Americans are incorrigibly attached to four propositions, each true in a way, each false often, but, if taken together in the following order and believed, as if each one as stated created legitimate grounds for the next, they become a cumulative disaster:

1. There are important things to know and legitimate, prescribed, and necessary ways to reason about them. Fumigants, after all, burn the skin, and it is false to say they do not.
2. Institutionalized education knows how to teach both what people need to know, making them experts in the real world, and how they should think, making them, in full preen for all to see, intelligent and smart.
3. There are easily available tests of knowledge and reasoning, and they can accurately identify who has learned the most and should be rewarded.
4. The United States is a developed meritocracy in which the best people—those who have a strong education and perform well on tests—are given the best jobs and the most rewards.

There are extensive literatures exploring how the last three propositions are more and less true, under what circumstances, and with what consequences. The results are not pretty, and getting worse by the day. What is untrue about the last three propositions: institutionalized education delivers only a top half of smart types at every step up the educational ladder, the assessment system enforces the hierarchy with little regard for either who knows what or how their knowledge makes a difference, and the full functional fantasy of a meritocracy has dissolved in the increasingly divided economy that serves the few over the many. If the propositions build on each other in order, a critique of the first might topple the rest. This chapter extends an old critique of the first proposition and carries it forward to the other three.

 

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