Getting an education in the Big Apple: George Packer’s honesty, a parent’s dilemma
It’s easy to mock George Packer for what he writes in this Atlantic essay about choosing a school for his son in New York City.
But I find his essay heartbreaking as well as complex. He’s a well-meaning liberal who checks all the usual liberal boxes, who wants social justice and diversity and is against what he continually refers to as “meritocracy” (as though that’s a bad thing), but is reluctant to make his child pay the price, and is torn about knowing what’s best for his child’s education. We all want the best for our children—at least, we should—and George Packer does. He hasn’t much of a clue what it might be or how to go about obtaining it, and his confusion is understandable in this day and age of the progressive hard left takeover of NYC public schools.
Packer states that he and his wife went to public schools. But he was born in 1960, so he attended in the 60s and 70s. I went to NYC public schools, from kindergarten right through to high school graduation, about ten years prior to Packer. So although we’re of slightly different generations, and no doubt there were some differences in our experience in public schools (his was in San Francisco, and from his description of it in the essay it was significantly better then mine), our experience spent in public schools probably had far more similarities than either of us would have with the experience of a student who attends public schools today in the same places.
The demogaphics in New York City schools were different in my time, for starters. My school was diverse by the standards of the day: students from the projects, low income students of all races, and kids from various ethnic backgrounds, but probably nothing resembling the proportions today. There was a stratified track system and the honors students had all their classes together. Teachers were mostly old and the curriculum was traditional, and pretty challenging for the honors students. There was some violence and some trouble and some family strife, but absolutely nothing on the order of what you find in most city schools now. The atmosphere was far from ideal, and it wasn’t as good as the private school some friends went to, but it wasn’t bad at all. Every year, a number of graduates from my public high school went to elite universities, and others went to not-bad universities, although the majority of students from my high school never went on to college at all or went to a 2-year community college.
I think it was pretty typical of the times, but very different from now. So what Packer was facing when he contemplated a public school system for his son (he was too financially strapped to continue paying the exorbitant fees of the private schools of New York) is something far different than what my parents or his own parents faced.
Here’s Packer, describing his decision to send his son to a specially selected public school that wasn’t his local school but was reputed to be pretty good:
[The school’s] combination of diversity, achievement, and well-being was nearly unheard-of in New York public schools. This school squared the hardest circle. It was a liberal white family’s dream. The admission rate was less than 10 percent. We got wait-listed.
The summer before our son was to enter kindergarten, an administrator to whom I’d written a letter making the case that our family and the school were a perfect match called with the news that our son had gotten in off the wait list. She gave me five minutes to come up with an answer. I didn’t need four and a half of them.
I can see now that a strain of selfishness and vanity in me contaminated the decision. I lived in a cosseted New York of successful professionals. I had no authentic connection—not at work, in friendships, among neighbors—to the shared world of the city’s very different groups that our son was about to enter. I was ready to offer him as an emissary to that world, a token of my public-spiritedness. The same narcissistic pride that a parent takes in a child’s excellent report card, I now felt about sending him in a yellow school bus to an institution whose name began with P.S.
Things are okay at the school for a quite a few years. But at some point—Packer pinpoints it as around 2014—the situation begins to change. Although he’s in sympathy with liberal politics, the atmosphere now transitions to, in his words, “the substance and hard edges of a radically egalitarian ideology” which he also refers to as a “new progressivism.”
I would describe it as a switch from liberal to left.
It initially took the form of voluntary opting out of standardized testing because it was supposedly racist, and here’s how Packer describes the process:
Opting out became a form of civil disobedience against a prime tool of meritocracy. It started as a spontaneous, grassroots protest against a wrongheaded state of affairs. Then, with breathtaking speed, it transcended the realm of politics and became a form of moral absolutism, with little tolerance for dissent.
Ya think, George? Surprise, surprise.
Something else about the opt-out movement troubled me. Its advocates claimed that the tests penalized poor and minority kids. I began to think that the real penalty might come from not taking them. Opting out had become so pervasive at our school that the Department of Education no longer had enough data to publish the kind of information that prospective applicants had once used to assess the school. In the category of “Student Achievement” the department now gave our school “No Rating.” No outsider could judge how well the school was educating children, including poor, black, and Latino children. The school’s approach left gaps in areas like the times tables, long division, grammar, and spelling. Families with means filled these gaps, as did some families whose means were limited—Marcus’s parents enrolled him in after-school math tutoring. But when a girl at our bus stop fell behind because she didn’t attend school for weeks after the death of her grandmother, who had been the heart of the family, there was no objective measure to act as a flashing red light. In the name of equality, disadvantaged kids were likelier to falter and disappear behind a mist of togetherness and self-deception. Banishing tests seemed like a way to let everyone off the hook. This was the price of dismissing meritocracy.
It’s odd that a man as smart as Packer wouldn’t have understood in the first place that this would happen as a result of “dismissing meritocracy.” But not really, because liberalism can block logic and thoughts that are not politically acceptable. It is to Packer’s credit that he came to admit the problem at all, and that he wrote about it.
Packer describes the decision he and his wife made to have their son take the tests. This may seem neither revolutionary nor brave, but believe me it did take some courage in the face of fairly intense pressure to conform. He writes:
[A school administrator Packer spoke to on the phone] described all the harm that could come to our son if he took the tests—the immense stress, the potential for demoralization. I replied with our reason for going ahead—we wanted him to learn this necessary skill. The conversation didn’t feel completely honest on either side: She also wanted to confirm the school’s position in the vanguard of the opt-out movement by reaching 100 percent compliance, and I wanted to refuse to go along. The tests had become secondary. This was a political argument.
Our son was among the 15 or so students who took the tests. A 95 percent opt-out rate was a resounding success. It rivaled election results in Turkmenistan.
Or in the USSR, back in the olden days.
You know where this led, don’t you? Exactly where you think it might:
The school’s progressive pedagogy had [previously] fostered a wonderfully intimate sense of each child as a complex individual. But progressive politics meant thinking in groups. When our son was in third or fourth grade, students began to form groups that met to discuss issues based on identity—race, sexuality, disability. I understood the solidarity that could come from these meetings, but I also worried that they might entrench differences that the school, by its very nature, did so much to reduce. Other, less diverse schools in New York, including elite private ones, had taken to dividing their students by race into consciousness-raising “affinity groups.”
Next came gender-neutral bathrooms:
The school didn’t inform parents of this sudden end to an age-old custom, as if there were nothing to discuss. Parents only heard about it when children started arriving home desperate to get to the bathroom after holding it in all day.
Sad, but unsurprising. But the kids came up with a solution—they simply divided into sexes and used the old bathrooms, same way as before the gender-neutral relabeling.
Packer’s article then veers off into a lengthy riff on the awfulness of Donald Trump and how Packer’s kids were traumatized by Trump’s election and beset by a host of fears (for example, his daughter was worried that Trump would split up their family). Packer reacted by damping down the political talk in front of his children (not a bad idea, actually) rather than changing any of his liberal viewpoints.
Unsurprising, really, because a mind is a difficult thing to change.
Packer goes on to describe how the curriculum his children learned in school both frightened them and made them feel guilty. Again, I don’t see Packer questioning the truth or falsehood of the actual content they learned—that would probably be too threatening for him—but he certainly is aware of its terrible impact on his children:
[Packer’s son had] been painfully aware of climate change throughout elementary school—first grade was devoted to recycling and sustainability, and in third grade, during a unit on Africa, he learned that every wild animal he loved was facing extinction. “What are humans good for besides destroying the planet?” he asked. Our daughter wasn’t immune to the heavy mood—she came home from school one day and expressed a wish not to be white so that she wouldn’t have slavery on her conscience. It did not seem like a moral victory for our children to grow up hating their species and themselves.
