When earned education is insufficient
In Jessica Wildfire’s post about her work as a private teacher to elite children bound for the (expensive) Ivory Towers that practically require generational investment for any long-term returns, she talks about the stress that (systemically and financially validated) parents can put on their offspring to achieve (externally validated and systemic) success.
Wildfire captures how meritocracy is often a social construct designed to reinforce inherited privilege. Those in positions of power train their progeny to first respect and then reproduce conditions that guarantee the status quo. These ‘privileged’ kids go to exclusive school after exclusive school after exclusive school to ‘get ahead’ in a game when any real failure on their part is largely due to an inner struggle with parental perceptions.
I say this not to diminish their struggle, but to contextualize it.
These kids never lack access to resources but, Wildfire notes, their materially comfortable environment demands that they ‘change the world, but…also…maintain a sense of privilege and superiority…[be]…showered with praise or guaranteed access to the absolute best of everything.’
So change the world, but not too much.
In such contexts, wealth as a moral and intellectual good is assumed, and ‘with great power comes great responsibility’ not necessarily to the larger community so much as to its presumed leadership. These children, born leaders-to-be, are requested to consistently justify their position of extreme privilege and the resulting riches and prestige bestowed upon them at birth. Inequality is not the problem; it’s ungrateful, high-caste nepo babies.
Shakespeare’s Henry IV acts this out on stage — the play pivots on the future king’s ability to be ‘like bright metal on a sullen ground,’ to be a leader that understands how to manipulate the common folk through uncommon understanding and intelligence — ‘earned’ intelligence that is in reality written into his character by the common playwright (or God-given divine right, if you were a member of the King’s court and wanted to keep your head on your shoulders.) Poor little rich prince, we empathize and support you and the system that crowned you as a unconceived fetus. Multiple tabloids and YouTubers maintain this tradition with modern monarchs and their socioeconomic peers; publishers and readers mythologize their elite positions and personal stories as though these reveal organic truths.
Speaking of the Prince-then-King Henry IV who was not one to ‘shame the devil’ with any unfortunate truth-telling, Wildfire’s musings recall, for me, the recently deceased Milan Kundera’s The Book of Laughter and Forgetting.
In Kundera’s novel, two kinds of laughter exist: the honest guffaw of the devil, who knows everything is meaningless, and the fake giggles of the angels, who find the world well-organized and rational.
Kundera is no fan of angels. His purpose in categorizing laughter is clear: any sort of systemic allegiance taken too far is fanaticism, and fanaticism derives from a misguided belief in some sort of a man-made utopia, which inevitably ends in massacre, sometimes metaphorical and often a little too real. Someone should tell these rich kids to drop the upscale textbooks and make for the hills before indoctrination kicks in and we all suffer.
This brings up access vs. capacity - just because there’s capacity, doesn't mean there’s access, and vice versa. For an example, let’s look at Edutech.
If you physically go to an elite school, your network provides elite opportunities (Access.) If you ‘just’ learn via an Edutech platform, you may never get access to opportunities despite your skills (Capacity.)
So my questions…and as a parent, these questions plague me….
Does Edutech upskill and then upgrade the life and priorities of the population it targets? Does completing an online class or participating in an Edutech platform like Coursera or Khan Academy meet any long-term expectations like those implicitly and explicitly offered by access to a real-world restrictive academic institution?
Or is a specific Edutech tool just another thing the non-elites spend their discretionary income on with deceitful dreams of jumping a socioeconomic class or caste?
Is a school system or a parent or a company buying what is sold as the golden ticket only to discover, over time, they dumped a bunch of their more limited resources (time and/or money) on a knockoff with a limited shelf-life that peddled false hope to the masses while funding the posh habits of the wealthy philanthropists that built the Edutech chimera?
Worse…is Edutech the way those with capital upskill their labor force and (insert devil laughter here) get labor to actually pay for the upskilling themselves?
