Cruel to be Kind

I happened to flip past the Tavis Smiley show today on the way to the store; he had the most incredible--I do not mean that as a compliment--panel of yahoos: Cornell West; Arianna Huffington, Frum, Milibank, John S. Chen.  Oh god, they started in on edumatcation.  Chen was like, Yo, back in Hong Kong, we study for 29 hours a day; our children do not sleep; failure is not tolerated.  The last bit is especially hilarious because he had said, literally moments before, that the reason American higher education is superior to all the rest of the world combined to the billionth power whereas its K-12 sux mah balls is that colleges fail students which incetivizes blah blah blah whereas in public edumacation social promotion rules the day.  Well I guess in Hong Kong failure is an option, just . . . an unexercised one.

A month or so ago, David Brooks said something astonishingly intelligent.  It was when everyone was still talking about the Tiger Balm mother or whatever, the one who's like, I psychologically torture my children in order to guarantee their superficial success in the credentialing sector.  Brooks said, in effect: that shit, it's easy.  Anyone can play the violin if they practice; anyone can learn calculus.  Try navigating the social currents at a tween sleepover and get back to me.  He said, look, anyone can learn shit.  Neuroscience tells us that the mind is almost infinitely plastic.  All the old developmental truisms about, like, learning a language when you're a wee bairn; that shit is basically completely unfounded and untrue, mere anecdote, completely at odds with the still-emerging portrait of the brain as it really, remarkably is.  So, you know, snuffing out your child's spiritual development in order that they get through two years of algebra in eight months in order that Forbes magazine or whoever can say that America has better eighth graders than Sweden is effectively nuts; it creates automatons with no capacity to act cooperatively and creatively outside of a rigidly ordered hierarchy in which all decisions flow from an apex point . . .

Oh.  Oh, wait.  Oh, shit.