And then Packer states this—which does not echo the liberal party line:
Adults who draft young children into their cause might think they’re empowering them and shaping them into virtuous people (a friend calls the Instagram photos parents post of their woke kids “selflessies”). In reality the adults are making themselves feel more righteous, indulging another form of narcissistic pride, expiating their guilt, and shifting the load of their own anxious battles onto children who can’t carry the burden, because they lack the intellectual apparatus and political power. Our goal shouldn’t be to tell children what to think. The point is to teach them how to think so they can grow up to find their own answers.
I wished that our son’s school would teach him civics.
Civics, yes! And then Packer veers back again into liberal paranoia about Trump – without, as is typical, explaining what Trump is doing that illustrates Packer’s judgments about him. Packer may think that everyone reading the Atlantic agrees with him about the utter obviousness of Trump’s awfulness:
By age 10 [Packer’s son] had studied the civilizations of ancient China, Africa, the early Dutch in New Amsterdam, and the Mayans. He learned about the genocide of Native Americans and slavery. But he was never taught about the founding of the republic. He didn’t learn that conflicting values and practical compromises are the lifeblood of self-government. He was given no context for the meaning of freedom of expression, no knowledge of the democratic ideas that Trump was trashing or of the instruments with which citizens could hold those in power accountable. Our son knew about the worst betrayals of democracy, including the one darkening his childhood, but he wasn’t taught the principles that had been betrayed.
I find this fascinating, this oscillation between a rejection of the excesses of liberalism and leftism and a wallowing in them.
Packer’s piece ends with a description of the de Blasio/Carranza school system in NYC (I wrote this post on Carranza), in which the idea of race and privilege hierarchies is practically the only idea there is. At some point his son asks the following poignant question: “Isn’t school for learning math and science and reading…not for teachers to tell us what to think about society?” Well yes, it used to be, but not any more.
Packer is sad and he’s bewildered. He doesn’t really know how this all came up, doesn’t connect the dots, and he doesn’t know what to do. The idea that the right has some answers never really occurs to him. I sympathize with him in his struggle, and wonder where it may ultimately lead. At the moment, the cognitive dissonance is fierce.
I didn’t really write this post to muse on the dilemma of George Packer the individual. But he’s especially interesting to me because I believe he stands for a large group of liberals who are currently wrestling with the consequences of what they supported, thinking the results would be good, and finding that the left had other and more terrible things in mind.
His problem is that gatekeepers in this and that guild favor using the schools as toy theatres where their social fantasies play out. Liberals don’t have the stones to stand up to them, so the schools default to these dysfunctional states. They don’t have the stones to stand up to them, because they value the wrong things.
Social justice in lieu of justice. Diversity or color judgment, including affirmative discrimination, color quotas, inference, assessment of value from low information attributes. Very Pro-Choice. Now, he’s losing his quasi-religion, because son.
The OWH reported that Nebraska had 114 National Merit Semi-Finalists in a state of 1.8 million. The Omaha Public School District is the largest in the state and has about 53k students in K-12. There are seven high schools. I can’t find the number, but let’s say 5k.
OPS had 5 total NM scholars at just two high schools. My Jesuit high school and the Sacred Heart school had 14. Those two schools have about 1,200 students.
The public schools fail those at the top and bottom and spend a fortune doing so.
All the Dems I saw in Iowa wanted to pay public school teachers more money. Rewarding failure.
Meritocracy. He didn’t work for that. He didn’t earn that. He is incapable of developing himself. Shades of progress to yesteryear.
George Packer—A jerk complaining about what his like-thinking jerks did to his kids.
The only thing he’s to be praised for is not blaming conservatives. Oh wait, he did make the point that Trump is the root of all evil. So, there is nothing about which to praise Mr. I-Can’t-Believe-My-Crazy-Beliefs-Are-Screwing-Up-My-Kids’-Education Packer.
This is reminiscent of the higher education bribery scandal that hoped to avoid meritocracy, select for other characteristics, and avoid reconciliation. Pro-Choice and collateral damage of intentions.
Then there is sex and gender neutral bathrooms, with accommodation for physical transgender/neogenders, original and medical corruption. The rest of the [rainbow] spectrum can self-moderate, and don’t ask don’t tell.
I should add that back in the day, Omaha Central high school had a pipeline to the Ivy League. Two girls on my block went to Yale and a guy across the street went to West Point.
NEO: ….is against what he continually refers to as “meritocracy” (as though that’s a bad thing)…
[sarcasm on]
It IS a bad thing… you lost the war and you dont get to define ANYTHING
or do you get to hold on to your white privileged concepts of power like meritocracy
that is now white supremacy… you know, like the kippa…
[sarcasm off]
the real women no one can question re-defined all this, and all the power people, money people, business people follow it… done, over, kaput… if you do not have common language, you do not have common ground…
wait till the ladies see what their efforts won on behalf of the few and actually privileged who will rule, at the expense of their own posterity
The Myth of White Meritocracy – Progressive.org
American Meritocracy Is a Myth
Recent scandals in politics and higher education show how the rich perpetuate inequality in the US.
‘White Privilege: Unpacking the … – National SEED Project
White Supremacy: Get Out the Way – Higher Education
The Myth of White Meritocracy – News & Views – The Commons
Technological Elites, the Meritocracy, and Postracial Myths
your like the old musicians in A Song Is Born – a remake of Ball of Fire
while they toiled and discussed things among themselves, they realized the world kept turning and all that was going on, they missed… making their research, views and such… not complete… not very useful… outdated..
what they are doing is what will replace what you knew
you and i and others here are mostly on the out..
the stuff i bring up, thats what they been shaping for the replacements
Artfldgr:
My comment in parentheses was sarcasm.
I’m well aware of the long-term ongoing war on meritocracy and its consequences.
After all, Pol Pot made war on people who wore eyeglasses.
Artfldgr:
Plus I seem to remember the war on intellectually gifted programs picking up steam not long after I graduated from high school.
You all already know what I am going to say.
I just hope that on some off chance, the hand wringing, puling, George Packer comes across this thread too; and reads what Neo has to say.
What I have to say he need not read and would not be interested in reading. And that is: that George Packer would transport himself to the cattle car, if the order to do so was delivered in a commanding enough tone in the name of solidarity and ‘justice’.
And if George Packer somehow appeared instead on my front porch, trembling, weeping, and begging for sanctuary and protection from an extra legal social justice enforcement mob, I’d throw his godd***ed morally worthless ass into the street to fend for himself. And then grab a gun, crack a beer (for symbolic purposes as I don’t drink beer), pull up a lounge chair (cheap aluminum tubing and woven plastic webbing if available), and settle in to watch.
Communists of the 1930’s, thought to be ever so slightly tainted by the West, or compromised in some modest way – perhaps by a lack of revolutionary zeal and ruthlessness – used to go back to the Soviet Union knowing full well that they would almost certainly be killed by Stalin’s henchmen, even though they professed not to believe it.
They went anyway.
This man, morally weak, yet proud of his weakness, complains about sacrificing his son on the altar of the insane, yet does it in the name of “solidarity”, anyway.
These kinds are all guilty at just being alive. And they pass it on to their kids. And perhaps, if one looked closely into their moral lives, and consciences, and at how they received their admitted ‘privileges’ and advantages (compared to other middle Americans; the sins of their fathers, and all), then maybe, they, despite outward appearances, should be guilty.
But … but … but …. “the human condition”, cries the masochist.
**** ’em.
You are wayyyy too kind, Ira.
