House of Eratosthenes

…[T]he winners of WWII, America and Britain, kept their old-fashioned elitist colleges like Harvard, Yale, Oxford, and Cambridge old-fashioned and elitist. The losers, like Germany, France, and Italy, after the war trashed their great universities on the altar of egalitarianism by going to open admissions. (In the U.S., CCNY was the only famous college to take the Spirit of ’68 seriously enough to dump selective admissions.) Today, that’s why ambitious Korean and Chinese students want to go to American or British universities, not to Continental ones: We won The War.

The French, not being fools, however, kept a number of small elite colleges, the grandes écoles, to publicly educate the small number of people who keep the place running. Not surprisingly, blacks and North Africans have a hard time passing the entrance exams to the French equivalent of Caltech at rates equal to whites.

Because entrance to the best grandes écoles effectively guarantees top jobs for life, the government is prodding the schools to set a goal of increasing the percentage of scholarship students to 30 percent — more than three times the current ratio at the most selective schools. But the effort is being met with concerns from the grandes écoles, who fear it could dilute standards, and is stirring anger among the French at large, who fear it runs counter to a French ideal of a meritocracy blind to race, religion and ethnicity.

France imagines itself a country of “republican virtue,” a meritocracy run by a well-trained elite that emerges from a fiercely competitive educational system. At its apex are the grandes écoles, about 220 schools of varying specialties. And at the very top of this pyramid are a handful of famous institutions that accept a few thousand students a year among them, all of whom pass extremely competitive examinations to enter.

… The problem is not simply the narrow base of the elite, but its self-satisfaction. “France has so many problems with innovation,” Mr. Descoings said. Those who pass the tests “are extremely smart and clever, but the question is: Are you creative? Are you willing to put yourself at risk? Lead a battle?” These are qualities rarely tested in exams.

Whereas imposing a quota will suddenly produce creative risk-takers. Right. That’s why Google was founded by Michelle Obama. [emphasis mine]

This is not exclusively a French problem. But it’s a pretty bad one.

Take a moment to think about the big picture of testing things. How can a test be flawed? There are two levels of sin here: A test can be non-productive, or it can be counter-productive. A non-productive test is blind and therefore random. Think of the airport passenger safety screener. If his metal detector is unplugged from the wall all day long, that’s what I’m talking about.

The next level beyond that would be profiling for terrorists. When you find a match, or when you X-ray the boarding party and find some individuals with crotch-bombs and shoe-bombs and liquid chemicals and guns — you wave them on to the plane and frisk the white-haired blue-eyed Scottish grandmothers.

These kinds of tests, I’m afraid, are counter-productive and not non-productive. They look for people who can follow instructions well. They look for the elite within that…and end up finding people who can follow extraordinarily nebulous instructions better than most anyone else.

Within a small sample this doesn’t do much damage. Over a larger one, it’s going to ultimately mean you’re sifting out the most creative resourceful people. Overall, the people who are best at responding to empathic signals from a stranger, are going to be the ones who aren’t very creative.

They will be confronted with an unorthodox situation, and their response will be to insist on a sequenced, numbered list of procedures to follow.

And in general, this has been precisely what has taken place. Inside of France and outside of it.

Hat tip to Dyspepsia Generation.

Leave a Reply

You must be logged in to post a comment.

Recent

Items of Interest

Monthly Archives

What They Say

Links

“Ideology Doesn’t Matter”Thursday, July 1st, 2010

“Ideology Doesn’t Matter”
Thursday, July 1st, 2010