Education

The standard American education panic arrives like clockwork every few Decembers, usually accompanied by a solemn graphic in the Washington Post and a collective sigh from the editorial board: our kids are falling behind, our classrooms are collapsing, and every country between the Baltic Sea and the Singapore Strait has apparently solved what we have failed to fix. The headlines are practically photocopied: The Washington Post: “U.S. students continue to lag behind peers in East Asia and Europe in reading, math and science, exams show.” ...

Somewhere along the line, society decided that plain old competence was too cruel a sorting mechanism. We could not just say one person is intellectually sharp and another person is socially graceful. That would leave somebody without a trophy. So we pulled off one of the slickest little semantic scams of the modern self-esteem era: we took people skills, wrapped them in the prestige language of IQ, and handed socially adept mediocrities an honorary genius badge. ...