“Jerk”, doesn’t scratch the surface of Clown Packer’s whining (yet paradoxically, fundamentally arrogant) moral dishonesty.
But then, maybe that was all the ink you thought worth spilling on the specimen.
In which George Packer unwittingly lays out a compelling case that journalists as a class are unworthy of the job of informing the public about much of anything.
Packer’s disordered thinking is infectious. His synapses are obviously not correctly connected. We are in an pandemic of it, and it will kill us, our civilization and culture and mores…
He’s earning a fine salary. Wonder why China will come to rule the entire planet in the next few decades? Look at this Packer for the answer. People are paid to generate drivel!
[edited for content by n-n]
“Teach them how to think” is one of the most pernicious, downright evil frauds ever foisted on the human race. Nobody has any idea what that means. It is a secret sacred rite known only to the shamans.
People don’t think too good. They are downright stupid. They is you and me. It has taken millenia (200?, 40?, 6?) to get to the point where anybody even has time to have any thought beyond surviving ’till the next sunrise. Up until this last tiny sliver of human history life has been “nasty, brutish and short”. It has only been in the last couple of centuries that even the thought of going to a school was thinkable.
We have gotten here because we paid the price in blood and guts and misery to learn what works. That is what must be taught before all else.
What a dumpload of pure blather: “He didn’t learn that conflicting values and practical compromises are the lifeblood of self-government. He was given no context for the meaning of freedom of expression, no knowledge of the democratic ideas that Trump was trashing or of the instruments with which citizens could hold those in power accountable. Our son knew about the worst betrayals of democracy, including the one darkening his childhood, but he wasn’t taught the principles that had been betrayed.”
Deserves whatever he reaps from this tosspot of puling puke.
My stint recruiting future Naval Aviators on campuses in the late 1960s was an early warning of what was coming. It has taken 50 years, but the transformation of our society is nearing an inflection point. We should have realized that the Left infiltrating the education system was going to lead us here. But most conservative leaning people are too busy doing things, making things, and enjoying their freedom. To us, it doesn’t compute that someone would intentionally erase standards that are geared to the facts of human existence. While we ben doing this:
“Avoid loud and aggressive persons,
they are vexations to the spirit.
If you compare yourself with others,
you may become vain and bitter;
for always there will be greater and lesser persons than yourself.
Enjoy your achievements as well as your plans.”
And this:
“Keep interested in your own career, however humble;
it is a real possession in the changing fortunes of time.”
the left has been burrowing into the foundations of our society intent on creating an egalitarian utopia, which, for crying out loud, has failed everywhere it has been tried.
I have been alarmed by it all, but believed reason would carry the day. I was wrong. Unless more Low Information Voters (LIVs) (Packer and others like him are certainly LIVs even though they think they are well informed.) grasp what is going on, the end of the Republic as we knew it is in sight. The ballot box will surely give way to the cartridge box. As Lex often said, “It is to weep.”
Packer sees the evidence first-hand, but refuses to change his world view. His name is legion. He should read David Mamet’s brain dead liberal article, I think from the Village Voice. It may not be too late for him.
Deserves whatever he reaps from this tosspot of puling puke.
“What’s wrong with it, Gerard?” he said in a pleading voice.
‘Obviously we all have radically different fundamental values, and these must compromised before we, as a collective, can govern ourselves. Because otherwise people with radically differing values would not be able to live together as we must, if we are to self-govern; and we would need a dictator to enforce our sharing and caring ways … or something. Got to live harnessed together regardless, that’s the important thing. It’s quite obvious to all whjo are not unfeeling sociopaths. Suppose then Gerald, that one neighbor is a devil worshiping cannibal who wants to sexually use and then devour the neighborhood children as part of a sacrificial feast? Suppose on the other hand the self-interested neighbor peremptorily rejects this use of “his” offspring … while turning up his haughty nose at his neighbors needs?
Well as that font of supernatural wisdom Pope whatshisname says, “Who am I to judge?” Is not diversity our greatest strength? Has the man with a taste for the flesh of men, less a claim on the solidarity and self-sacrifice of his fellow man than those who do not?
How then are we to live together and share a space in which all may thrive thriving?
Compromise is the obvious solution, as we self-govern our way out of this predicament. Posing you Gerald as the neighbor, let’s say that maybe the cannibal will agree to just kill and eat a couple of your kids during a sacrificial feast held to honor to the devil: whereas you on the other hand get to keep at least one or two all to yourself.
We just have to look past our prejudices. And once we do, there is the obvious, progressive, and enlightened democratic answer staring us right in the face … or the flesh cutlet, as the case may be. Amen.
Strikes me as a whiny lefty who couldn’t afford to put his kid /couldn’t get his kid into a good private school. Which everyone with half a brain does in NYC. Either that or they move to the ‘burbs with elite schools like Scarsdale, Greenwich, Darien, New Canaan or Westport.
I assume that if Mr. Packer checked with his son’s school’s administrators, he’d find that all the school’s teachers were credentialed – including those self-same administrators.
Isn’t that meritocracy to start with?? How can they preach/teach against a meritocracy with that’s what their jobs depend on in the first place! Home school parents don’t have credentials – but still perform the same job. I wonder what their attitude about home schooling is…but I’d be willing to bet what it would be! They’d probably also tell you that we’re much smarter than our ancestors.
Hah.
https://newrepublic.com/article/79470/1895-8th-grade-final-exam-i-couldnt-pass-it-could-you
We should have realized that the Left infiltrating the education system was going to lead us here. But most conservative leaning people are too busy doing things, making things, and enjoying their freedom. </i?
I sense from my son and grandchildren that a reaction is building among children now that posits some hope. My youngest daughter who is 29 and my grandchildren who are 17 to 12 are conservative and see the BS in much of this stuff, There may not be enough of them but I am not totally pessimistic.
I recommend Steve Sailor's essay on What if America had never had slavery.
Poor George. It is one thing to say what is required when it only affects you, and you are on the inside anyway. It is totally different when your children are affected, and they may be in the process of being excluded from the inside track. We thought that DeBlasio’s changes to school admissions would have repercussions.
This needs to be read in conjunction with David Brooks https://www.nytimes.com/2019/09/12/opinion/markovits-meritocracy.html
Clearly there is a deep disturbance going on among liberal opinion-makers. George testifies to the precise moment the new Establishment lost its mind—during the Obama administration. What happened? George alludes to it: inequality exploded, especially in the cities that dominate finance, communications, and technology.
The rise of identity politics and the leftward drift of the Democratic base are the reaction to social facts on the ground. Either the Party and its institutions use the power of exclusion to cut its clients in on the goodies, or the Party loses the cohesion of its electoral coalition and therefore loses power. Given the stakes, George and his children are expendable.
Inequality is the key to understanding our age and its discontents.
At Yale, George was in what was then called John C. Calhoun College. Calhoun was notable for its collection of actual or probable future celebrities. For example, George overlapped with Naomi Wolf and Jodie Foster. Old “Hounie” Skip Gates was around as a mentor. So even on the New Haven campus, George was in select company. Perhaps no one guessed that he would win a National Book Award, but he came from a distinguished academic, literary and political family.
Which is how it worked, and still does.
https://www.sfgate.com/magazine/article/Thicker-Than-Water-3282174.php
George Packer is not smart, he is the result of ideology superseding reality and logic. In another time and place he would have been the prisoner in the Lubyanka telling his visiting wife that it was a mistake and if only Stalin knew he’d be released, but it in any case it was for the good of the Party. She’d never see him again.
