Freddie de Boer is a… Let’s go with “polarizing figure.” I forget how I first ran across him, but I’ve found him a consistently interesting writer, mostly because he hews very closely to his own very particular interpretation of things, in a way that doesn’t line up especially well with either side in the Culture Wars. He’s an avowed Marxist who’s probably more intensely disliked by liberals than conservatives, which is quite the trick.

The Cult of Smart is a book-length exposition of his take on the American education system (defined somewhat broadly, in a way that mostly incorporates college as well as K-12), and in case you had any doubts on where he comes down based on the title, it helpfully comes with a subtitle: “How Our Broken Education System Perpetuates Social Injustice.” So, yeah, he’s not really a fan… His central argument is that modern American society puts too much emphasis on being “smart,” in a way that’s actively damaging to a significant portion of the population. In the process, he argues, we’ve set goals for the education system that are probably self-contradictory and definitely impossible for it to meet.

That maybe doesn’t sound so different from various Takes you might expect from people who fit comfortably within one side or the other of the Culture Wars, but his basis for the claim is pretty much guaranteed to piss people off. He argues at length that the fundamental problem with using education as a catch-all solution to a variety of forms of inequality is that some people just aren’t “smart” in the academic sense. There are, he argues, necessarily going to be individual differences in academic aptitude that will shut some substantial fraction of the population out of any benefits that can be gained from education. To put it slightly crudely, half of the population is always going to be below average, and nothing you do in the classroom is going to change that.

This is not, as he points out repeatedly (bordering on tediously), but probably futilely, an argument that particular groups of people are less academically capable than others. The claim is an individual one– some people just aren’t cut out to succeed in school, and will thus inevitably be left behind when social and economic rewards are tied too closely to getting good grades and going to good schools.

While this is positioned as a book about education policy– Amazon’s ultra-specific algorithms put it as the #1 bestseller in that area– it’s really not. Or, rather, it’s only half a book about education policy– the first half, which basically argues that none of the options in the discussion about how best to organize the public education system will work as advertised, or even matter all that much. The second part of the book is a pitch for Marxism– the real “from each according to abilities, to each according to needs” kind that avowed Marxists will tell you has never been tried. The argument being that the fundamental problem here has to do with the entire organization of society, and thus just tweaking what we do in schools and colleges is hopelessly inadequate.

That makes this kind of a difficult book to talk sensibly about. I’m largely on board with the first half argument about education, though being a person of a more sunny and optimistic disposition than de Boer, I would phrase it a little differently. That is, I agree that different people have different innate aptitudes and inclinations that make the sorts of things one needs to do for academic success more congenial for some people than others. I would tend not to describe this in terms of a lack of intelligence, or an inability to do certain kinds of things, though, because (as I’ve argued at book length), the mental toolkit we use to do things is pretty universal. Most of the people who aren’t well suited to success in school are way more capable than I am at non-academic tasks, despite my collection of academic credentials.

Framing aside, though, I basically agree with de Boer that there are a good many individuals who are ill-served by a system that ties material rewards too closely to formal educational outcomes. This is much the same argument made in Chris Arnade’s Dignity (which I talked about last summer), which phrases it in a third way but is largely saying something similar. We need a path to material success for people who aren’t likely to get there by going to college, and this is badly neglected in a lot of mainstream politics because the people who dominate those conversations tend to have reached their positions via the “standard” route of academic success.

Where I part company with this book is in the pivot to Marxism, mostly because I’m not a Marxist. Which is not to say that de Boer’s description of his socialist utopia in the final chapter doesn’t sound like a lovely place to live– it sounds great in a lot of ways. The problem is, is also reads a bit like a “Golden Age” SF story about the wonders of the future, in that it doesn’t feel inhabited by recognizable human characters with plausible human motivations. I don’t see a path from here to there that doesn’t involve space aliens replacing us all with pod people.

And that’s a shame, because I think the identify-the-problem part is really good: he’s got a decent collection of (mostly mildly depressing) evidence for his position, and presents it well, and I think the problem he’s identified is an important one. I just don’t find the long-term solution he’s proposing remotely plausible.

I suspect there’s probably a more liberal-wonk version of this book that makes a stronger case for one of the floor-setting systems (either a Universal Basic Income or a Job Guarantee) that de Boer presents briefly and dismisses a little too quickly for my tastes. That is, some intermediate level of resource redistribution that ensures that people who aren’t inclined to pursue a more academic path to success don’t risk lapsing into poverty, but leaves the academic-striver path relatively untouched. I have an easier time believing that sort of arrangement could work, and wasn’t especially persuaded by the arguments against them.

(I have a secondary criticism as well, namely that I think he oversells the awfulness of the academic grind in a way that’s sort of the mirror image of the selection and survivorship biases he identifies in a lot of discussions about school reforms. That is, I think the conversation about the negative aspects of the academic track to success tends to be dominated by people who were especially sensitive to the stresses involved, in a way that exaggerates the problems. But then, as someone with degrees from elite schools who’s a tenured professor at an elite private college, that’s exactly the sort of thing I would say…)

Anyway, I found this an interesting and thoughtful book, and it was very easy to read– whatever his faults, de Boer can certainly write. I thought the final chapters were aimed a little too directly at true believers in a cause I don’t really subscribe to, though, which ultimately made it less successful than it could’ve been. It’s worth a look, though, if you’re interested in this sort of thing, and I hope it provokes somebody to take another look at the problem it identifies and propose a different set of solutions.