Education and the Elite

Someone just told me, "The goal of education is not to create an elite, but to provide people with the knowledge necessary for them to then help improve society."

This is an excellent topic for an essay. It should be set for an exam question or something — just tack on the word, "Discuss."

I would say that most people would want to believe that the goal of education is not to create an elite. Some of those people might genuinely believe this to be true. As for the knowledge necessary for them to then help to improve society, that's moot — what -is- the knowledge necessary to help improve society?

Clearly, some knowledge (for example, that which helps us understand society, how it works and what makes people's lives better) is likely to be helpful. Of course, the Marxist-type philosopher would argue that universities think that whatever makes a society value a university-style education more is the kind of knowledge that should be propagated. That's partially true, as we shall see.

The thing is that we all know that humans come in a bell-curve for most things. When babies are born, they pretty quickly prove to be differentiable for genetic reasons along many dimensions of capability and potential. Some will be taller, some will be shorter, and little short of drastic re-engineering with chemicals and nasty interventions will change that.

It is the same with displayed intelligence — everyone has intelligence if they have a brain, but without cradle-to-grave (or at least, birth-to-early-adolescence) environmental optimisation, a bell curve is obtained long before the usual university-going age.

This means that those likely to benefit from going to high school (say the top 80% of any cohort, to be generous) will now certainly have diverged from those less likely. The most divergent will be able to benefit most from going to college, and then to higher education. Eventually, divergence will string out the bell-curve even more, and the 'high end' will have become an elite.

There are two interesting counter-arguments.

One is that people can do better without going to university. True. Those are outliers. They are even more of an elite, being able to treat the world as a university, than those who do go to university. If we set the criterion at 'could not have made it into any university or benefited from one, but did better than anybody who could', this elite becomes even more elite. I don't think you can find anyone like that.

One is that universities are like hospitals or parks. They are public goods, since they are supposed to make people better (more useful etc) members of society. So everyone should be allowed to enter universities. Well, that's like saying everyone should be allowed to enter hospitals and make use of hospital services whether they can benefit from hospital services or not. We instinctively differentiate between hospitals and parks because parks are cheaper to maintain per square foot, if you include things like power consumption, water, staffing, insurance and (oh yes) medical services. So we can indeed make universities like parks if we make them less staffed, less powered, less service-providing.

So yes, I think that education has the largely unintended (but sometimes fully intended) goal of creating an elite. It's just that most of the educated have been educated not to think of it that way. Which is... odd.

Egalitarianism Fails

Egalitarianism is one of those philosophies of the community that defeats itself. In principle, it's a lovely ideal: equality in the social, political, economic, and legal sense. For all to be equal under the law, in society; for all to have the same access and the same treatment; these are the hopes of egalitarianism.

But the problem can be reduced to a simple point. There are only two levels at which all humanity can be said to be equal: all or nothing. At any other level, there would be differences. So, as many philosophers have pointed out, Death is the great leveller — it makes all things equal, whether by complete loss of all things or by the attainment of all things.

It's of course possible for society to make the vain attempt to defeat the natural biological tendency to discriminate and differentiate. It never works out, because all humans are not equal and never will be.

But, hang on, someone might argue, why can't we do things like make the poor richer and feed the hungry? If everyone were equally well-off, that would be good, wouldn't it?

Actually, yes, it would be. But humans aren't like that. Godliness with contentment is great gain, said a 1st-century philosopher. But humans in general are not gods, and are never content. Nobody wants to be equally well-off; at the very best, we want to be differently well-off. Give any two people the same amount of resources, and they will definitely do different things with them, for all humans are not equal.

So at what level are humans equal? Surely we have a common humanity?

No, we don't. We can try for things like equal opportunities and equal rights, but the most adept (in both good and bad ways) among us will always come out on top because they are better at manipulating things. No two humans are the same; ergo, no two humans are equal. Forcibly making things equal has Harrison Bergeron consequences.

But even in a Harrison Bergeron society, where the authorities make everyone behave as if they were equal, having that authority makes a person different. Only in utter anarchy would things be equal, if you define anarchy as having no person in authority over another. That, however, is worse. The removal of societal hierarchies leads to biological competition, which is even less forgiving and less egalitarian.

Which brings us to the debate on elitism in education. If egalitarianism fails, then elitism triumphs. Education systems must be set up to channel the elite, not corral them or confine them or Harrison-Bergeron them. If people are 'more fit' for some purposes, so be it. It doesn't mean the rest have to make themselves worse by spending time in envy and discontent.

But they will. Because humans are like that.