On thinking about it, one could add another goal, that it is valuable to avoid suffering even amongst those people whose prospects aren’t that bad overall. Extreme boredom at school is miserable, even if random luck with parents and genetics has set someone up to enjoy a flourishing life somewhat better than those whose weren’t so lucky and even if it happens to someone who doesn’t respond to that boredom by playing up and wrecking the educational prospects of the worse-off in their class.

So far from feeling jumped all over I think your reaction of “ugh” is your problem. As someone who has dyspraxia I personally would like a fix for that. And since my brother got a severe brain injury my desire for medicine to be able to fix brains has only increased. I am quite intellectually okay with doctors doing things that are “ugh” in the process of carrying out cures (I object of course to ethically-horrible things like murdering healthy young adults for their organs, I am merely talking here about things that make me feel queasy), and they seem to enjoy it also by the way they tell war stories over a meal if given half a chance, so I don’t share your objection.

I also don’t know where you got the idea that you think that I think that the problem with developmentally-disabled people is that we don’t know how to “fix” them yet – I have my faults of character but at least I am aware that my faults are far more varied than merely the dyspraxia, I most certainly do not believe that fixing my dyspraxia would “fix” me or any other developmentally-disabled person, and I am baffled as to where you got the idea that I did believe such a silly thing – I don’t even know anyone who has just one problem in their lives.

As for not being able to engage in policy discussions entirely in your own home, yes, that is true and I never argued that otherwise, my objection is that people who struggling with reading, writing or participating in discussions at university are going to be hampered in that participation outside university as well no matter how society is organised.

Harry – I’ll just say again that I still can’t see the attraction of ‘radical educational equality’ as a principle. I was wrong (and perhaps a bit uncharitable) in attempting to second-guess your motivation for adopting it but I note that you haven’t given a principled explanation of what does motivate its choice. I don’t think it’s obvious, actually, that in the kind of world I have in mind (where your total years of schooling does not influence how much you get paid, the degree of respect people have for you or, conceivably, how satisfying your job is) how much education people received would be a ‘matter of justice’, in the sense of a squabble over the distribution of scarce goods. (I’m mostly sympathetic, I think, to the kinds of policies you say it would underpin in the real world but it’s not clear to me this is decisive, bearing in mind that all kinds of reasonable theoretical views would seem to support a similar policy agenda.)

Educational reform starts by terminating edu-crats and schoolmarmies, er at least terminating their contracts. And it’s not obvious that being, say, a lawyer beats being an electrician.

So it’s thereby a semantic argument – therefore uninteresting, or at least, less interesting than if Harry really thought we should lobotomise children to make them equal or anything like that.

However, Harry does seem to be supporting the idea that, while it’s low on the priority list, ceteris paribus, we should strive for equality of outcomes. I have some sympathy for this idea.

I’ll discuss what certris paribus might look like in a moment. But firstly, here are two problems for the alternative (equal outcomes for equal (natural) talent)

1) how can we tell two people have equal natural talent except, by noting they achieve equal outcomes whenever everything else (family background, prior education, motivation, time to study/train etc.) is the same?

I think what usually happens here is that if we can’t think of any other explanation, we put the differences down to ‘natural ability’ and decide it’s How Things Are.

One big thing to consider here is people’s actual performance always comes out of an learning environment that has a certain structure to it. If the structure changes radically, there’s no guarantee that the same people will appear to be the ‘talented’ ones. For example, our education system puts particular emphasis on reading, writing, and sitting tests – in many ways it’s quite theoretical. It’s almost certainly the case that this makes people who are predisposed to be good at sitting still and writing and reading things much easier than those who hate sitting still and thinking but like ‘getting out and doing things’ or talking to actual people. If our education system was instead structured much more around collaboration, practical experience and two-way oral discussion (for both instruction and assessment), then different people would certainly succeed more. So the structure biases certain kinds of potential over others. What is natural talent then? The potential to perform in our system? Or the potential to perform in any system whatsoever? If the former, why does it deserve any privilege? If the latter, how could we possibly tell?

2) how is ‘natural talent’, if there is such a thing, any less arbitrary and fortuitous than one’s parent’s position in society?

To put it another way, we’d like the playing field to be level for people regardless of their birth circumstances – we’d like it to be the case that if someone is born to rich and wealthy lawyers who can afford the best education and can instruct their child in the law themselves and use their connections to get them good positions is no better or worse off than someone who is born to street sweepers. We think this presumably because we think people do nothing to earn their birth circumstances, and it seems unfair to penalise or promote people’s chances on the basis of things that just fell to them and they didn’t earn. Why doesn’t the same reasoning apply to ‘natural talent’, if there is such a thing?

(It may be that the ‘talented’ can secure more goods for society at lest cost than the ‘highborn’. But that’s just a pragmatic reason for preferring a meritocracy, it doesn’t make equal outcomes for equal talent just in itself. What if it turned out to be more costly to level the playing field for social position than the expected returns for benefiting just the talented?)

Anyway here’s a plausible ceteris paribus situation involving equalising outcomes that doesn’t involve lobotomies or grand orphanages: a group of people entering your institution have the same funding, motivation, time devoted to study, encouragement from their parents and peers, etc. It comes to your attention from a recent study that if you do nothing, 20% of them will fail, but if you give them early assessment, work out who is in this 20%, and give them some feedback on where their weak areas are and encourage them to work on them, then everyone will pass. This requires a cost, but it isn’t a big one (so you’re not diverting huge amounts of resources from something that may need them before). Would doing this make your course more ‘educationally equal’, or would it make it less?

(I think this is a very plausible scenario, by the way, one quite similar to things that teachers are in fact often faced with, differing only by artificial clarity (I loathe science-fiction moral intuition pumps)).

