By George Will
Sunday, September 01, 2019
Nestled on the Front Range of the Rockies, the city of
Crystal was a largely upper-middle-class paradise, chock full of
health-conscious and socially conscious — meaning, of course, impeccably
progressive — Coloradans. Then in slithered a serpent in the form of a proposal
for a new school, to be called “Crystal Academy,” for “accelerated and
exceptional learners.” Suddenly it was paradise lost.
This “deliciously repulsive” story (one reviewer’s
scrumptious description) with “Big Little Lies” overtones (the same reviewer)
is told in Bruce Holsinger’s compulsively readable new novel The Gifted
School. It is perfect back-to-school reading, especially for parents of
students in grades K-12. And it is wonderfully timely, arriving in the
aftermath of Operation Varsity Blues — who knew the FBI could be droll? — which
was the investigation into a very up-to-date crime wave, the scandalous
goings-on among some wealthy parents who were determined to leave no ethical
norm unbroken in their conniving to get their children into elite colleges and
universities.
In Holsinger’s book, school officials, speaking
educationese, promise that as 100,000 children compete for 1,000 spots — the
dreaded 1 percent rears its ugly head — there will be “a visionary, equitable,
and inclusive admission process.” Four mothers who have been friends forever,
but might not be for long, begin becoming rivals in what they regard as a
nearly zero-sum game, as they plot to game a process that looks alarmingly
fair. Their children are embarked on a forced march to demonstrate that they are
“gifted,” a word “that slashed like a guillotine through other topics”:
“Advanced math, Chinese, martial arts, flute lessons with the principal player
in the Colorado Symphony: by eighth grade Tessa had become a living, breathing
benchmark, a proof of concept for the overinvested parenting they all practiced
with varying degrees of obliviousness and guilt.”
This is what Holsinger calls “advantage hoarding” and the
“delicate ecology of privilege.” Everything is hypercompetitive, even among
Crystal’s eleven-year-olds, from History Day at school to the travel soccer
teams, which involve “a lot of mileage, a lot of Panera” in an Audi Q7 with a
“Feel the Bern” bumper sticker, with “all the Patagonia parents huddled by the
pitch, cheering on their spawn in socially appropriate ways.”
When one father takes his toddlers to a playground and
other parents ask about his children’s ages, he subtracts a few months to make
them seem developmentally remarkable, for the pleasure of seeing “that flicker
of worry in the parents’ eyes.” And when rival children do not make the cut for
the new school, schadenfreude drapes the Rockies like snowdrifts.
Because Crystal Academy is to be a magnet for students
whose transcripts are clotted with AP (advanced placement) courses, it is definitionally
elitist, and consequently an awkward fit for good (and affluent, and
credentialed) progressives who are determined to lie and cheat in order to
maximize the already considerable advantages of their family cultures.
Students’ submissions for a school’s science fair become the parents’ projects.
Soon, and inevitably, there is a movement against the new
school: “We are a group of concerned parents strongly opposed to the creation
of the new public magnet school for allegedly gifted students. We believe that
gifted education should be democratic, egalitarian, and nonexclusive.”
Holsinger’s “allegedly” is priceless in conjunction with the insistence on
gifted education that eschews exclusivity and inequality. It is not easy being
an affluent progressive and a scourge of privilege.
The parents in Holsinger’s book insist that their
corner-cutting, truth-shading, thumbs-on-the-scale maneuverings, and brazen
lies are, as people usually say, “all for the children.” All, that is, except
for the large dollop that is for the bragging rights of parents who have
hitched their status anxieties to their children.
Now teaching English literature at the University of
Virginia, Holsinger previously was at the University of Colorado, and he says
Crystal is a “reimagined Boulder.” He probably did not have to strain his
imagination. He told the Wall Street Journal that you take
“over-parented kids, over-invested parents, a cutthroat [college] selection
process, and the rest kind of writes itself.”
He has deftly written a satire that arrives when it is
needed most — when it is difficult to distinguish from sociology. As America
becomes more cognitively stratified, with rewards increasingly flowing to the
well-educated (or expensively credentialed, which is not the same
thing), the recent college admission scandal has become, Holsinger says, “one
of the great cultural parables of our time.” It is a parable about, in another
Holsinger phrase, “privilege-hoarding,” as American life uncomfortably imitates
his art.
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