#59. Was James Conant Responsible for Destroying American Childhood?

Did changes in Harvard College admissions policies contribute to the loss of childhood freedom we see today?

Dear friends,

I’ve spent much of my career studying and writing about the nature of childhood and how we have subverted it in recent decades (for examples, see here and here). Children are biologically designed to play. explore, daydream, and mess around in their own self-directed ways. Through behaving in these natural ways, they learn about themselves and the world around them; discover what they like to do and develop passionate interests; learn in social play how to get along with others; learn in risky play how to manage fear; learn they can fail and bounce back from it; learn they can get into trouble and find their way out. That is how they acquire the resilience, confidence, and real-world skills required for success in life.

But now children have much reduced opportunity for such independent activity and the resulting growth. They are nearly continuously supervised, guided, and judged by adults as they follow the dictates of teachers, coaches, and parents rather than their own will. We are seeing the results, with record levels of anxiety, depression, and suicide and a relative absence of passionate interests or meaningful sense of purpose in life.

This deprivation of children’s freedom to be children has come from many intertwined societal changes (for some of them, see here), but the proximal causes have mostly to do with our increased irrational fear that children who are not immediately guarded by an adult are in danger, so parents who fail to guard are considered negligent (see here) and our ever-increasing obsession with school performance and other superficial indices of what we call “achievement.” Here I focus on the obsession with school performance.

In an interesting article in the December (2024) issue of The Atlantic, David Brooks attributes our obsession with school performance to the rise of a concept of meritocracy in which school grades and scores on academic tests are the measures of merit. And he suggests that James Conant, president of Harvard University from 1933 to 1953, was the major instigator of that version of meritocracy.

Conant’s View of How to Improve the Caliber of American Leadership

As a social critic and president of the most elite college in America, Conant was concerned, according to Brooks, that American democracy was being undermined by “a hereditary aristocracy of wealth” and that the admissions policies of Harvard and a handful of other elite colleges were a major part of the problem. In the first decades of the 20^th century, the student bodies of Harvard, Yale, and Princeton were filled largely with sons (those schools accepted males only then) from ultra-wealthy, socially powerful families, and, at the other end of the pipeline, the positions of power in America were filled largely with graduates of these schools. For example, as Brooks points out, from 1901 to 1921 every American president had gone to Harvard, Yale, or Princeton. Conant saw that Harvard and its ilk were a major part of the mechanism by which a hereditary elite—a sort of American version of nobility—had developed. The elite sent their sons to the elite schools, and the imprimatur of the elite diploma enabled those sons to continue the family tradition of power, wealth, and elite social status.

Conant was no doubt aware, as he visited classes and met with students, that these sons of the ultra-rich were not necessarily the brightest young lights in America. Wouldn’t it be better, he thought, if Harvard and the like found and accepted the brightest kids, not the wealthiest, so the brightest would go on to be America’s leaders. So, the merit Conant was looking for was intelligence. And, like many people of his time (and like some today), he believed that intelligence was innate and manifested itself in academic performance, including grades in school and tests such as the SAT.

Gradually, beginning in the 1950s, elite colleges changed their admissions policies to focus more on school grades and standardized academic tests and less on the social and economic status of the family. A beneficial result, over time, was some democratization of admissions. More students from middle and sometimes even lower economic strata were admitted and were provided financial aid so they could attend. More than was true before, academic achievement became a route for upward social mobility.

But the downside is this: As academic performance became increasingly a major criterion for admission, the pressure on students to sacrifice other parts of their lives for the sake of such performance increased. Increasingly over time, parents bought into the idea that anything their kids were doing that wouldn’t help improve their college applications was wasted time. Schools bought into it by reducing recesses, vocational classes, art and music, and some of the other more enjoyable and creative activities that were once part of the school experience, so they could devote more time to academic drill and testing. Increasingly, a well-meaning but misguided democratic impulse promoted the idea that all students should be on a college track, regardless of their abilities or interests. The major task of secondary schools became that of preparing kids to make it into college rather than preparing them for life.

The Toxic Stress We Have Created

And so, we have the toxic academic pressure we have today. We have created a situation in which high-school students have been found, in national surveys, to be the most stressed-out people in the country and in which the great majority say school pressure is the major source of their distress (see here). A few years ago, in response to a blog post I wrote about young people’s anxiety, I received dozens of comments from students across the country that all went along similar lines. Here is a sample of them:

“I’m a senior in high school, and from a young age I’ve always been taught that I won’t be able to go to college unless I have mostly As.”

“Anything less than an A was unacceptable, and it was ingrained in us early on by our parents that perfection was our only choice for success in this competitive world.”

“They tell you that good grades are not enough, that getting all As is the bare minimum. You need to be a member of at least two organizations, but being a member is not enough, you must be leadership.”

“High school was all about feeling trapped. … The idea that it was all about grades and obeying the rules, irrespective of whether or not I actually learned anything, disgusted me.”

The reality is not as bleak as many have been led to believe. Kids and parents are deluded in their belief that failure to get into an elite college is life failure. But I will save that argument for my next letter in this series.

