schools and intelligence validation
on the bus, making myself write. 602 words in 17 minutes.
schools and intelligence validation
The other day I ended looking at a map of one of the towns where I grew up and I saw the community college where I went to summer camp a few times. It struck me just then that summer camp was basically daycare for older kids. I had a great time at that camp. Among other things, me and some of the other boys would build cars out of lego blocks and ram them into each other until the cars broke. Whoever’s car last the longest won. My mom went to that college.In my head, I put the words in uppercase - My Mom Goes To College. Someone else I knew had gotten a four year degree and was working on a master’s degree, and that phrase was such a big deal it was in all caps - A MASTER’S DEGREE. I now realize that my mom was working on her associate’s degree. I don’t meant to minimize anyone’s accomplishments, but an associate’s is not the huge deal I thought it was when I was a kid. Neither is a master’s degree.
I am the most formally educated member of my family. Some of my family didn’t finish high school and no one else got a four year degree. I’m also one of the people who makes the least amount of money and I always have been. This has been hard for my family to understand, because people in my family tend to think that formal education creates economic opportunities. That’s why I went to college in the first place: “after you go to college, you’ll get a good job that pays well.” When I graduated with my philosophy degree I looked around for someone to give me that job but they never did. My wife has pointed out that some of this is generational, tied to what’s happened in the economy. We graduated in a big downturn, and it’s been downturns since. A friend of ours who got a computer engineering degree got a really good job for about two years, then was laid off and ended up working retail. Most people we know our age are in a similar boat. That sucks for them but it’s reassuring for my wife and I to know that this isn’t our fault.
College wasn’t just about income, though. College was also about being smart. I was a smart kid, I was supposed to go to college. My parents were proud of me for being smart and this meant in part that I would be able to get some official recognition for my smarts. My parents overestimated how much effort and talent take people places, instead of structurally distributed opportunities and privileges. At the same time, part of the appeal of credentialing was a kind of legitimacy of intelligence. If I got a degree it meant I wasn’t just someone they thought was smart, it meant I was genuinely smart, and it would validate them. I remember a conversation once where my mom told me that a neighbor who was, as my mom put it, some kind of scientist, had said to my mom that she was an intelligent, intellectual person. My mom was deeply moved by this. I can now see that she spent years of her life trying to get a kind of intellectual validation, that she was a legitimate thinking person with a right to ideas. Schools provide that kind of validity, and by gatekeeping who gets that validation, and monopolizing the process, schools also help create the sense of invalid or illegitimate intellect that my mom had.