Hildegarde

Here’s the thing.  I’m a firm believer in the idea that everything that survives serves a function, even if it’s not the function we think it’s supposed to be serving. 

But the fact remains that a lot of what we do does not serve the function we say we want it to serve, and not just education as a skills-credentialing system.

Take, for instance, “rehab.”  Drug and alcohol programs, including AA, have a success rate of something like 3% after one year.  If only 3% of heart surgery patients survived after one year, we’d call that a failure, say we didn’t know how to do heart surgery, and go back to the drawing board to figure out something new.

But the news is even worse than it seems to be.  Among alcoholics and drug addicts who receive no treatment at all, approximinately 3% get sober and stay that way for a year, each year.

In other words, as far as we can tell, based on every verifiable, falsifiable and fully disclosed study ever done, rehab and twelve step programs have no effect at all on drug and alcohol use.

And yet, this society puts enormous resources into rehab programs.  Government and private insurance systems par for them.  Courts order participation as a condition of probation and parole boards insist on participation as a condition of granting parole.  

What’s more, every form of entertainment–movies, television, books, even comic books–puts out an endless stream of propaganda about how rehab and only rehab ever “cures” the “disease” of addiction, and all the stories and plays and films leave the impression that everybody who really puts their mind to the twelve steps will succeed.

To be fair, of course, the old system–blame the addict for his lack of self control and insist he lie up to his responsibilities and stop behaving badly–didn’t work either.  In fact, in those days, the number of alcoholics and addicts who managed to get sober and stay that was for a year was…3%. 

We know less about addiction than we know about cancer, and we know frighteningly little about cancer.  But that brings me to something else that we do even though it doesn’t work the way we say we think it does.

Anybody who has ever spent time in a facility giving chemotherapy or radiation treatments for cancer knows that success and survival rates are abyssmally low.  In some forms of cancer, they’re as low as those rates for successful rehab.  

Some forms of  cancer respond to the things we know how to do about cancer.  some forms do not.  We’re not really sure of why that is.   We go on doing what we do, even when we know it isn’t effective, because we want to feel we are doing something.

But cancer treatment has an advantage that neither educational credentialing nor rehab shares.  For whatever reason, it just isn’t enough for cancer researchers to feel that they’re doing something.  They keep insisting on finding a way to actually do something.

In education and rehab,  however, we have situatoins where we not only aren’t doing what works, but where what we’re doing is preventing us from finding something that does work.  Having reache our officially accepted “answer,” we have largely stopped asking the question.

With educational credentialing, I think that part of the problem is that any serious attempt to ask the question would require us to discard assumptions that we feel are not just true–actually, I think that large whacking hunks of us suspect that they’re not true–but morally imperative to hold.

One of those is the idea that ability, intellectual and athletic and artistic and anything else, is almost entirely a result of nurture, not nature. 

Part of the reason we hold so desperately to this assumption, which seems demonstrably untrue on its face, is that we fear that if we accept that ability is heritable, we will find that such heritability differs by race. 

What’s going on here is complicated.   I think that for a small percentage of the people clinging desperately to the “it’s all nurture” paradigm, the problem is that they already think that heritability differs by race, and that black and brown people are inherently stupider than white and Asian people.

This lands them in a terrifying position.  First, they think if it became socially acceptable to acknowledge what they believe to be true, then it would have to be legally acceptable to discriminate against people–to deny them opportunities in employment and education–by race.   Second, they’re fairly sure that the first thing would lead inevitably to the establishment of legally “superior” and “inferior” races, where slavery (at best) and genocide (at worst) would have to be redefined as morally and politically acceptable.

Part of the problem here is that these are people who cannot understand mathematical distributions–that is, they don’t understand that saying that “group X tends to be Y” tells you absolutely nothing about any individual member of group X.  Group X may tend to be Y, but this particular member of group X may be Z instead, and there’s no way to predict that from his membership in any group at all.

In other words, discrimination on the basis of race would still be a) incredibly stupid and b) morally wrong even if the heritability of abilities differed on the basis of race, because we would still have to approach every individual on the assumption that we couldn’t know, from his race, what his own particular abilities were. 

If we accept Kant’s most important categorical imperative–that we must treat every human being as an end in herself and not as the means to the ends of any other person–then we would still be obliged to treat Chuck and Nigel and Mark and  Su  Ling as Chuck and Nigel and Mark and Su Ling, not as black and white and Latino and Asian.

Nor would we be even pramatically justified in putting fewer resources into the education and training of any one race.  Distributions are distributions, but geniuses are wild cards, and the guy who’s going to finally actually be able to cure cancer could be born purple for all we know.

The other reason there’s so much resistance to accepting that abilities are largely heritable is less apocalyptic, but maybe more insidious–none of us wants to accept that we can’t “be anything we want to be” if we just put in enough time and effort.

The idea that it’s effort and not talent that counts, that all of us are born capable of achieving whatever we can imaine to achieve, is so deeply engrained in the American psyche that it can almost be said to be one of our founding principles.  It is, in fact, one of the basic assumptions of the entire Englightenment project, the idea that human beings, if they applied reason to the world and to themselves, could better both it and themselves.

There’s a lot of juice in that assumption, and holding it has a lot of upside.  If you honestly believe you “just can’t” do something chances are good that you won’t even try to do it.  And it’s people trying what they don’t know they can do that gets us democracy, antibiotics and the use of perspective in painting.

Progress comes from refusing to believe that we have to accept what is.  And yet, sometimes we do have to accept what is.  Neither the world nor the individual human being is infinitely malleable.   Nature sets limits on us all.  I could have worked my butt off for all my life, practiced and trained and done everything available to me, and I still would have ended up playing basketball less well than Michael Jordan would have if he’d spent all of his life in bed.

We’re not going to reform education unless we learn to accept that–and it’s possible that we can’t reform schools-based education at all.