It’s the same with the aptitudinal trait known as Foresight. At no point during the testing did I recall being quizzed on the winner of tomorrow’s 2:15 at Belmont, and yet there was Foresight at the top of the multipage “Inventory of Aptitudes and Knowledge” that every testee receives as a parting gift. I brought this up with Crystal, the personable O’Connorite charged with giving me my end-of-testing consultation, and she explained that my powers of prognostication had been measured in the test that had me stare at an abstract pattern of circles and list everything I thought it looked like. The simple fact that I had strained to come up with eight possible resemblances as opposed to two or three apparently marked me as the kind of person who anticipates hurdles before they arise, and that was all there was to be said about it.
After a blissful 90 minutes of talking about myself and how awesome I am—Crystal didn’t spell it out but was clearly hinting that my ultimate career destiny is to go into business marketing my own sperm—I floated out of her office on something of a cloud. The world looked startlingly clear and manageable, which is saying something when you’re five blocks from Ground Zero. I felt optimistic, not just for me but also for Crystal, and for Johnson O’Connor himself, who may soon, I suspect, finally be able to stop spinning in his grave.
Because, as Nicholas Lemann brilliantly argues in The Big Test: The Secret History of the American Meritocracy, the current system really can’t endure. For the better part of a century, we’ve been measuring human potential on a vertical scale, that IQ test we euphemistically call the SAT (once known as the Scholastic Aptitude Test). The goal was noble: to help smart people from all social strata get into universities. But the project has become a victim of its own success. The more meritocratic the college-entrance system became, the more demand there was to go to college, and the more universities people built. Such that now, if they want to, pretty much everyone can go to college, which is great—except that seeing as pretty much everyone now does, having a degree no longer means you get a better job. In all likelihood, in fact, you’ll end up having the same terrible job you would have had a hundred years ago, being just as miserable, only you’re four years older and a good deal deeper in debt.
Besides, how much longer are we really going to care about which college we go to? With the ever-increasing freedom we have to acquire information from beyond the bounds of our own geography, how long will it be the case that there are some things you can learn only in Cambridge, Massachusetts? On its Web site, MIT offers—for free—more than 1,500 classes through its OpenCourseWare project. A witch doctor in the Gambia can now take a semester of astrophysics from the finest professors in the discipline (in which case, I confess, he will have shown more stamina than did I, who gave up after half an hour).
If colleges don’t matter, then the SAT doesn’t matter, and freed from that behemoth’s monstrous shadow, O’Connor’s gentler, more egalitarian approach to human merit will flourish. And the public will have no choice but to accept his big and obviously true idea that people are happiest when they’re doing things that they do well, when they are expressing and exploring their innate talents rather than trying to squeeze the round peg of their self into the square hole of some job they’ll never be good at. What our nation will be like when that happens, one can only imagine. Unless, presumably, your Ideaphoria is in the low range, in which case I can only advise you to stay tuned.
