the facts don’t care about your educational philosophy

This post by Freddie is a reminder that about education he has three major points to make:

In any given population, the ability to excel academically (whether or not you call it “intelligence”) is, like almost all other human abilities, plottable as a normal distribution: that is, a few people will be really bad at it, a few people will be really good, and the majority will be somewhere near the middle.

Because some people are simply better at school than other than other people, any pedagogical strategy, practice, or method that improves the performance of the worst students will also improve the performance of the best students; this means that “closing the performance gap” between the worst and best students will only be possible if you use the best strategies for the worst students and the worst strategies for the best ones — and even then the most talented students will probably adapt pretty well, because that’s what being a talented student means. (N.B. I am assuming that “Harrison Bergeron” strategies will not be employed, though maybe that’s not a safe assumption.) Another way to put it: if every student in America were equally well funded and every student equally well taught, point 1 above would still be true.

Resistance to these two points is pervasive because we collectively participate in a “cult of smart” that overvalues academic performance vis-à-vis other human excellences. That is, because we value “intelligence” as a unique excellence, necessary to our approval, we cannot admit that some people simply aren’t smart. (By contrast, we have no trouble admitting that some people can’t run very fast or lift heavy weights, because those traits are not intrinsic to social approval.)

Each of these three points is incontrovertibly true — indeed, if you think for a moment, the first two are blindingly obvious — but each is unwelcome to those who’d very much like to believe that equal/equal-ish/equitable educational outcomes are possible, and attainable through (a) more money or (b) better methods or (c) both. So again and again readers (a) misread, probably deliberately, Freddie’s arguments or (b) attack his character or (c) both. It would be funny if it weren’t so sad.