“I believe he stands for a large group of liberals who are currently wrestling with the consequences of what they supported, thinking the results would be good, and finding that the left had other and more terrible things in mind.” – Neo
The problem is that he apparently doesn’t really blame any of it on the Left at all.
Somehow it just happened, and it’s all Trump’s fault.
Certainly it’s not HIS.
Oblio on September 14, 2019 at 8:41 pm said:
…
This needs to be read in conjunction with David Brooks https://www.nytimes.com/2019/09/12/opinion/markovits-meritocracy.html
* * *
The headline should have specified the ELITE meritocracy, but it’s amazing to see that Brooks actually wrote something almost conservative.
I guess that’s what happens when you acknowledge reality.
Bill Ayers must be rather satisfied these days. Bombs didn’t bring about the leftist paradise/dictatorship he desired, so he became an Ed School professor. Ed School trained teachers then proceed to mold students into little progressives who conscientiously parrot the narrative de jour. Very astute move.
A school with an admission rate of ten percent is against meritocracy? Sounds like a bit of an oxymoron to me.
Meritocracy is the only solution to inequality. Does it solve it? No, the problem is unsolvable. But there are many ways to excel and in a meritocracy that leads to turnover and mixing. Leftist solutions tend to increase stratification and the role of inherited privilege.
Oh, my.
So much fisking material, so little time.
Just adding a few (!) more comments to Neo’s analysis, beginning at the beginning because the events that lie before the shift of the school from liberal to left foretell much of Packer’s ruminations about the testing process, although they don’t appear to be connected in own his mind at all.
I will only give a few sentences that have much more material behind them; if you are interested, a word search of the Atlantic post will find the referenced section fairly quickly. I hope to avoid any HTML fails, as I haven’t seen Edit in a long time.
I must admit to being surprised that the Atlantic published something that, at heart, is critical of progressivism, even if Packer did make the obligatory magical incantations against Trump and conservatives in general.
First of all, what Packer starts out describing (the agony of picking the right school) is not “meritocracy” in the strict sense of the term at all, but “aristocracy,” in which entry to the Peerage (the Elite, in the sense of the term that has become common these days) is not through blood alone, but can be “bought into” with enough effort and money.
Now, within the elite, those so admitted may be ranked in some kind of traditional meritorious manner (supposedly by the dreaded Standardized Testing, although not so in reality), but that is a subset of the population, not the whole country.
The only hint of true meritocracy is the story of Marcus (see below).
Despite his recognition of the decline in education accompanying progressivism in New York, he fails to attribute any of California’s decline to the same cause.
Why DID the tax revolt occur, and did it really “eviscerate” the schools, or just impose discipline on the big spenders there, which they took out of education and not administration budgets? I have forgotten, if I ever knew.
Throughout this article, I kept thinking the author was like a man with blinders on which kept slipping, but he never quite reached up and pulled them off until too late. As Neo said, “I find this fascinating, this oscillation between a rejection of the excesses of liberalism and leftism and a wallowing in them.”
THIS is meritocracy: taking all kids from all classes and giving them the same chances as those whose parents scheme, play the games, spend money, and sweat over which school to get their kids into so they can move into the aristocracy — if all kids don’t have that opportunity, it is not a meritocracy.
“Ya think?” indeed.
Slipping blinders, but he puts them back on.
In the long list of reasons he gives for ditching the tests, not ONCE does he mention the wide-spread cheating by teachers and administrators after they or their schools got low scores; of course educators were happy to have the parents decide to opt out of taking them!
Their support for bus driver unions over the kids earlier was a harbinger of that, but he does not connect it.
Look back at the earlier quote about harmonious race relations — all of those kids were already in an elite school that was supposedly devoid of racism as a given. If the non-whites scores are lower (were the Asians?), why aren’t they devoting more resources to bringing those kids up TO the standard? If the tests really are “institutionalized racism,” why not work to provide neutral ones?
Here is where “meritocracy” became the enemy rather than the goal. If getting your kid into a better school isn’t an attempt to play the meritocracy game (that is, the school’s purpose is primarily to improve the child’s “merit score” through better education), then why work so hard to get them into it in the first place?
(Cue the links to the college admissions scandals.)
He’s already established that his son feels that “no one was better than anyone else” on the basis of race or class (which is good), but no parents want to admit that their kid just might NOT be better academically, and they would rather not rank anyone at all than find that out.
A meritocracy is only good if MY kid comes out on top.
Now we begin to see what Solzenitsyn was talking about, and all the other people who have warned us about tyrannies imposed by people on themselves.
Remember, we are talking about a school — not a government with an army of secret police, not an employer who might fire you, not even a twitter mob (that still lies in the future), and people are too afraid to voice their opinions publicly, even though they still take action on them, as covertly as they can (going off campus, for instance).
Huzzah!
Are the blinders really off at last?
THIS is meritocracy: taking all kids from all classes and giving them the same chances as those whose parents scheme, play the games, spend money, and sweat over which school to get their kids into so they can move into the aristocracy
That is why the SAT was developed. It has worked too well, showing who has merit, so it had to be destroyed and is now dumbed down to be meaningless.
Actually, I was wrong on my very first comment. Now that I’ve read the article, he DOES blame the Left kinda sorta.
He just blames the Right more.
He obviously isn’t reading Neo’s blog, or anything to the right of MSNBC.
Probably didn’t listen to the Democratic primary debates, where the candidates are all gung-ho about abolishing all of the Bill of Rights, because none of it makes sense to them.
They really do believe that.
No.
Quit taking them to blatantly partisan theater (Hamilton) and political marches (Women’s March) and they will be just fine.
Well, there is an answer, but you can get in trouble for saying so, much worse than just not following the orthodoxy on school testing.
So wishy-washy about wanting to be in the Good Tribe, but not quite believing all of the Sacred Dogma.
Neo excerpted a lot of that dancing about on the horns of his dilemma; she omitted this:
It’s not all the fault of the schools, Mister Parent.
He is spot on here, but which party / faction has been so busily engaged in removing civics from the school curriculum, that his son’s teacher was so concerned he would miss on the two testing days?
But then, it might also have empowered more of Hillary’s supporters to reject her.
Somewhat like the political marches you took your 5 year old daughter to the year before; he does not make the connection.
*They were doing that literally at one school, handing out forms with boxes to check.
He sees this about wokeness so clearly, but what he has been ascribing to “democracy” is really the “heavy-handed ideology” of leftist dogma.
“You didn’t build that” on steroids, and the core of all socialist failures in a nutshell.
Why work to be better at anything if you don’t get any reward for the effort?
There can be equality and meritocracy, but only if disadvantagd students are given the tools to overcome their disadvantages, rather than issuing them a different set of Privilege Points, which allows them to have the rewards without the effort.
So the solution was to just do away with the rewards of doing wel in school for everyone.
Any bets on whose History book they are using?
And this is considered to be better than the meritocracy, which at least let some of the disadvantaged & non-white kids who performed better academically get on with improving their lives.
They would still inflict all of this progressive rot on the kids, anyway.
This is the core of his dilemma: how to be one of the True Believers, and yet exempt himself and his family from the Holy Sacrifices.
We’re almost at the end, but this is important, because it captures the essence of Leftist agendas and processes.
But if the done deal doesn’t affect his own family, does he ever object to it?
Climate change is an existential crisis: he let the school frighten his son about that, without doing any research to see what the skeptics had to offer.
Are there any other Leftist / liberal orthodoxies that he has rejected? We don’t know from this article, but he works for the Atlantic, which couldn’t tolerate having Kevin Williamson write for them.
He never really established that the meritocracy of the schools was “false” or kept people “trapped” — that is only true if the competition for better schools and the placement in academic tracks was rigged to admit children who have not met the academic qualifications, and kept out those who had.
