Pamela Cantor, M.D., Reflects on David Brooks’ “How the Ivy League Broke America”
“A meritocracy should discover talent and skills of all kinds and grow it.”
PAMELA CANTOR, M.D.
November 20, 2024
Several things strike me about David Brooks' admirable cover story for The Atlantic, “How the Ivy League Broke America.” First is the decision, which I believe was correct, to build a meritocracy by taking a higher education system designed to keep everyone but aristocratic families out and crack it wide open.
Unfortunately, as Harvard President James Conant and his Ivy League peers sought to “get rid of admissions criteria based on bloodlines and breeding and replace them with criteria based on brainpower” to “construct a society that maximized talent,” they devised a new system to select and sort. Yes, some kids made it through who would not have before, but how many Einsteins, Malalas, and Mozarts have we missed?
Brooks rightly points out the overrating of intelligence, the undervaluing of crucial skills such as relationship skills, agency, and curiosity, and the value of multi-dimensional assessment techniques to understand rather than rank an individual.
Today, we know many things that Conant could not have known in the mid-20th century about human development, learning science, the developing brain, and even the developing genome.
“A meritocracy should discover talent and skills of all kinds and grow it. It should reveal vulnerability and heal it. We have the knowledge to do this and so much more. Let’s use it. ”
Back then, we believed that genes were the drivers of who we become, including our intelligence. Today, we know that genes are developing structures, turned on and off like a dimmer switch. Context is the driver of who we become, the expression of our genes, and the force that harnesses the brain’s incredible malleability to heal and grow.
We believed that talent was scarce and distributed along a Bell Curve with most students in the middle. The Bell Curve is a statistical theory that has been disproven many times, most cogently in Stephen Jay Gould’s The Mismeasure of Man. Talent is, in fact, everywhere and there are many pathways to develop it.
For the better part of a century, we believed that an average score stood for an individual. Today we know that an average rarely represents an individual – a compelling story that no one tells better than Todd Rose, in his illuminating book The End of Average.
And we believed that a factory model requiring lots of memorization was a good and efficient way of educating kids. As Brooks argues, “We need to stop treating people as brains on a stick and pay more attention to what motivates people…. we want people with enough intrinsic desire to learn and grow all the days of their life.”
Our education system was designed with the false belief that the potential of a young person was knowable in advance. Today we know that we can’t see potential unless we design the environments to reveal it. A meritocracy should discover talent and skills of all kinds and grow it. It should reveal vulnerability and heal it. We have the knowledge to do this and so much more. Let’s use it.