Anti-elitism runs so deep in American culture that even our founding fathers thought it was old news. In 1813 Thomas Jefferson warned that the “artificial aristocracy founded on wealth and birth, without either virtue or talents,” represented “a mischievous ingredient in government, and provision should be made to prevent its ascendancy.” Like James Madison and Ben Franklin, he worried that this elite was interested in protecting its own privileges rather than the good of the Republic.
Madison, Franklin and Jefferson agreed on one major antidote to the evils of hereditary privilege: education. Jefferson started a university, in part, to pull “from the rubbish,” as he once put it, students who lacked economic resources but who made up for it with drive and intelligence. From their ranks, he envisioned a new class of leaders based on talent rather than fortune.
Through much of the 1800s up to the middle of the 1900s, education was widely regarded as stimulating social mobility and innovation. In the 1830s, Alexis de Tocqueville observed that the relative lack of hereditary institutions in the United States made education a crucial means through which citizens could rise in the world. “All that serves to fortify, to expand and to embellish intelligence,” he wrote, “immediately acquires a great value.”
This became the dream of countless immigrants throughout the 20th century. They saw higher education as a primary vehicle for changing their economic and social fortunes.
Today, that system has attracted a great deal of criticism for accomplishing the opposite outcome. It’s still true that when poor people attend a highly selective university, they are likely to greatly improve their economic prospects, but a majority of those attending such schools are from wealthy families. It’s those families that can enroll their children in the best public or private schools and afford tutors, coaches and fancy résumé-boosting summer programs.
So while some universities have eliminated tuition for those with few resources, students from the bottom 20 percent of the nation’s income distribution still make up only about 5 percent of the student bodies at selective institutions. This hasn’t changed much in 100 years.
Elite education has lost the trust of many Americans, in no small part because of how it solidifies the advantages of wealth. The fact that many schools still give preferential treatment to children of their alumni just adds insult to injury.
It doesn’t have to be this way. College should not be a prerequisite for advancing one’s prospects in life, but everyone should have an opportunity to continue education as a young adult, either in a good apprenticeship, trade school, two-year college or university. The best universities would be even better if they invested more in finding talented students in places they have historically overlooked — if they went beyond the usual metrics of meritocracy that elite families know how to use to their advantage.
Today we sort students early, sending the children of wealthier families on a path that has been smoothed for them. But with quality instruction and even limited exposure to intensive learning, more heterogeneous groups of students would develop the appetite and aptitude for research and creative practice that selective colleges and universities seek.
The Teagle Foundation, a group that works to strengthen and expand liberal arts education, has done just this in its Knowledge for Freedom initiative. The program invites underserved high school students to college campuses for seminars on the enduring questions thinkers have posed about leading lives of purpose and civic responsibility. These young men and women discover that the Great Books raise issues that are not mere accessories for the rich, but that can also inform the personal and professional lives of all students.
The power of elites can be disrupted by popular resentment, as we see every day in our public sphere, or it can be disrupted by opportunities for mobility. Education transforms lives; we just need to make it more widely available.
The National Education Equity Lab, a nonprofit, partners with universities to offer free college classes in so-called high-poverty (Title I) high schools. They instruct students across the United States with video lectures recorded by professors, classroom teachers and university-trained teaching assistants. Subjects range from the Great Books of the Western tradition to computer science, engineering and psychology.
The kids are highly motivated, they work hard, and about 80 percent of them pass. Beyond the particulars of any class’s curriculum, students learn that given a chance to work at a high level, they can become members of the educational elite. The students earn college credits — from Howard and Harvard, from Stanford and Wesleyan — to prove it.
I taught a humanities course focused on modern classics as my university started our partnership with the National Education Equity Lab. “The Modern and the Postmodern,” offered in rural districts and in urban centers, was filled with eager young people who were being told for the first time that there was no limit to what they might learn.
Recently, I met a student at Barnard who had taken the course in high school. She said it gave her the confidence to pursue her education at the highest level — and to encourage others to follow in her footsteps. The first priority of college admissions departments should be finding students like these and offering them the support they need to reach their full educational potential.
Good college classes, despite what one reads these days, don’t just teach close-minded students to condemn privilege or to complain about systemic oppression by elites. A good college education opens pathways for transformative achievement. And by doing so, the school inspires still more people to change their life trajectories through learning.
We will always have elites — some deserving, some not — and we will always have anti-elitists — some civic-minded, some cynical. Constitutional democracy doesn’t work if people are stuck in the station they’re born into, and education can still be an effective lubricant, and a powerful corrective to entrenched inequality.
Like the founders, we can be anti-elitists without falling into the trap of being anti-education. We’ll have to create pathways that change the opportunity structures for our fellow citizens, wherever they live and wherever, or whether, their parents went to school.
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