Attributing their impending failure to lack of talent is about as plausible in this case as it usually is.

So if you really think that educational equality should be about stratifying people’s outcome by talent, shouldn’t you think that spending this extra time to identify student weaknesses and help them overcome them is making the course actually less equal?

Tracy W.—I don’t want to jump all over you, but just to point out that suggesting the problem with developmentally disabled people is we don’t know how to “fix” them yet is, well, ugh.

No one is suggesting lobotomies for everyone. I, at least, am suggesting thinking about how we might create broad options for a range of different kinds of human flourishing (because we value having a broad range of kinds of people around) that are not predicated on pushing and rewarding achievement along one narrow measure (school).

I also think citizenship could be usefully restructured such that being book-smart enough to read policy documents in the privacy of one’s home and formulate good opinions about them (which NONE OF US CAN DO ALONE anyway—the sewage plant is a great example, actually. Beyond NIMBY, one might wish to become informed about various options for treating sewage, new advances in sewage plant technology, and formulate a stance on the best of those options—all of which requires community discussion and getting help from others who know more, whether one is cognitively disabled or not).

I suggest you look at Project Followthrough and the Direct Instruction research (see http://www.projectpro.com/ICR/Research/DI/Summary.htm for a summary). It shows that primary schools can be far more effective at teaching disadvantaged kids, and provides reason to believe that the quality of instruction can drastically extend the levels that most people can reach, even if some will always take far longer to get to those levels than others.
Of course there will always be some kids with cognitive disabilities so severe and expansive that they cannot be very good at school, or at least there will be until medicine figures out how to fix the human brain. But as Harry says, the only way equity for those kids can be achieved is by lobotomising everyone.
And the ability to read, write and discuss at a college level is valuable not only for employment reasons, but for other reasons as well – to be an effective citizen (what would happen if those students you write about get a letter from their local council saying that a sewage pond is going to be built next door), to handle practical problems like medications or what to do when the baby swallows half of a weird pot plant, and it also provides a useful source of mental entertainment when life leaves you deprived of both TV and internet access (I remember sitting on the front of a boat travelling between two Tongan islands, watching the sun rise while reciting “Sea Fever” to myself.) Regardless of the economic structure of society, I think everyone should have as good an education as possible.

No, quite wrong. Educational equality is more urgent when the surrounding context is one of unjust inequality than when background inequalities are small or not unjust. But even if the basic socio-economic envrionment is egalitarian (which I think we could, indeed, reform it to be) there would still be a matter of justice about who received how much education, and one (but only one) of the consdierations would be raising the achievement of the “naturally” cognitively disabled (which is demanded by educational equality, but also by other principles).

That said, the point about this being mainly a debate in non-ideal theory holds. In the US, some 10-20 percent of children (possibly more) get through the schools without acquiring the basic skills necessary to have a significant amount of control over their lives either at work or outside of it. I don’t believe that by raising all of their achievement we’d be raising their prospective incomes by much (but by some, sure); but I do believe that we’d be increasing by some the control they have over their lives (eg, their ability to control their emotions and feel some sort of self-confidence and know where to go when confronted by the arbitrary use of power by a manager; their ability to join and participate in a union; their ability to use credit effectively, etc). This may all be covered by the corollary of the difference principle to which I refer in the post. But whatever the principle, we shouldn’t falsely promise this population that we have some egalitarian alternative that they might inhabit in the near future (not that I’m suggesting you or Kathleen think we should, I’m just trying to justify the independence interestingness of justice in education in an unjust world).

I can’t check back for a while, but will respond to others when I can.

Too many kids are crowding into college because they feel they have to in order to get a decent job. They are not there to enjoy the life of the mind. Sadly, with more people getting four-year degrees, the value of the four-year degree has eroded and now the common wisdom among students is that a college degree is the new high school degree, and you need to go to grad school to get a decent job. So now students have suffered through (or, very often, dropped out of) college to find themselves competing for low-paying service jobs. We say lots of pious, self-congratulatory things about Social Justice and Fairness in encouraging these kids to attend college, but in the end, how much private good have they been able to enjoy?

Meanwhile, my experience is similar to Kathleen’s (do we teach at the same place?):
“in the classroom the sharp as tacks students are held back in discussing ideas when surrounded by evidently befuddled peers. ” They’re not just held back, they’re alienated and frustrated, and they become disengaged. That’s a real shame, and I wish this were brought up more often:
“I think that it is more important to arrange social institutions to maximize the prospects for a flourishing and enjoyable life of those whose prospects are worst than it is to ensure equality of opportunity (or educational equality). In so far as we can improve the conditions of society in a way that benefits the worst off by training the talents of the talented and getting them to put them to work, that’s what we should do. This principle gives us a powerful reason to foster the talents of people who are might develop the wealth and technology that can improve the lives of, for example, the severely cognitively disabled.”

I agree and would take it further: the proper view of education should be mainly or even exclusively as a public good. We should stop seeing it as merely the admission ticket for the game of White Collar Employment Musical Chairs.

(1) Our public school system has been systematically run down by various State governments, while
(2) the Federal government has skewed the system by giving federal grants to public and private schools based on a formula which has failed to direct the most federal money at the most disadvantages schools, in fact, has directed quite a healthy whack of the funds to the richest private schools,
(3) 1. and 2. plus huge marketing has caused middle class parents to panic and fall over themselves / get into debt to put their kids into private school, or failing that, to a selective high school
(4) So the public schools are losing their ablest students as well as their funding
(5)We are drifting towards a situation where the public system is in danger of being made a safety net for the most disadvantaged.

Blind Freddy could see that one very simple and effective reform would be for both State and Federal governments to re-prioritise public education to the point where all or most private schools are of similar quality to the selective public schools now, so the middle class don’t panic and pull all their kids out.