We are sacrificing our young to the education machine. Our children lose their childhoods to endless hours of classrooms and homework. This must end.
A true childhood is lived wholly in the moment. Concern about the future is an adult’s burden.
The intrusion of digital stimulation into the quiet of childhood robs children of wandering thoughts, of their own strange myths and little misunderstandings. The premature introduction of an education sends forth facts that cut mercilessly through dreams and fantasies. What room for wonder when all is laid bare?
A utilitarian education is necessarily future-facing. It tests and measures and shapes. Under evaluation, there is little room for innocence. Children’s misconceptions must be trimmed off, their wandering thoughts focused.
And so dies what Jean Cocteau calls “that world whose momentous, heroic, mysterious quality is fed on airy nothings, whose substance is so ill-fitted to withstand the brutal touch of adult inquisition.”
Yet our hand is forced. In the society we have built, this little death has become necessary. The responsible parent gives their children a modern education, which starts early.
To get a good job, you need a good degree. To get into a good college, you need exceptional grades. To get exceptional grades, you must study.
This desperate rat race is rigged against our young. The college selection process favors those groups that are willing to sacrifice their children to a brutal study-culture, or those groups that don’t need to, because their minority identity renders exceptional grades unnecessary.
This system is the result of the progressive project to obscure reality. Due to constraints on employers’ ability to test candidates for intelligence, organizations must crudely infer candidates’ aptitude from their credentials. This mechanism can be manipulated by the Left, which controls the credential machine.
The power that control of this system affords is tremendous. By manipulating the selection mechanism that sits at the heart of our society, progressives can ensure that leftist-favored groups receive artificial advantages, and that anyone else that wants to benefit has to spend a fortune on an education that achieves little except to propagandize students and to enrich the Left.
To stand a chance of entering the elite, our young need exceptional grades on tests that require rote memorization. This means a childhood spent locked in the classroom, to the particular detriment of young men, who are ill-suited to this stultifying environment.
Even if the recent Supreme Court ruling does prove to reduce race-based admissions, most of these undesirable structural effects will persist. The rat race will continue, and the colleges will continue to grow richer and more progressive.
If we could find a way to circumvent and starve this system, the ramifications would be profound. But the answer is not a simple one; we cannot simply refuse to play the game. If we suddenly cease optimizing our children’s educational prestige without making other preparations then they will fail to secure strong careers.
Before we fix education we must fix hiring. It must become standard across all our own businesses to conduct our own assessments, rather than unthinkingly continuing to rely on legacy credentials controlled by our political foes. We must have the confidence to interface directly with reality where they do not.
This is easier said than done. In my former professional life, I led teams that hired elite software engineers. Despite all the flaws with the college system, checking which program an entry-level applicant had graduated from was by far the most efficient heuristic to determine competency. This is now standard at all the big tech companies, even those that once had more creative hiring processes.
To supplant this system we must have a mechanism that is efficient and precise. This mechanism exists - if we have the confidence to embrace it.
IQ tests are, in fact, legal - if the right conditions are met.
The most significant ruling about the legality of cognitive tests was a 1971 case argued before the Supreme Court, ‘Griggs v. Duke Power Co.’. It centered around the question of whether Duke Power’s selection process for its best paid departments was legal. The company had mandated a mechanical aptitude test, an IQ test, and a high school diploma for applicants.
The process resulted in significant disparate impact between ethnic groups. 58% of whites passed the required standard on the aptitude tests, compared to 6% of blacks.
The Supreme Court ruled that the process was illegal under Title VII of the Civil Rights Act. Specifically, the Court declared that the disparate impact caused by the tests would only be justifiable in the event that the company was able to demonstrate that the tests were “reasonably related” to the jobs at hand. If the tests had been shown to be a "reasonable measure of job performance", they could qualify as a business necessity. However, given that the tests administered by Duke Power were generic and the company had conducted no study of their relationship to performance, the Court ruled them as unjustified and therefore illegal.
Various other rulings have followed in the subsequent decades. From these, a common set of criteria that cognitive aptitude tests must satisfy have emerged. These apply to all employers that are subject to Title VII of the Civil Rights Act (ie. those companies that employ 15 or more employees) and wish to apply tests that result in disparate impact.
The primary criteria that a legal test must satisfy are that they are given to all candidates equally, that they are relevant to the role being applied for, that they are professionally developed and validated, and that they are not established to deliberately discriminate against protected classes. Tests that satisfy these conditions have fared well in court, and continue to be used by large organizations.
These requirements can be satisfied without undue effort. Many small consultancies exist to help businesses achieve them. We can establish more of these consultancies if necessary. What is lacking is awareness of this possibility, a culture of applying these tests, and the will to challenge conventional processes. This must change.
High-quality cognitive aptitude tests are more effective at predicting job performance than any other selection measure. Applying them benefits all parties: employers get better employees, and our young can get straight to work, rather than accruing debt and wasting time in boring, propagandistic lectures.
These tests need not be the only improvement to our hiring processes. Family businesses, apprenticeships, personal recommendations, and matchmaking services like New Founding and EXIT will all play a role. The small percentage of youth that are genuinely called to continue their studies well into their adulthood will be free to do so at parallel educational institutions like Hillsdale, as the prestige of an Ivy League credential will become increasingly irrelevant.
The education that we do provide our young will be exciting, teaching children to think, rather than endlessly memorize. As Plutarch tells us, “the mind does not require filling like a bottle, but rather, like wood, it only requires kindling”. This fire will be lit with athletics, mathematics, music, and philosophy. It must be joyous!
“For, truth to tell, dancing in all its forms cannot be excluded from the curriculum of all noble education: dancing with the feet, with ideas, with words, and need I add that one must also be able to dance with the pen”
-Nietzsche
Breaking the education machine will allow us to give our children a proper childhood, with plenty of time for adventure, play, freedom, romance, and beauty. A lovely childhood is the foundation upon which our children learn to love their people and their place.
In the words of George Eliot: “We could never have loved the earth so well if we had had no childhood in it, if it were not the earth where the same flowers come up again every spring that we used to gather with our tiny fingers as we sat lisping to ourselves on the grass… What novelty is worth that sweet monotony where everything is known and loved because it is known?”
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Sic transit imperium,
Johann
Johann, I understand your writing here as a noble effort to end run the social, academic, and corporate barricades that have been long in place and used as an expedient culling tool in the hiring practices of elite institutions. If the underlying objective is to win jobs for our children in high profile competitive jobs in these elite secular organizations....then maybe we should consider our aims. Perhaps, rather than fomenting revolution in established elite organizations with our cadre of outstanding noblemen and women...we should rather create our own competitive institutions, organizations, and corporations from scratch, with faith as the cornerstone. Wasn't this the tactic and Raison d'être of our forefathers? Is integration with elites the true and righteous path forward? Or is now the time for all good men to come to the aid of their country...by building unapologetic excellence in our own faith-based elite institutions? Something tells me... That with God at the center, our children will flourish and excel in exactly the type of free-wheeling, homeschool or private situation that is tailored to their original design...to kindle the very fire that Plutarch spoke of and break free of the chains of so-called modern schooling. All one needs to do is read a simple paragraph of Jefferson's writings to see how dumb we have become in 200 years of modern public schooling.
Good stuff!