Ideology doesn’t matter
1st July 2010
Steve Sailer is never afraid to look Political Correctness in the eye.
The background is that the 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.
Whereas imposing a quota will suddenly produce creative risk-takers. Right. That’s why Google was founded by Michelle Obama.
To an American, it’s amusing to hear the French come up with the exact same cliches and fallacies as Americans have been telling each other for 40 years. Indeed, there are problems caused by reliance on entrance exams in terms of selecting for creativity and the like. But quotas do zip to fix those real problems. It’s not like the American quota kids all flock to Silicon Valley and start-up their own firms. A quota won’t give France its own Silicon Valley.
“With the objective of a great social opening,” the U.S. has been trying to invent “a better measure of young people’s intelligence” for 45 years, but we keep finding out that the old tests we had before the Great Society worked fine. It’s the test-takers who turned out to be the problem, not the test. But why should the French government learn from the U.S. experience? The U.S. government never learns from the U.S. experience.