Elitism

Golden Apple Fellow Jane Artabasy has been doing a lot of thinking about the upcoming election. In recent weeks, she has been particularly upset at the use of “elitist” as a major criticism of Obama, and in this post, she argues that an elite president is exactly what we need.

Here’s a dose of the obvious: we need to get this next election right.  With record numbers voting in the primaries, it appears our citizenry understands the immediacy of this moment and this choice.  Teachers and former teachers are particularly well-equipped to help the process along.

Even as spin, distraction, dissimulation, and fear mongering grab center stage during the campaigns, we can hold candidates and media accountable by urging ideas of substance, creativity, and even nobility in the last months of what has been an exhausting, if exhilarating, electoral season. 

Teachers are inherently a skeptical lot, not a natural base for the Kool-Aid culture of 21st century electioneering, with its cynical, smarmy manipulation of language.  As a start, how about the most recent “word du jour:” elitism?  Only an intellectually bankrupt political system would dare to twist such a perfectly good noun into a pejorative, a negative, a mortal stigma. Webster’s defines elite as “the choice or most carefully selected part of a group...” Sounds to me like the perfect baseline description of a president. 

If Senator Obama is elite, or Senator Clinton, or Senator McCain, shouldn’t that be a very good thing, or at least cause for celebration?  Don’t we dearly need an Oval Office resident who’s a whole lot smarter than most of us?  Someone incredibly educated, with a nuanced global awareness and the wisdom to bring a strategically beneficent vision to the complex diplomatic demands of our age?  In the context of our anguished times, an elite might be a breath of fresh air.  An elite someone in the Oval Office might be the only hope we’ve got left. 

There is a larger point here unrelated to the election, as well. Last month, I linked to a post by a teacher of gifted students critiquing the culture of education schools:

In short, there is a relentless tide of mediocrity in schools of education, one that’s nearly impossible to swim through...You learn to be mediocre. You learn that not to be mediocre — to strive for scholarship, to insist on a level of academic rigor — is...viewed as useless or pretentious.

Does our profession truly suffer from a commitment to mediocrity? Are teachers frightened of being labeled “elitist”?

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