He gets close to taking off the blinders with that last sentence, but can’t quite manage it.
The leftists are upset, now and always, that they cannot get enough minority and / or poor students to meet the qualifications unless they also give up their dogmas about eliminating marriage and stable families, replaced with unrestrained sex and unlimited abortion, and obstructing any kind of effective deterrence or punishment of crime.
No culture can have genuine meritocracy or efficacious democracy without responsibility for personal behavior, despite any historic or even directly extant injustices some individuals may have suffered.
Neo’s conclusion about Packer’s cognitive dissonance is absolutely correct.
However, I doubt we will ever see him in a #WalkAway video.
Packer’s confusion at the way in which his liberal ideology has turned on him reminds me of a video clip I saw after Obamacare was implemented, when the premium hikes started showing up in people’s mailboxes.
A befuddled looking twenty-something man was holding his letter and saying, “Of course I wanted everyone to have health insurance. I just didn’t think I’d have to pay for it!”
An excellent companion piece – Packer recognizes that the new leftist education policies don’t conform to common-sense; he wants to support them anyway, because he’s a liberal, and can’t square the circle, so he decides to opt out of them rather than repudiating them directly.
Really, I’m still surprised he wrote that article and The Atlantic published it.
Is there a hidden agenda I’m not seeing?
What is the battlespace they are preparing?
https://amgreatness.com/2019/09/14/the-war-on-common-sense/
There is an agenda; it is unlikely to be coincidence that Time and The Atlantic both chose this week to address inequality in education by talking disparagingly about meritocracy and elites. What’s the end game here?
https://time.com/5676174/universities-equality-eliteness/
My word AesopFan, that was a well thought out argument you made. Well Done Sir! Bravo Zulu!
For Packer, 2+2=5.
And for a lot of others, too. Basically decent, ethical, caring, intelligent, even brilliant people.
It’s what happens when one buys into the non-stop, fervent, determined—religious—demonization of the other.
When one is convinced of the absolute morality of one’s demonization of that other and joins the holy, holy, holy chorus—the spiritual echo-chamber—of 24/7 demonizers.
Yes, 2 + 2 has become 5. (And they don’t even know it, nor do they know how it came about….)
Neo and none of the commenters have seen the real problem, that education is a government monopoly.
We should let government pay for it, but not provide it. We should create an educational endowment for each student. Students should become customers for educational services, not inmates in a government system. There should be a free market in education.
With an educational endowment system, the money would be paid out only when that student achieves a specified annual level.
Poor students become much more valuable to educators who can catch them up. Bringing a 16 year old up from sixth grade level to tenth would pay four years of payments to the successful educator.
Instead of being unmanageable problems, under-performing young adults would have mentors who really involved themselves and who had serious financial stakes in their student success rates.
Unpaid funds should stay in each student account indefinitely, allowing people who finally get their act together as adults to obtain an education.
A rather lengthy post describing the woes of a jackass.
I still don’t understand why conservatives send their children to progressive public schools.
George Packer is like almost every liberal in that (1) He has a closed mind, politically. (2) He has very little Common Sense.
I agree that there should be a free market in education. A real one, which means the government can’t be in charge of it. Designing the transition from government schools to free-market schools would be a challenge, but not an impossible one. Start by abolishing the teacher’s unions (we should abolish all public-sector unions, if you ask me), then pump up the school choice programs and make it easier to create charter schools. Phase out the government schools gradually. On the financial side, start with vouchers, then start changing the tax code to give people back the part of their property taxes that now goes to public schools. If schools were run as businesses they wouldn’t be able to afford layers of useless administrators and foolish programs that don’t bring results.
George felt like a member of the Inner Party. Now he knows he is in the Outer Party. Hence all the DoubleThink on display.
This is part of a long process in New York schools. Does anyone else remember how the civilization-ending nuclear war started in Sleeper? “”A man named Albert Shanker got the Bomb”
I feel sorry for the guy, as it sound like a miserable way to live. Maybe he can figure out something different a little later, if he has another kid. But I find this interesting, as it is so different from my experiences in the small town vast majority white northeast US.
Right now, I would really like to see the textbooks those kids are using in school today, for history and social studies, and any literature reading lists that they have. I really wonder about the historical interpretations they may have been taught. (On the other hand, I can recall how long it took me to be a better critical reader and thinker.)
Albert Shanker was responsible for the destruction of our former enviable public schools.
“a man as smart as Packer”
Hahahahaha. I think you are assuming something without evidence.
Putting kids through stuff like this is child abuse. There is a solution when presented with nonsense like this. Move to a sensible state.
New York City teachers and parents banded together 51 years ago and walked out of school to protest the city’s decision to agree to allow community school boards to determine school administrators based on race, as the result of actions by the Ocean Hill-Brownsville community school board to replace Jewish school administrators with African-Ameriican ones. So this type of race-based agitation been going on in the city for over a half-century now.
But Packer notes that the recent hard-left shift occurred in 2014. What might have happened right before that to cause that shift….oh yeah — New York City voters elected Bill de Blasio as mayor, and then re-elected him in 2017. Elections have consequences, and as mayor, de Blasio got to appoint far left activists to run the city’s school system. Packer complains about the downward spiral of the city’s education system, but nowhere in the story does he mention whether or not he voted for the current mayor in 2013 or 2017. If you don”t want a woke SJW loon like Richard Carranza running the NYC schools, don’t put a woke SJW a loon like Bill de Blasio in the mayor’s office.
Albert Shanker was responsible for the destruction of our former enviable public schools.
Shanker’s contribution was cost inflation and a set of work rules which prevented the dismissal of lousy teachers. (I think unions also tend to promote dysfunctional screens to restrict entry). I don’t think you can blame him for the horrid disciplinary situation in schools, or for the inanities in teachers’ college curricula, or for the depredations of the public interest bar and the race-hustler squad.
“When our son was in third or fourth grade, students began to form groups that met to discuss issues based on identity—race, sexuality, disability.”
What the hell is THIS all about?
That right there should have resulted in him pulling his out of there, never to return.
This fellow Packer is your typical liberal progressive hypocrite and an idiot.
They are 100% for lib policies – no questions asked, no doubts about it’s righteousness – until it affects them personally. Then they begin to ponder this or that, but never seriously question their liberal-progressive religious beliefs.
Any slight deficiencies they may suspect are all the fault of republicans or Trump or other neo-Nazi groups, but they never seriously question their immutable political religion.
You can bet your house, car and life savings that Packer will do whatever it takes to get his kid into some Ivy League or other top-notch university when the time comes.
All his pseudo-religious views about diversity, “white privilege,” etc. will matter not at all when choosing which first rate university his son will attend. After all, how many of these white libs send their kids to mostly black colleges? Let me guess; ZERO.
But hey, this is what liberal progressive hypocrites do; you can count on it.
Packer is an idiot (or is it delusional?) because he has been hit across the face with a 2×4 with the harmful Stalinist policies he and his son have been subjected to.
Yet, he is still firmly in the lib-progressive church not unlike the unshakable beliefs People’s Temple member held as they drank the lethal poison at Jonestown, Guyana in 1978.
Packer would willingly walk under the “Arbeit Macht Frei” gate to get a shower and apply for a job even if he observed the bodies being dumped out the back door of the “shower” facilities.
I too attended NYC public schools at pretty much the exact time as did NEO. I even attended a CUNY 4 year institution right out of high school.
In those days, of course, schools were for learning.
