What Did High-achieving Use to Mean?
The modern “high-achieving” high schooler is easy to recognize: taking AP classes, getting perfect grades. This achievement often means engaging with ideas in the most superficial sense. Students take notes from slideshows containing bullet points that themselves are notes, like an infinite regression towards nothing. Students skim through books or read the SparkNotes summary to pass in-class quizzes.
The more you’re acquainted with modern “achievement”, the more contradictory it proves to be. Successful students spend surprisingly little time actually engaging with deep ideas.
This educational shallowness isn’t an individual failure, though. With the National Council of Teachers of English, saying “the time has come to decenter book reading and essay-writing as the pinnacles of English language arts education,” it should be clear that education’s shallowness problem is rooted in the education system itself. Students rarely, if at all, broaden and strengthen their minds by reading complex texts – and students certainly aren’t pushed to do so by an education system “decentering” that sort of intellectual engagement.
Sustained engagement with difficult texts is no longer central to what we call achievement. As the substance of our educational curriculum has thinned, our educational and job incentives have only amplified that thinning. Visible accomplishments, impressive on paper but often hollow in substance – from A’s and high GPAs (increasingly proven to not be worth much), to extracurriculars and internships – drive success in college applications and jobs. How can we reproach the individual actors, the high-achievers, for skimming Sparknotes, when it’s only bringing the education system’s anti-depth logic to its conclusion? They’re playing the game as they’re given it, behaving rationally in a system that “de-centers” the alternative.
Looking towards the education systems of the past, though, we see far more engagement with complex texts themselves. A student might read Plato rather than a paragraph about “Plato’s themes,” for example. In the 19th century, elite institutions like the University of Pennsylvania examined applicants on works like Caesar’s Gallic War, Homer’s Iliad, Virgil’s Aeneid, and Cicero’s orations.
It wouldn’t be wrong to say that some of this was a form of gatekeeping, creating a barrier to entry for the elite. For example, knowing Latin or memorizing Shakespeare was necessary for entrance exams to top universities through the first half of the 20th century. We aren’t without barriers today: the requirement of LinkedIn résumé padding, for example, creates a barrier to entry separating those with connections from others. Even if both, especially the former, are rooted in elitism and classism, it’s easy to see their difference. Translating a language or wrestling with difficult philosophy genuinely strengthened memory, attention, and reasoning; meanwhile GPAs and Linkedin résumés too often signal an ostensible competence.
Indeed, making comparisons to schools reserved to the elite in societies where the majority of the population didn’t receive formal schooling seems tenuous. But for the fact that education has been extended to the vast majority of people, or that “some students might not have to deal with books in their jobs” doesn’t require abandoning intellectual depth. As shown in “The Intellectual Life of the Working Class in England,” working-class populations have engaged in rich intellectual life, when given access to ideas and texts – completely self-educated. Intellectual engagement within our education systems is possible for everybody, irrespective of class, intelligence, or future job prospects. Suggesting the opposite is akin to accepting an “intellectual underclass” in a society advanced far beyond the point where this was the “only way”, especially in the United States, richest society in the earth’s history, while everyone possesses the sum of human knowledge in their pockets.
As a result of our society’s burial of deep-reading, the minds of our students and population suffer. Our vocabulary, for example, is a microcosm of this larger trend. Research finds that, even as vocabulary levels have declined since the 1970s, it’s people with higher educational achievement (bachelor’s, doctorates) whose vocabulary have declined the most. Meanwhile, there’s been an increase in corporate jargon. This mirrors the broader shift quite closely: depth, which would normally mean using advanced, textured vocabulary as a result of engaging with complex texts, being replaced with superficiality, here the form of corporate jargon. The fact that this trend has been most precipitous at the highest levels of education is another corroboration of the education system’s degradation into shallowness. It’s only logical that as our education systems give up deep reading and inquiry, we lose the ability to use similarly meaningful vocabulary.
Ultimately, we must consider what we’re losing by conducting education as the shallow pursuit of credentials rather than the formation and development of the mind. If we want our society to have the richness of a novel rather than that of a summary or bullet points, then the intellectual depth that develops the minds that texture society cannot be optional or “de-centered.” Otherwise, achievement will remain what it too often is now: impressive on paper, but hollow in substance.