you are wedded to the idea, I really think after many years with this subject that the idea of having a liberal, almost radically democratic and classless society built around the idea of selecting an elite at an early age to go to fancy colleges is just unworkable. This system just does not, in and of itself, promote democracy. Democracy is sort of a separate good that should be promoted in different ways. ___________________________________