Well, I’ve re-read it, taking your views into consideration and actually using them to help me speed up the process of identifying particular points of interest. FWIW, it is a long article; someone in a different publication printed it out and it came to over thirty typewritten pages. So, it’s target rich, to say the least.
If you’re like me and you’re used to only reading Brooks’ NYT op-eds, it comes as something of a surprise that he’s actually capable of weighing both sides of an argument, something there’s not always space to do in a medium that favors epigrams.
Thus,
Conant’s reforms should have led to an American golden age. The old WASP aristocracy had been dethroned. A more just society was being built. Some of the fruits of this revolution are pretty great. Over the past 50 years, the American leadership class has grown smarter and more diverse. Classic achiever types such as Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, Jamie Dimon, Ketanji Brown Jackson, Lin-Manuel Miranda, Pete Buttigieg, Julián Castro, Sundar Pichai, Jeff Bezos, and Indra Nooyi have been funneled through prestigious schools and now occupy key posts in American life.
Is coupled with:
Researchers at the University of Chicago and Stanford measured America’s economic growth per person from 1960 to 2010 and concluded that up to two-fifths of America’s increased prosperity during that time can be explained by better identification and allocation of talent.
In terms of this,
Students are trained to be good hurdle-clearers. We shower them with approval or disapproval depending on how they measure up on any given day. Childhood and adolescence are thus lived within an elaborate system of conditional love. Students learn to ride an emotional roller coaster—congratulating themselves for clearing a hurdle one day and demoralized by their failure the next. This leads to an existential fragility: If you don’t keep succeeding by somebody else’s metrics, your self-worth crumbles.
I’m not sure why it’s controversial. We argue about this all the time right here on CC: Is tiger parenting the norm among upper middle class parents? - Parents Forum - College Confidential Forums
And lastly,
The history of the meritocracy is the history of different definitions of ability. But how do we come up with a definition of ability that is better and more capacious than the one (James B.) Conant left us? We can start by noting the flaws at the core of his definition. He and his peers were working at a time when people were optimistic that the rational application of knowledge in areas such as statistics, economics, psychology, management theory, and engineering could solve social problems. They admired technicians who valued quantification, objectification, optimization, efficiency.
I kind of think this is what’s really setting people’s hair on fire. It comes across as an attack on quants. My feeling here is that had he used the word “tinkering” or manipulating or something else to describe what he really meant to convey (what ever happened to just plain, old ordinary chutzpah?) he might have lost fewer readers. At least among those who stayed with him that far into the piece. Yes, what follows is an extended discussion of one set of tinkerers - largely, Harvard and other Ivy League social scientists - as they do a number on another set: Harvard and other Ivy League quants. That, IMO, is the real political battle underlying the article.