Today, they are for inculcating in students the hate-America-first, left wing, socialist mind set in the same manner that the Bolsheviks utilized the Young Pioneers and the Komsomol; the Nazis utilized Hitler Youth or the DDR utilized the Freie Deutsch Jugend.
This will not end well for what remains of our Constitutional Republic, and thank god for the Electoral College.
Just as an aside, NYC + Westchester, Nassau and Suffolk County has a greater population than about 40 States of the Union.
Thank god for the Electoral College.
By age 10 [Packer’s son] had studied the civilizations of ancient China, Africa, the early Dutch in New Amsterdam, and the Mayans. He learned about the genocide of Native Americans and slavery. But he was never taught about the founding of the republic. He didn’t learn that conflicting values and practical compromises are the lifeblood of self-government. He was given no context for the meaning of freedom of expression, no knowledge of the democratic ideas that Trump was trashing or of the instruments with which citizens could hold those in power accountable. Our son knew about the worst betrayals of democracy, including the one darkening his childhood, but he wasn’t taught the principles that had been betrayed.
I’m not usually a vindictive bastard, but I would love to be fly on the wall the day Packer and his wife realize that their uber-woke kids are now less educated than Red State kids who were home schooled or attended Christian private schools.
But then that day may never come.
Virtually all socialism groups, communes, fail the sustainability test of raising children. Parents, normal parents, good parents; even bad parents, parents want all kids treated equally — but want their kids to be more equal than others.
Parker’s kids, partly because of Parker’s honest angst, will probably be OK. And again soon be on the elite / elite-wannabee track of college prep and go to an SAT tutor to get into a “good school”. With some learning, especially about how to lick boots and suck up to those in authority who make decisions about the futures of others. (Such folk usually support the boot-lickers).
He’s lying to himself, but beginning to doubt his own prior lies. Possibly he’ll come around in 2024, when the Dem (Left) are hating the Rep candidate, whoever it is, at the same level as they hate Trump.
Before one can understand how bad the Dem policies are, one must be able to ask, to think to ask, if it’s possible that the Dem policies are bad. Could this policy be bad? Have bad results? Only with Free Speech and free thinking, with liberty, can people ask such questions and search for truth.
The Dems currently don’t want truth; the want Good Feelings. For all (except Trump, and any who agree with Trump, or any of Trump’s policies).
“Our son knew about the worst betrayals of democracy, including the one darkening his childhood, but he wasn’t taught the principles that had been betrayed.”
Gee, why didn’t his PARENTS teach them?
I went to private school and then a public school. At the private school, we were sometimes exposed to hippy-skippy ideas, particularly from other children’s parents, but our own parents gave us guidance. When I wanted more challenging material, my parents took a hand in picking out books for me.
This idea of handing off your children’s education completely is nuts.
By age 10 [Packer’s son] had studied the civilizations of ancient China, Africa, the early Dutch in New Amsterdam, and the Mayans. He learned about the genocide of Native Americans and slavery.
That’s a witlessly unfocused elementary program. Ideally, you’d be drilled remorselessly in reading, writing, and arithmetic. When you’d reached a certain level of mastery, social studies would be introduced as a third subject, and consist entirely of the fundamentals of American history, geography, and civics. You’d complete your program when you could diagram a sentence properly and reliably and when you could pass a test in elementary algebra (as well as the fundamentals of American history, geography and civics). Some students would finish by age 10, some by age 14, and some would age out of elementary school and continue following an elementary program as adolescents.
His casual reference to that obscene canard ‘the genocide of ‘Native Americans’ tells you something about this man which causes any sympathy you’d have had for him to drain away almost completely.
In current Amerikka, the process is the punishment. It’s clear that Big ED is intent on punishing traditional White and Asian families. If you are LGBTQUERTY, no prob; Black, Brown, single mom – soft bigotry of low expectations.
My message to George- LOLGF.
“But he’s especially interesting to me because I believe he stands for a large group of liberals who are currently wrestling with the consequences of what they supported, thinking the results would be good, and finding that the left had other and more terrible things in mind.”
You seem to have an affinity for George Packer and his dilemma.
But Antifa wouldn’t be cracking skulls with bike locks without the implicit permission of fellow Democrats like George Packer.
Likewise, I bet the George Packers of the Democrat Party have no shame that their people attempted a soft coup of the legitimately elected President of the United States.
Don’t get too cozy with George Packer and his ilk.
Don’t get too cozy with George Packer and his ilk.
While he’s feeding his children political lunacy, I’d like to know what he told them about people whose injuries at the hands of the state haven’t been imaginary. Start with Baronelle Stutzman.
Art Deco:
Baronelle Stutzman is privileged to go before the Washington Supreme Court, again, for having the wrong thoughts and principles (religious beliefs). You must obey the alphabet people!
I read this entire thread with close attention and by the end I’m just really sad. The decline of civilization. We’re witnesses. I’m not sure what can be done.
I remember how, in 1980 or so, I asked what seemed like the very innocent question, “How many more years does Affirmative Action need to exist?” No one at the late night table of young idealists there from Portland’s “alternative” weekly paper would venture a number. The silence surprised me, but no one was brave enough to say whether 20, 30, or 50 years would be enough. Now, obviously, the answer has become “?????” (“Until we get it right.”) Well, what does that mean?
Bill Ayers once said that blacks MUST BE the vanguard of the Revolution. He got his black president. Does this sort of white guilt and masochism mean that black children must be given 100 on every test whether they even show up or not? Where does it end?
It looks like most of the commenters are on the same page of the schoolbook, but Fen gives the bottom line.
A small (heh) addendum to the third section of my magnum opus:
“He never really established that the meritocracy of the schools was “false” or kept people “trapped”.. ”
I believe, after thinking some more about Packer’s POV, that he is correct in his observation, but not for the reasons he advances.
The false meritocracy he refers to does exist, because the elite educational-political-economic system we currently live in (and that Packer aspires for his children to join) only grades by “merit” AFTER the candidate has entered the system through non-meritorious means (that is, the way Packer describes getting his kids into the “right” schools) in the first place.
Children who don’t have access to the “elite meritocracy track” really do become “trapped” outside of it, unless they exert tremendous effort or are lucky enough to have some kind of mentor/sponsor to pull them through despite not being in the right schools.
However, there are other meritocracies that coexist with the elites, such as business, trades, and some of the arts (others are, sadly, too closely allied with the elite and partake of the same meritocracy subset).
The problem in NYC,and other blue cities and states, is that the Left has systematically (oh, that word!) destroyed the non-elite meritocracies and the schools or training that pertain to them. So, in New York, kids who don’t get into the right schools are indeed trapped, because they don’t get any kind of effective education at all.
Nor is the Left interested in giving them one.
I do think it a case of willful blindness that concerned parents like Packer fail to see that the only institutionalized racism their kids are exposed to is that of the Democratic Party.
In “Lovingkindness”, a book by Anne Roiphe, a feminist mother whose daughter sinks to the depths of degradation until rescued by Ortodox Jews says, in a moment of self-awareness, that she feels like an architect who designed a house no one could live in. That’s exactly where George Packer lives now.
“Parker’s kids, partly because of Parker’s honest angst, will probably be OK.”
No, it’s not honest angst. It’s what AesopFan identified:
“This is the core of his dilemma: how to be one of the True Believers, and yet exempt himself and his family from the Holy Sacrifices.”
There is nothing honest about it. Somebody has to die to placate the wrath of Divine Diversity (that’s a metaphor, btw). What will save Parker’s kids will be his apostasy when it really hits the fan — he’s already moving in that direction by sending his daughter to a private school. So, yeah, his kids will be OK in that they will grow up with what passes for a decent education (including Yale or whatnot). What I wonder is, if those kids are half as perceptive as Parker implies, do they perceive that he is a hypocrite doing lip service to a toxic religion?
