The German experience from kindergarten right through graduation and on to law school and university for computer science has taught me the superiority of the German system-but even that system, formerly thoroughly merit-based, has now at least partly given way to the pressures toward egalitarianism. As you probably know the Germans triage their students early on and put them on a life path to one of three school systems. The Abitur awarded by the German Gymnasium is a ticket into free university education without competitive entrance exam except for medicine and veterinary science.
This describes one of the main reasons why I stay in Germany, the schools here on average, at least at the Gymnasium level, are superior to most public schools in America and many private schools and they are free.
Under this system my third son at the age of 17 went directly into law school after Gymnasium while my oldest son here in Germany elected to go to the University of Virginia and then on to law school which cost him an extra four years. So the question is, do we want lawyers to be Renaissance men or do we want them to be proficient at the law?
However, I have seen the standards even in the highly ranked Bavarian schools begin to be watered down over three decades under the pressure of egalitarianism. As you point out, every parent assumes his child is Einstein and every parent, even when he or she admits in the dark corners of his mind that the child is average, understands that the child would benefit immeasurably from the sheepskin which is the ticket onto the better life.
So the main pressure by the parents is to undo a merit-based system and substitute a "compassionate" system. At the university level we see the same impulse from the faculty and we see the impulse toward compassion in the affirmative action programs. As the standards in the universities are watered down so that everybody can enjoy an equal outcome, the universities attempt to compensate by enrolling merit-based Asians.
The parents are happy so long as the kid gets the ticket to the better life and remain blithely unconcerned that the system is eroding beneath their feet.
All of this comes about in a society that thinks it is living in an era of abundance and closes its eyes to the fact that we actually live in an era of scarcity. In other words, we as a nation cannot afford our national programs or our personal lifestyles unless we go into debt by about $1 trillion a year together with an extra amount labeled unpaid liabilities. This is an illusion, a bubble which deludes us into thinking that we can afford to abandon merit and substitute compassion.
Certainly we as parents think we can abandon merit where our own children are concerned. Educators, routinely leftists, think they can abandon merit for egalitarianism on ideological grounds. We do this on so many levels, we see crony capitalism, we see self-dealing politicians, and we see whole sections of society addicted to subsidies. All of this is tolerated because we believe we live in an era of abundance. We do not.
Teachers think that the fault lies with the parents who are unresponsive to their children's needs to be educated at home as well as in school. Taxpayers believe the teachers are greedy for ever demanding more and more money while producing less and less. Parents think the system is corruptible and insist that their children not be left out of the corruption. Teachers say we are here to teach but we cannot fix the cancer in our culture which produces broken homes and lost generations of children and it is, therefore, unfair to expect us to do so. Politicians are eager to make venal deals with teachers unions and sellout the kids. Everyone except a few curmudgeonly conservatives believe that throwing money at the problem will solve it.
We cannot cure any of this as long as we assume we are living in abundance believing we have a cushion which permits us to deny the reality that without a merit system mediocrity, indolence and corruption will bring the system down in time. We cannot cure any of this so long as we are paying penance for broken race relations over generations so that we cannot address the plight of the inner-city child. We cannot address these problems unless we are willing to courageously examine IQ levels among races. Ultimately the problem is a cultural problem but we have no institution, not the educational establishment, not our churches, not our political parties and certainly not our government which is capable of fixing the culture.
So we go along, taking care of our own kids if we can, and pretending we live in abundance.
