The “cult of smart” is everywhere. The phrase, which is both the title of Fredrik deBoer’s new book and his term for our collective obsession with intelligence, is an apt descriptor for a societywide phenomenon. Geekdom and the celebration of academic credentials have become inescapable features of media and popular culture. Despite their ideological differences, both the Bush and Obama administrations made sending more children to college a central goal of their education policies. During a recent Lakers-Raptors broadcast, color commentator Doris Burke gravely intoned that “there’s no more powerful agent for change in society than education.”
DeBoer, a lefty blogger with a contrarian streak, wants to change all that. He calls his book a “prayer for the untalented” — the children who have been left behind by our educational arms race not because they are lazy or make bad choices but because they suffer from an innate lack of academic ability. The Cult of Smart forcefully argues that we’re too fixated on “smart kids” at the expense of those unequipped for classroom success. The book is less persuasive the farther it strays from the realm of education policy, but deBoer’s central point is compelling.
When we think about variables outside a child’s control that influence future success, the first things that come to mind are family, neighborhood, and other environmental and socioeconomic factors. Some of these could, at least theoretically, be addressed by public policy, but deBoer is interested in a more uncomfortable truth. He marshals a wealth of evidence to argue that genetic aptitude has a decisive and underappreciated role in shaping children’s academic and professional outcomes.
DeBoer takes aim at the smart kids, from their tendency to marry within their social stratum to their peculiar consumption habits and their campus antics, but his book is clearly written for the sort of person who did well in school. The Cult of Smart takes the commonsensical observation that children’s academic careers are profoundly shaped by their innate ability and buttresses it with mountains of research into human genetics. That this obvious fact has to be laundered through statistics and peer-reviewed research is a testament to the smart kids’ power. American elites tend to resist arguments that their success has been preordained by genetics, but they’ve also been conditioned to accept the verdict of science.
Fortunately, the book is more readable than a dry academic tome. In true blogger fashion, deBoer draws on an eclectic array of sources to make his case, from academic work to fellow blogger Scott Alexander to an anonymous contributor to the website “Edushyster” to the YouTube channel “Cuck Philosophy.” This mix is a reflection of deBoer’s own idiosyncratic background. Although he describes himself as a smart kid, personal asides reveal someone who took a more circuitous route through the meritocracy, including an early stop at a commuter college. I suspect the book’s critique of our educational establishment would be less cutting if deBoer was another impeccably credentialed insider.
DeBoer’s diagnosis is persuasive, but his proposed cures are radical. The book starts with some interesting ideas about education policy before making a case for Medicare for All, universal basic income, a federal jobs guarantee, and finally, communism. I will not rehearse the familiar conservative arguments against redistribution and revolution here, but I’m skeptical that a more egalitarian state, even a communist utopia, would topple the cult of smart. A complex, technologically advanced society will always need people with brains to keep things running, and status competition is a human constant. As a teacher who wants to make schools more hospitable to a wide range of students, I would have preferred more about some of deBoer’s intriguing reform proposals, including lowering the dropout age to 12 and getting rid of high school algebra requirements, and less about the coming revolution.
DeBoer is an unapologetic lefty, but he may find a more receptive audience on the Right. At least rhetorically, President Trump has shifted the Republican center of gravity toward working-class voters. Rising conservative stars such as Sen. Josh Hawley now tout the value of trade schools and technical education. Chris Arnade has written against the idea of sending more children to college for American Compass, a newly launched think tank aimed at moving conservative policy in a populist direction. As the Democratic Party absorbs more educated, upwardly mobile voters, the divide between the smart kids and the rest may become a new partisan fault line.
If the GOP becomes more skeptical of the smart kids, it will mark the return of a paternalistic, anti-egalitarian strain of conservatism that has found unexpected support in the new science of genetics. A worthy companion to The Cult of Smart is 13 Ways of Going on a Field Trip, a personal reflection on teaching from the pseudonymous blogger Spotted Toad. Toad’s book includes several moving passages about working with children who just aren’t very good at school, recalling deBoer’s own experience tutoring a painfully nice student who just couldn’t figure out long division. By the end of the book, Toad has stumbled on an evocative model for what our education system should look like. A good school, he writes, should be a rainforest, accommodating a wide range of academic niches, as opposed to just the smart, the driven, and the academically gifted.
I was particularly taken by this idea because I teach English in a foreign country, and there is nothing like conversation in a second language to expose students’ varying levels of intellectual ability. Some children effortlessly pick up English from YouTube, Twitch, and Netflix. Others still struggle after years in an intensive bilingual program. There are few things more painful than watching a teenager who has been studying English since elementary school fumble over the simplest of sentences.
This summer, I tutored a former student for an intermediate English exam. He had been a ghostly presence in my classes, largely uninterested in spoken activities, vocabulary worksheets, and the short stories I so enjoy teaching. But outside of the classroom, he was a lot of fun. He liked to talk trash after blocking my shots in pickup basketball. He was always friendly and talkative in the hallways. He took the English exam three times, and despite our best efforts, he just couldn’t pass. But I still remember our time together fondly. And like deBoer, I pray for an education system that is more accommodating of students like him.
Will Collins is a high school teacher in Eger, Hungary.
