My Thoughts on Egalitarianism in Education

As part of our teacher meetings at school this year, we’re reading through select chapters of “Repairing the Ruins,” edited by Doug Wilson. To prepare for our meeting last week, we read Chapter 6 of the book, titled ‘Egalitarianism: The Great Enemy.’ We didn’t end up with a lot of time for discussion, so I didn’t share any of my thoughts on the chapter during the meeting, but I did spend a lot of time after the meeting digesting some of the ideas from the chapter. This essay is what I would have shared during the meeting if we had had more time for discussion.

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I grew up during the 1990s, a decade of wonderful things, including wide-leg jeans, the Spice Girls, and the beginning of the internet. I can still remember when people wrote each other letters instead of emails, and set up coffee dates over the phone instead of via text message. I had a few select friends’ phone numbers memorized and relied on the phone book for the rest. I still remember my parents buying their first computer, a big, boxy Dell in a cow-print package.

The 1990s were also the height of the self-esteem movement. I probably heard the words ‘self-esteem’ for the first time in elementary school. The ideas that backed the self-esteem movement taught me that I could be anything I wanted to be, and that I was limited by nothing–not even intellect or effort. So, I grew up believing that I was already special and great at many things, even though I didn’t have to work very hard at them. Unfortunately, I was one of those students who achieved straight A’s without having to study and one of those singers who had some natural skill without practice. I thought that everything I needed in life would be handed to me on a dinner plate, and that if I had to work hard at something, it meant that it must not be worth doing because I wasn’t very good at it to begin with.

This set me up for disaster in college. I breezed through my lower-level science and education courses, just like I had in high school, and found plenty of extra time for social events and leadership opportunities. The first couple years of college felt similar to high school for me, fun and carefree. When I reached my upper level courses, however, things began to change. My grades in science dropped because I had no study skills and I wasn’t very disciplined about my schoolwork. (I continued to do okay in my education courses–they involved a lot of essay writing, which I enjoyed.) I remember feeling frustrated with myself. I thought I was good at science, but now I was discovering that I wasn’t? Somehow, even after all my training to become a teacher, it didn’t register with me that doing well in school requires effort and discipline. I was a senior in college before I realized that no college professor was going to give me a passing grade because I was nice and enthusiastic. I needed to prove that I could meet challenges head-on, work through them, and produce something that I was proud of, even if the work took a long time and meant I might miss out on some social time with my roommates.

I came to the same conclusion about singing. I’ve loved to sing for as long as I can remember, however, I believed I could never be a good singer because some aspects of vocal training were challenging for me. I kept waiting for the morning that I would wake up and be an incredible performer, with people lining up to listen to me sing and fame waiting just around the corner. I was probably about the same age, late in my college years, when I realized that even being a good singer takes effort and practice and time. I started taking voice lessons again, singing scales, doing vocal exercises, and running through the hardest sections of the pieces I was learning. It all paid off–I may not be the best singer on the planet, but I know how to use my voice. I can say with confidence, all praise to the grace of God, that both in my professional work teaching and my songwriting I have finally learned to “work heartily, as for the Lord and not for men,” knowing that from the Lord I will receive an inheritance; I am serving the Lord Christ (Colossians 3:23b-24).

What does this all have to do with Repairing the Ruins Chapter 6? Doug Wilson spends Chapter 6 discussing egalitarianism and its effect on the education system. He says,

If God has made children with varying abilities, and He has, the educator is faced with a choice. He may apply the same standard to all the students and get varying results–some students who excel, others who bring up the rear, with the majority in the middle of the pack. Or he may insist that the process of education result in the same results, in which case, he must apply varying standards. Egalitarianism demands equality of result, equality of outcome. Because this is not the way God made the world, the world must be rigged if these egalitarian results are to be realized. For example, if an egalitarian PE teacher insisted that all his students must share the thrill of dunking a basketball, he really has only one option, that of lowering the net. In other words, the tendency of egalitarian dogma is always down.

So, in my own words, and in response to one of our discussion questions, I wrote, “Egalitarianism means that nobody gets what they need (or what they deserve).” In an egalitarian system, the academically-inclined, bright students are not challenged because the material has been made easier so that everybody, regardless of ability, can succeed with relative ease. This also means that the less academically-inclined students are not made aware of the areas in which they might need help in the future, when they find themselves in a higher grade level, in college, or even training for a career. This type of system puts everybody at a disadvantage–“nobody gets what they need.” The students who need extra help don’t get extra help, because the standards by which they are judged have been made to accommodate their abilities rather than reveal which school subjects will require more of their time and effort. The students like me, who need somebody to present them with more challenging material, or to challenge their laziness, don’t get what they need, either. They get used to schoolwork being easy, and then they don’t know what to do when they’re confronted with work–schoolwork or otherwise–that isn’t easy.

In the same chapter, Wilson says, “An industrious child with three talents far surpasses a ten-talent child who does little.” In an egalitarian system, the bright students’ good grades don’t necessarily represent how much effort or hard work they put into their schoolwork. If they are lazy students, who happen to still get good grades, they deserve to be reproached by their teachers instead of rewarded. In this way, the bright students don’t get what they deserve. Likewise, if the standards in an egalitarian system have been moved so much that they don’t challenge any students, the less academically-inclinded students don’t get what they deserve, either–their grades don’t reflect the effort they put into their studies.

Students benefit the most from a non-egalitarian system, in which they’re made aware of what they’re naturally gifted at, and what they are not. This doesn’t mean that a student can’t pursue something that challenges him or her. It means that all students can “work heartily, as for the Lord,” in all subject areas, receiving the help they need when they need it. It also means that all students can find a vocation they love, combining natural talent and hard work, and pursue that vocation wholeheartedly, to the glory of God.