the culture rewards smartness with success because “smartness” is, definitionally, the ability to succeed in the culture. And, if any effort is made to imbue the terms with some independent meaning—to define “smartness” without reference to success, or “success” without reference to evidence of smartness—then the whole proposition falls apart: the equation becomes hopelessly confounded by the variables of class and culture, and whatever causal relationship remains between “smartness” and “success” begins to look, at the very least, bidirectional.
As the empirical proposition collapses, so too does the moral and political framework of The Bell Curve’s “natural” order, as well as its regressive critique of the law. It is simply not true that, throughout the history of this nation, law has been the great social equalizer, bucking the tides of natural justice. On the contrary, law has been and remains the great defender of the natural order, protecting the bounty of the “smart” from the intrusions of the “not-so-smart” while eluding all insight into the actual construction of those terms.
The Bell Curve got it backwards: law does not impose an artificial equality on a people ordered by nature; on the contrary, law preserves the artificial order imposed on a people who could be, and should be, of equal worth. Because it is culture, not biology, that makes people different. It is culture, not nature, that generates the intellectual hierarchy. And law maintains rather than challenges the smart culture.
I did pretty well in my early years of school. From the first through fifth grades, I got almost all As, and never anything less than a B +, except for in penmanship, where I tended to get mostly Ds. This last wasn’t for lack of effort, but for the life of me, I just could not master the cursive style. The disorder persists to this day.
When I was eleven my mom remarried, and we moved from our brick rowhouse into a completely detached split-level home with a driveway, a patio, and a backyard that seemed at the time large enough to get lost in. I changed schools at the same time, and got my first experience with what I now know is called academic tracking.
At my new school, the sixth grade was divided into four sections, A through D, with section A being for the really “smart” kids, B for the less smart kids, and so on down the line. Though I had a section A type record, I got assigned to section B; this, I figure, reflected either a skepticism about the academic standards at my old school or an emphasis on penmanship at the new one.
I did not fare well in section B. In section B, we were expected to talk about stuff, and most of the kids—feeling, I guess, at ease among friends—found this activity not the least bit challenging. I was another story. Most of the talk focused on current events, and while I sort of knew what was going on, and think I understood when I was told, the simple fact was that I could not bring myself to say much about the matter. And so I got mostly As on my homework, and even As on the tests, but when called on in class I was completely unresponsive. Day after day the sixth-grade teacher would call on me, sometimes for opinions, sometimes just to repeat the received wisdom of a prior lesson, and day after day I would sit in silence, staring at my desk, waiting for the teacher to move on.
I had lots of conferences with the teacher, and at least two that I can recall with the principal. They were not terribly productive. Yes, I could hear the teacher’s questions; yes, I knew the answers; yes, I knew the importance of sharing the answers with the teacher and the rest of the class. No, I was not trying to embarrass the teacher; no, I was not afraid of being wrong; no, I certainly did not cheat on my homework or on the tests. And no, I was sorry, but I did not know what the problem was, or what anyone should do to fix it.
I guess the principal came up with his own solution, because I spent a couple of days with the kids of section C. The move may have been punitive or it may have been remedial, but, in either event, I loved it. The kids of section C did not bother with current events; our focus was on drawing—and I loved to draw. In science, we drew pictures of solar systems and molecules; in social studies, we drew pictures of historical figures; in math, we drew pictures of numbers, then added anatomical features to convert them into animals or people. Precisely how the kids of section C were expected to contribute to the war against communism I do not know, but I do know our training for service was a heckuva lot more fun than section B’s.
At the same time, it worries me some in retrospect that section C’s drawing lessons were so thoroughly unencumbered by any actual knowledge of the things to be drawn. I don’t remember ever learning anything at all about the physical appearance of molecules or solar systems, let alone anything about what they did or why they were important. And about the only math I remember from my time in Section C is that a 6 is versatile enough to be any animal from a giraffe to a turtle, and a 9 can be the same animal in extreme distress, but a 2 isn’t worth a damn for anything but a snake.
We learned just as much about the historical figures. I remember a Thanksgiving lesson that required each of us to draw a picture of Pocahontas, an easy task for me, I having studied at my old school from a textbook that featured a very nice picture of the Thanksgiving heroine. The image stuck with me—she looked like a movie star, and I think I had a crush on her—and so I finished the assignment with ease, producing a credible rendition of Sophia Loren in buckskins with a feather sticking up out of her head. Some of the other kids at my drawing table—in section C we did not use individual desks—did not know Pocahontas as well as I did, and a couple of the boys drew Pocahontas as a very fierce, and very male, Indian warrior, which certainly would have made Captain John Smith’s story a more interesting one, but was, as far as I know, largely inconsistent with the historical record. But we all got the same grade on the assignment, except for the one kid who drew Pocahontas holding a bloody scalp, an image, I guess, that ran counter to the sentiments of the holiday.
I did not get to stay in section C all that long. I spent half a day with some other principal-type person taking a slew of tests; a week later, I was in section A. In section A, we seldom talked about current events, and we hardly ever drew. Instead, we diagrammed sentences (kind of like turning numbers into animals, but with correct answers), learned the periodic table (there really is a krypton), bisected triangles (with compasses and protractors), argued about who started the War of 1812 (it was the British, of course), and even wrote and performed a play (based on Romeo and Juliet, to every boy’s dismay). We had lots of tests in section A, and some were like the ones I took in the principal’s office, multiple-choice tests with separate answer sheets where you had to be careful not to mark outside the little circles with your number 2 pencil. Sometimes kids would leave sectign A, and sometimes new kids would arrive, and always we kept taking the tests.
I did not do all that great my first few weeks in section A, but I eventually got the hang of things and, with help from my teacher, once again started getting As. I made friends in section A, and some of them would be friends clear through high school. I sometimes missed the kids in section B, and also the kids in section C, but I lost touch with all of them. From time to time I wonder what happened to them, and to the kids in section D, whom I never even knew.
I learned a lot in section A, acquired a lot of new skills, gained a lot of new knowledge. We didn’t get to draw much or talk about current events, but we learned to think and to write, and we learned lots of new concepts and new words and new phrases. Maybe it was in section A that I learned the meaning of “self-fulfilling prophecy.”
George Harley and John Sellers wanted to be police officers. In the District of Columbia, applicants for positions in the Metropolitan Police Department were required to pass a physical exam, satisfy character requirements, have a high school diploma or its equivalent, and pass a written examination. Successful applicants were then admitted into Recruit School, a seventeen-week training course. Upon the completion of their training, recruits were required to pass a written final examination; those who failed the final examination were given assistance until they eventually passed.
The initial examination given to all Department applicants was known as Test 21, an eighty-question multiple-choice test prepared by the U.S. Civil Service Commission. The test purported to measure “verbal ability”; a few sample items follow:
Laws restricting hunting to certain regions and to a specific time of the year were passed chiefly to
a.