Matt Breunig recently released a thoughtful essay on the importance of standardized tests for college admissions. I thought it would be worthwhile to respond to it because it’s about time that I wrote something about our education system after a year and a half of trying my hardest not to think about it.
I largely agree with Breunig’s argument that test-optional admissions for highly competitive universities favor the scions of the rich and well-educated. But we might as well point out the obvious: the whole country favors the scions of the rich and well-educated. This is beyond dispute, but it should be elaborated in the case of our education system.
Living in a capitalist country our bourgeois dictators instill their characteristic bourgeois greed and bourgeois cunning into their spawn from an early age. These traits help ensure their children’s success in the capitalist economy, and their children, if successful, will pass on their class vices to their children. So on and so forth that their line may feed off the superprofits of the world forever. Yes, just think of the Roosevelts, The Kennedys, The Pritzkers, or The Godfather. Individually, the bourgeois seeks to replicate their personal acquisition of social privileges in their children. It’s the American Dream, and that Dream is realized in our education system.
However, schools (shorthand for the education system generally) also serve another purpose. Since the natural reproduction of class privilege is not always successful (anyone may have a stupid kid), schools must also serve as a mode of social reproduction. That is, to instill the values of capitalist and bourgeois society into all children, not just those of the wealthy and powerful. This is completed in two stages: in our K-12 schooling and then at college. K-12 consists of the acquisition of cultural capital, accompanied by the exertion of powerful social, institutional, and disciplinary pressures on juveniles, while college is where the opportunity to collect human and social capital is distributed to those who have successfully demonstrated the acquisition of cultural capital during high school.
These two elements are the main purposes of schooling. A conveyor belt of privilege moves bourgeois children into positions of power with schools serving as mere quality control, while the rest of the assembly line manufactures the remainder of the population into humble citizen-subjets; but a few are eventually allowed into positions of power. Schools are the backbone of our class society. Part of the central nervous system through which the whole body is controlled, and anything may be accomplished.
Returning to Matt Bruenig’s essay, I agree with him that the admission process of our most illustrious educational institutions should include standardized tests. But we should ask ourselves why? Is it so that more noble proletarian children may grow up to enter the detested journalist/blogger/politician-industrial complex? As socialists, our goal should not be to guarantee the personal flourishing of the thrifty, intelligent, and young “deserving poor” within the bourgeois system, but to place them at the head of our class movement.
Therefore, I agree firstly because, as everyone should be, I am personally sympathetic to the cause of intelligent young people struggling to find a place in the world. But also because it is a window into the inequality of the admissions process. If we allow admissions processes to be obscured by soft factors and interviews it makes it possible for universities to exclude otherwise qualified students for vague reasons, creating the cover for universities to put in place patently unjust policies like the infamous Jewish quota of the twentieth century. A more transparent admissions process allows public scrutiny into the self-selection of the bourgeois. There will always be unknowns, but a more-or-less concrete number allows for at least some comparison.
To argue strongly in favor of strictly merit-based admissions to Ivy League schools is to go too far. As far as undergraduate studies go, there is not much human capital to be gained from attending a private school as opposed to a land-grant university or other public institution. This is demonstrated by the fact that the cream of these institutions always curdles into the drooling dullards and spooks at the helm of our failing state, perfectly aligned with the general dimness of all Americans. In short, the main benefit of elite universities is the social capital that their branding provides. Knowing that, I cannot imagine how a socialist organizer, or anyone for that matter, would have a more fulfilling life knowing Obama, Alan Dershowitz, or some other character.
Signed,
Josiah (Bloss)
Editorial addendum: Freddie deBoer’s recent substack argued that tests do make admissions fairer, but this is like asking for fair admission to the mafia: the problem is not fairness but the system itself. People who call themselves socialists used to know this.
Normal Thoughts 