William Voegeli outlines at National Review Online a key contradiction in liberals’ approach to educating their kids.
[D]iversity in education, from preschool to postgraduate, and the resulting holy war on privilege, requires denouncing but not renouncing. Despite its stated intent to subvert unjust hierarchies, multiculturalism facilitates rather than impedes careerism. A degree from a selective college, one racially integrated in a carefully curated way, does wonders for those getting on in the world. “Checking your privilege” never involves transferring to Jerkwater A&M, diverse in ways selective colleges never will be, and thereby surrendering one’s spot in the Ivy League so that it can be filled by a cashier’s or opioid addict’s kid. Noah Remnick, son of New Yorker editor David Remnick, devoted the summer before his senior year at Yale to sharing with Los Angeles Times readers the results of the “great deal of time” he’d spent “studying and talking with faculty and other students about what constitutes privilege, fairness and unfairness in American society.” Remnick will begin a Rhodes scholarship at Oxford in October, pursuing his interest in “race, resistance, and urban politics.”
In The Big Test: The Secret History of the American Meritocracy (1999), Nicholas Lemann wrote that our system of higher education has become a “national personnel department.” The reason for “the crush at the gates” of the most selective colleges and universities is that “people believe admission can confer lifelong prestige, comfort, and safety.”
The consuming concern with privilege and oppression, with confronting and correcting historical wrongs — social justice, in short, the ideology of preeminent colleges — has moved outward to less eminent ones and downward to secondary and primary schools. Many parents are eager, and many others are willing, to entrust their children to an educational system that inculcates this deep solicitude for the downtrodden, albeit just that portion of the downtrodden meeting certain demographic criteria. But the system, especially its most exalted institutions, is also expected to transmit the aspirations, expectations, and advantages of the uptrodden, those who started or climbed high and want their children to start and climb even higher.