At first, I was wondering why these halfway-intelligent people didn’t just home school, until I realized that they probably need both high incomes to survive in NYC, and leaving The City would be unthinkable to such as these. Not to mention that something so non-collectivist is also unthinkable (literally) to them. Asshats.
Nobody Atall:
Actually, it’s by no means clear that Packer’s children would get a significantly better education in a private school in NY these days. From what I hear, private schools are overrun with the same intersectional “check your privilege” stuff as the public schools. There may be more challenging content and a little more actual learning going on, but my impression is that it’s all couched in a PC environment that taints nearly every moment of the process.
AesopFan:
Bravo for all the work you did!
I stopped my own post at a certain point, but there are so many others parts of Packer’s magnum opus that could be criticized on so many levels. For instance, the whole critique of “meritocracy” has a lot of holes in it. It’s an enormous topic I may tackle some day—and not just what Packer says about it, but the issue in general.
Nobody Atall:
I want to add that Packer does display “honest angst”—accent on the “angst.” In other words, his angst is honest. He is also honest to the degree that he even wrote this article in the first place and risked the criticism he knew he would get for signing his name to it.
When someone has a belief system of long standing (for example, such as Packer’s belief in liberalism and the goodness of its goals) and he or she encounters facts that argue against that belief system, people don’t usually flip overnight into a different belief system. It takes time and is a struggle. That’s where Packer’s “honest angst” comes in.
I somehow doubt he’ll ever go much further into rejecting the left, however. He has too much bound up in it. But I suppose time will tell.
I believe, after thinking some more about Packer’s POV, that he is correct in his observation, but not for the reasons he advances. The false meritocracy he refers to does exist, because the elite educational-political-economic system we currently live in (and that Packer aspires for his children to join) only grades by “merit” AFTER the candidate has entered the system through non-meritorious means (that is, the way Packer describes getting his kids into the “right” schools) in the first place.
Disagree. The problem is that institutions of all sorts waste students’ time and commonly try to fill their heads with rubbish. (A great many characters in the mental health trade do this too).
There are certain milieux where a degree from a fancy private university is quite helpful if not crucial for placing you in the recruiting pool. These are niche occupations. If you’re not itching to sell commercial paper for Goldman Sachs or clerk for some judge on the DC Circuit, it’s not all that consequential. Have a gander at capsule biographies of Fortune 500 CEOs. Plenty of people at the very top attended state universities. I have a ready example from among my own shirttails. He attended unremarkable suburban schools, attended a satisfactory private college I’d never heard of and I’d wager you haven’t either, majored in a silly subject, and attended the state law school in Houston. He made himself useful as a law firm employee before and during his years in law school, built a fine academic record in law school, and built relationships with people who would and could recommend him. He’s landed two plum positions thus far. He didn’t need Yale.
Art Deco:
I agree that a degree from an “elite” institution is not the magic ticket to success a lot of people assume it is. What matters much more is individual focus, skill, grit, and sometimes even luck. But on average, an elite degree does help. One way in which it helps is the connections a student makes with other students there on their way up. That can help with job searches later on.
Bill Ayers once said that blacks MUST BE the vanguard of the Revolution. He got his black president.
No, he got a personal friend and collaborator in the President’s chair. When Gov. Blagojevich said ‘I’m blacker than Obama’, he spoke the truth. Obama’s connection to the domestic black population has been that he married into it. His personal friends within it are people like Eric Whittaker, a scion of the mulattish old-money patriciate in the black population. Nothing wrong with old money patricians, but it’s a translucently thin slice of black America.
But on average, an elite degree does help.
See Thomas Sowell on this point. The life trajectories of people admitted to elite institutions are (on average) remarkably similar without regard to whether or not they actually enrolled. I agree it ‘can help’. The question is whether or not the actual value-added of attending the institution justifies the anxiety of the sort this fellow Packer is experiencing. My fat-self-in-seersucker is out on a limb here, but I’m gonna say no.
Art Deco:
I don’t always say this, but here I am in agreement with you.
Art Deco:
But I will say this—at least from my own school experience, which is very old at this point: for someone very intellectually inclined, being among other students who are similar in that regard is a wonderful thing. It doesn’t necessarily mean success in material terms, but it can be an experience that has lifelong benefits in other terms.
I went to both sorts of schools, by the way—“elite” and not-elite. More of the latter than the former, I might add.
And I’ve observed very smart kids bored to tears in regular schools, who blossom when they go to private schools and are part of a more intellectually rigorous environment. That was also a long time ago, to be sure.
This post really hit a nerve with your readers, Neo! And not surprisingly, either, as it touches on a parent’s foremost duty. And I don’t mean getting a good education for your child – I am talking about protecting your child from harm.
Anyone else do the math on this Packer guy? Seems he came to fatherhood rather late – maybe as late as 50, I’m thinking. So then, if he’s in his fifties and his personal narcissism keeps him from his fatherly duty to protect his child from those who would damage him – physically, intellectually or spiritually – even though he KNOWS this is happening!!! – he’s a lost cause.
That, or he’s as dumb as a box of rocks.
“There are certain milieux where a degree from a fancy private university is quite helpful if not crucial for placing you in the recruiting pool. These are niche occupations. If you’re not itching to sell commercial paper for Goldman Sachs or clerk for some judge on the DC Circuit, it’s not all that consequential.” – Art Deco
I agree with you completely, but that is not Packer’s point of view, as I read his post.
We had a college friend whose father had a legal practice and would deliberatly NOT hire graduates of the elite schools; he said the lawyers coming out of the solid state schools did a better job because (my inference) they didn’t have the ego.
Molly, I’ll take door number two.
Molly Brown:
Ah, but I think Packer is indeed interested in protecting his children. Thing is, as a NY intellectual liberal journalist, the things he wants to protect them against turn out to be—as he is just now discovering—mutually exclusive. He has to prioritize and he’s having a lot of trouble doing it, in part because it would mean giving up some cherished ideals he has had for most if not all of his life.
Packer is 59 (I’m getting all of this from his Wiki page). Therefore he had his son in his latish 40s (somewhere between 46 and 49, I’d say). However, Packer was married before and then divorced. Does he have children with his first wife? I have no idea.
https://nypost.com/2019/09/13/the-regents-latest-step-on-the-road-to-ruin-for-new-york-schools/
We’ve all read how astonished are those on the Left, the enablers of totalitarianism, when they are pushed & lined up against the wall… an awakening that is almost always too late.
George is lucky, so far… but he’s unlikely to save himself. Pride is like that.
The result of Packers beliefs is that he willingly engages in what I would call child abuse by driving his children into a form of psychosis brought on by irrational fears of the future. What normal 4th or 5th grader goes into a kind of stupor over the election of a president?
These people are deranged and they are forcing their children to embrace their derangement. Very, very sad and scary.
Steve W:
It is indeed sad and scary as well as infuriating to drag young children into politics and whip up fear like that. However, I doubt it was solely Packer himself—although I am pretty sure he had a role in it—perhaps not even mostly Packer. The reason is that the children probably heard it not just from Packer and his wife talking to each other, but also from the school itself, schoolmates, the internet, relatives, friends, the parents of friends, the entire milieu in which they are steeped. He does say that he finally pulled back from discussing politics in front of his children, and I suppose that would help, but it’s only the tip of the iceberg.