Brooks’s List of “Six Sins of Meritocracy”

Brooks goes on to describe some advantages of the change that came from decisions by Conant and his peers. Indeed, the new admissions criteria allowed an increased number of bright young people from non-wealthy social classes to become valued scientists, scholars, and statesmen through the gateway provided by higher education. But, Brooks points out, the change has not been as effective as Conant had hoped, for the following reasons, which he calls “the sins of meritocracy.”

1. “The system overrates intelligence.” I would go further than Brooks on this and say that intelligence is not unitary and not measurable. Intelligence is not a single thing. We can be intelligent in many differing ways. It is the diversity of intelligence that leads to a diversity of great achievements. So, a focus just on whatever it takes to perform well on academic tests leaves out many potential great achievers. Moreover, Conant’s belief that tests like the SAT measure innate intelligence, by any definition of intelligence, is manifestly false. You can improve your SAT score greatly by studying the SAT prep books, and wealthy families help their kids boost that score by hundreds of points by putting them into expensive SAT prep courses. That’s just one of the reasons why kids from wealthy families still have a great advantage over others in admissions to elite colleges.

2. “Success in school is not the same as success in life.” I like the way Brooks elaborates on this. He writes:

“But school is not like the rest of life. Success in school is about jumping through the hoops that adults put in front of you; success in life can involve charting your own course. In school, a lot of success is individual: How do I stand out? In life, most success is team-based: How can we work together? Grades reveal who is persistent, self-disciplined, and compliant—but they don’t reveal much about emotional intelligence, relationship skills, passion, leadership ability, creativity, or courage.”

He then goes on to cite evidence from a research study revealing that the correlation between school grades and career performance is “modest in the first year after college and trivial within a handful of years.”

3. “The game is rigged.” Conant’s view that a change in college admission procedure would abolish the advantage of wealth has not been realized. The rich continue to send their kids to elite colleges at far higher rates than do the rest of us. They use their wealth to provide their kids with all sorts of ways of improving their college resumés that most can’t afford, and colleges still can’t resist the temptation to take in kids of the ultra-wealthy because of the financial gifts that come from the ultra-wealthy.

4. “The meritocracy has created an American caste system.” Brooks contends here that the focus on educational achievement has created a sharp split between the college educated and those without a college education. The college educated, believing they are doing well because of merit not privilege, tend to scorn the others, and the others resent the scorners and their apparent smugness.

5. “The meritocracy has damaged the psyches of the American elite.” I like the way Brooks makes this case. He points out that those who make it through the hurdles of the meritocracy have done so at great sacrifice to their wellbeing. In his words:

“The meritocracy is a gigantic system of extrinsic rewards. Its gatekeepers—educators, corporate recruiters, and workplace supervisors—impose a series of assessments and hurdles upon the young. Students are trained to be good hurdle-clearers. We shower them with approval or disapproval depending on how they measure up on any given day. Childhood and adolescence are thus lived within an elaborate system of conditional love. Students learn to ride an emotional roller coaster—congratulating themselves for clearing a hurdle one day and demoralized by their failure the next. This leads to an existential fragility: If you don’t keep succeeding by somebody else’s metrics, your self-worth crumbles.”

6. “The meritocracy has provoked a popular backlash that is tearing us apart.” This sin is a continuation and elaboration of sin number 4, concerning the creation of castes based on education. Here and elsewhere, Brooks attributes the huge political polarity of recent times and the social disruption it has created to the rise of a caste system based on amount of formal schooling. He concludes:

“James Conant and his colleagues dreamed of building a world with a lot of class-mixing and relative social comity; we ended up with a world of rigid caste lines and pervasive cultural and political war. Conant dreamed of a nation ruled by brilliant leaders. We ended up with President Trump.”

In a subsequent section on how to fix the problem, Brooks says, “If I were given the keys to the meritocracy, I’d redefine merit around four crucial qualities.” And then he lists the four as curiosity, a sense of drive and mission, social intelligence, and agility (understood as ability to adapt to change).

Amen to that. But how do we foster the development of those abilities? We let them play and explore in the ways that nature intended!

Further Thoughts

To what degree and in what ways is admission to an elite college truly, today, a major route to success? I will examine that in my next letter and make the case that it matters far less what college young people attend than most people believe. I will discuss there advantages of deliberately choosing the lower ranked college if presented with a choice. To a considerable degree, the sacrifices being made to create a resumé aimed at admission to an elite college are built on myth, not reality.

I have also put a lot of thought into the question of how to solve the problem of creating routes to successful employment, democratically, in the full range of careers. My approach is different from that suggested by Brooks. It involves not a change in criteria for college entry but the elimination of college as a steppingstone. It involves an extension of apprenticeships, internships, and other forms of on-the-job experience supplemented in some cases with vocational training. I will present evidence that we are already beginning to move in that direction.

And now, what do you think of the ideas presented in this letter? Do you buy the thesis Brooks has presented or not? To what degree have we become a meritocracy based on school performance, and what has been your experience with this route to success? This substack is, in part, a forum for discussion. Your questions, thoughts, stories, and opinions are treated respectfully by me and other readers, regardless of the degree to which we agree or disagree. Readers’ comments add to the value of these letters for everyone.

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With respect and best wishes,

Peter