I currently employed at an elementary school. I’m a product of parochial schools. The elementary I’m at has no stratified curriculum. During my school days the curriculum was stratified. The teachers at public are better paid in general if we subtract rural districts. My teachers at the parochial schools were paid pennies. I still believe I received a superior formal education than a majority of the school-aged kids today who have attended public schools, K-12. My parochial schools still divide bathrooms by sex. Parent don’t complain nor do they care that it’s not “with the times.”
Actually, Neo, I don’t think his primary goal is to protect his son. I think his goal is to raise the perfectly ‘woke’ child. Just like some parents want to raise a starring quarterback, or child star.
Molly Brown:
I strongly believe you are incorrect about that.
If raising the perfectly “woke” child was his goal, he would never ever have written this article.
I read it, and from roughly line 4, every sentence seemed to be simply : “An Old Bolshevik writes from 1934.”
Been there, done it, got the T shirt. Unless people like George wake up, it ends in a pile of skulls. As usual.
At the time of constructing the Tower of Babel, Lord has mixed the languages the people spoke, so they could not anymore understand each others. In our times Lord operates in more subtle ways. People still believe they spoke a common language, but really this is not the case: the words can be common, but every political tribe have different meaning to these words, so effective communication is not possible.
You think George Packer has problems….
https://spectator.org/michael-flynn-graymails-the-government/
Wow. This man hates with a passion. As all good lefties must. At the core, this is all about the hate. It’s how they feel special.
Reading the article made me wonder if Mr. Packer is beginning to understand the frog being boiled as the temp is constantly raised.
Aesop fan,
Regarding hiring from non-elite schools, there was a time when Silicon Valley understood this. Adobe, for instance, did a lot of engineer hiring from state schools in the 90s. And not even UC, rather Cal State schools.
I was friends with a programmer with a degree from Chico State at the Israeli-founded hi-tech start-up I’ve mentioned. He stayed several years longer than I did — it was a classic Silicon Valley meat grinder — and he did well, but could never get a promotion to senior software engineer, though he led projects.
But his degree from Chico and at the company you were just not going to be promoted to senior level unless you were Israeli or had a degree from Stanford or Berkeley or such.
My friend had the last laugh. He got sick of it, applied to Apple just before the whole iPod thing happened and eventually made several million on his stock options. He stopped taking my phone calls.
@Neo
I will take your word re the long tortuous path to changing one’s mind for most people. My experience was an almost-overnight switch at a much younger age, so I must be a weirdo (not the first time!). It angers me that this man, and all of his ilk really, will never really comprehend that there is another way to live and it is not evil. If they understood that their choices are just that – choices from a menu of life styles and philosophies … but they accept just one revealed way as the Great Religion Without G-d For All Good People … I guess that’s my great blindness: how can they NOT SEE what is right out there to be seen? Very frustrating.
Nobody Atall:
You certainly aren’t the only person with a quick conversion, nor do I think it “weird.” But I do believe, from personal observation, that a slow and difficult process is much more common. That’s particularly true for someone like Packer who is both older and whose livelihood (and I assume social life and community standing and self-image and perhaps even marital tranquility) depends on his remaining a member of the liberal in-group.
It took me a couple of days to figure out what it is that George Packer illustrates so perfectly here. It is the way that Leftists switch seamlessly from being a part of their tribe, screaming 24/7 to make all sorts of poorly thought out changes to the management of just about every human system, to being a ‘victim of the system’, without ever stopping between those two exalted states to consider or take any responsibility for the consequences of their own actions.
It’s a wonderful (if totally self-indulgent) trick, because it enables one subjectively to be right under all circumstances, no matter how badly and obviously things go disastrously wrong.
It took me a couple of days to figure out what
+10
(Wish I’d said that).
Meritocracy-you keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think that it means.
“Civilization as you knew it came to an end when a man named Albert Shenker got the bomb.”
— Woody Allen, Sleeper*
(For you young ‘uns out there, yes, there was a time when Woody Allen was funny.)
https://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2019/09/does-the-left-suffer-from-ods-obama-disappointment-syndrome.php
I think the line up of Democratic candidates is perfectly awful, but awful is salable to north of 40% of the electorate and they’re competitive for the swing voters. Our political culture used to be better than this.
Another example of the sort of thing that might possibly upset Packer, but that probably depends on his own ideological investment in climate hysteria.
https://nypost.com/2019/09/17/the-climate-strike-is-a-crock-that-exploits-kids/
From Matt Continetti:
https://www.nationalreview.com/2019/09/public-schools-story-shows-radical-left-transformation-american-education/
Neo,
I think your posting is especially poignant.
And useful. Much more useful than most of the mud-slinging finger-pointing namecalling comments. Anybody can do that. Yet most of our commenters have form for offering thoughtful, interesting comments in other discussions; I do not mean to trash individuals.
Your own comments help to point out some of the real difficulties that Mr. Packer faces as he tries, even now, to figure things out without having entirely to re-place himself in the world.
Whether he ever comes entirely into the Light (*g*), it’s commendable that he has more than just a glimmer of the problem; and has had the cojones to put it before the public.
I imagine it will reach some of the people who are also caught in the trap, but have (perhaps without quite recognizing it) begun squirming a bit at its confines. Perhaps it will cause them to continue pondering the problem and facing the realities of the present version of their ideological milieu’s positions and projects, and of the agendas of their own élites.
I’m particularly impressed by yours at September 16, 2019 at 3:53 pm. I was never any sort of leftie, nor librul … basically a Classical Liberal and still a conservativish-libertarianish type. And still I’ve had to make some changes in the way I see the world and my place in it.
(For instance. David Horowitz burned his final New Left bridge when he voted for Pres. Reagan in 1984. He’d have been 45 at the time. He’d spent the previous 10 years trying to work himself out of the Trap — to re-position himself in his own mind and in the world. In his biographical article at
https://www.nationalreview.com/2015/11/david-horowitz-journey-left-right/ ,
Jamie Glazov writes:
)
Thank you.
.
Aesop,
As usual you bring a good deal of useful material to light, and good commentary to go with it. Thanks, as always.
.
Mike K,
Thank you too, for reminding us that there are spots of light here and there.
And that the SATs were once pretty good.
I am listening to a Jordan Peterson interview today in fits and starts between chores, and was impressed by his rationale for writing his first book, “Maps of Meaning.” IIRC He undertook an investigation of how and why people acquiesce in the atrocities of authoritarian regimes, most notably Nazis and Soviets, in order to understand the psychology of — my phrasing — why good people do bad things.
His goal was to learn to do just the opposite, so that, if the challenge came, he would not become one of those people. His opposition to the Canadian speech coercion law came out of that decision.
About 35 minutes in, he discusses the incompetence of universities, and seques into the war on competence at about 40.
The whole thing is worth watching, of course. He seems to pack more good sense into any given ten minutes of verbiage than anyone I know of. Lewis & Chesterton & and others certainly have as much good to impart, but they do it more liesurely, I think, even when speaking.
This has been my go-to link of the day, but in an hour of JP talking he covers just about every topic that’s roiling the zeitgeist.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v6H2HmKDbZA
From the Aspen Ideas Festival, recorded Tuesday, June 26, 2018. Jordan Peterson, author of the best-selling 12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos, may be one of the most famous intellectuals in North America today. He also may be among the most misunderstood. His fans say that he’s saved their lives, and detractors say that he’s the gateway drug to the alt-right. Who is this psychologist-philosopher whom so many of us had never heard of two years ago, and what does he really believe?
Featuring Jordan Peterson in conversation with Bari Weiss. Hosted in the St. Regis Hotel Ballroom, Aspen, Colorado.
(Bari, to her credit, asked infrequent but interesting questions, and then just got out of his way. There is also audience agreement and applause at lines you might not expect in Aspen.)