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Brian Lehrer: It's The Brian Lehrer Show, on WNYC. Good morning again, everyone. Now we continue our WNYC Centennial Series, 100 years of 100 things. It's thing number 45 today, 100 years of the American Meritocracy, with David Brooks, best known as a longtime New York Times columnist who traces our current system of college admissions to the 1930s and has The Atlantic magazine cover story this month, called How the Ivy League Broke America.

This is a very in-depth article that displays on my computer at 48 pages, and includes suggestions for reforming our notions of merit and meritocracy, for maybe the next hundred years in the public interest. So we'll get into that too. David, thanks for joining our 100 Years of 100 Things series, and sharing your thinking about this with us. Welcome back to WNYC.

David Brooks: Always a pleasure to be with you, Brian. I'm proud to be number 43 or 45, whatever it is, at least in the top 50. That's good.

Brian Lehrer: 45. Some people who are 45 come back as 47, but that's another show. Your article begins with the notion that every society has a social ideal, an image of what the superior person looks like. You cite one that you say was in effect in the United States from the 19th century until sometime in the 1950s. Would you start with that as a kind of prehistory, before our modern idea of merit?

David Brooks: Yeas, the idea back then was that the perfect person to run society was the well-bred man, and that was the person who was white, Protestant, male, probably had an ancestor that came over on the Mayflower. To get into Harvard in those days, it didn't matter whether your SAT scores were good, or your grades were particularly awesome. What matters is your dad went to Harvard, and 90-odd percent of legacies got in in those days.

The students at Harvard, Yale, Princeton, didn't really care about academics so much. The people who cared a lot about that were the grinds, they were the outcasts. It really mattered what social club you got into, whether you got into Porcellian or Skull and Bones at Yale, or the Ivy at Princeton. That gave you the social connection and was this display of your breeding, that you're elegant, good-looking, prudent, and that got you jobs at white-shoe law firms in New York.

It got you jobs at the good banks, and eventually, it got you jobs in the White House, between 1900 and 1920 or so, '22, the White House was occupied by a person from Harvard, Yale, and Princeton. Then, in the New Deal, it was occupied by another person from Harvard, so the upper crust really did dominate the leadership of society. It was not brain power, it was bloodlines.

Brian Lehrer: Then you write that a small group of college administrators decided to blow that all up, and you name a most important person to that, who became president of Harvard in 1933. Who was that? And what was the group of administrators he was part of?

David Brooks: Yes, James Conant was president of Harvard for 20 years. He decided, very sensibly, that we couldn't compete in the 20th century, if the country was run by the dim-witted heirs of Mayflower families. He decided, quite sensibly, that the American economy had become an oligarchy of a few rich families dominating the big industries. He decided that what really matters in ability is not who your father was, or whether your family came over on the Mayflower. What really matters is intelligence.

He defined intelligence in a certain way. He had tremendous faith in IQ tests, and tremendous faith that intelligence is revealed by academic accomplishment, ability to get straight A's in schools. We switched from a system based on bloodlines to a system based on brain power. We shift, and it turns out, when you shift the criteria it takes to get into elite universities, when you shift the criteria it takes to join the American upper class, you basically shift society.

What happened was, parenthood changed. Now, college-educated parents drive their kids here and there. They give them mobile lessons, SAT prep. Kids in those families run these frantic lives. It changed the American educational system. Schools now issue standardized tests from kindergarten, straight through high school. Succeeding in school basically means succeeding in a whole series of standardized tests all along the way.

All of society shifted around this new definition of merit, brain power. The era of the well-bred man was over, and the era of the cognitive elite was here.

Brian Lehrer: Your article is called How the Ivy League Broke America. I realize the writers don't always write the headlines, but is it not just the Ivy League? Don't most colleges, even within state university systems, let's say, judge applicants on some hierarchy of merit?

David Brooks: Yes. They use the one Conant observed, which was IQ and GPA. It's not just the Ivy League. The headline the magazine gave my piece was aggressive, but it attracted attention, but it's not only that. It's pretty much all the selective schools, then it's all colleges, high schools, and elementary schools. Students are taking so many standardized tests by age 7 or 8, that the children of rich kids, by 8th grade, are four grade levels above the children of poorer kids.

By 8th grade, you don't have to be a Harvard candidate, you know whether school decides that you're smart or not smart. The smart kids get shifted into the pressure cooker of the modern meritocracy, and the kids who are labeled not smart, who perceive they're not smart, the teachers smile at them less often, they spend less time on them, they spend less attention on them, and they go off to schools, they go off to community colleges, but mostly, by age, 4th, 6th, or 6th grade, they know where they fit in the status hierarchy of society.

They know society doesn't value them as much as it values people who get straight A's, so they have a tendency to drop out. It's, to me, tremendously unfair that we're judging young people at this early age, and basically telling them their value to society is either higher or lower.

Brian Lehrer: On the history timeline. Just going back to that for a minute, you do write that as late as the early 1950s, Conant was still struggling to plant this new idea of meritocracy into the culture, or at least the admissions office of Harvard. Why was it hard? Why was it a struggle?

David Brooks: He had his endowment to worry about. Harvard was dominated, the alumni organizations was dominated by these rich legacy families, and as much as he wanted to end their reign atop American society, he needed them for their money. Even 15 years into his presidency, he was still accepting 91% of the children of Harvard alumni. By the 1950s, you could get into Harvard easily with a 550 SAT score, so long as your connections were right, but eventually, the system kicked in.

By the late 1960s, you didn't need a 550 to get in. You need something like a 680, and today, you probably need something like a 750. Conant took a little while for his cognitive elite to form, but it's definitely formed now.

Brian Lehrer: You cite a 1967 reference to this new social ideal by the sociologist David Bell. Is that worth going into, in some detail, to continue on this timeline, how this meritocracy that, as it's defined, took hold, gradually, over those decades?

David Brooks: Yes, we decided, starting with Daniel Bell, who wrote a book called The Post Industrial Society, that we were moving toward a knowledge economy. Therefore, to succeed in America, you had to go to a four-year school. You had to take what were then called the new economy jobs, which were knowledge jobs, so basically, what we built, and all status would go to knowledge workers.

David Goodhart, who I quote in the piece, is a British writer who says over the last 50 years, there's been a gigantic shift in status, away from people who are, say, good at working with their hands, good at plumbing, electricians, and who embody the dignity of work. The status has shifted radically toward people in finance, to people in consulting, to people who do knowledge work.

Daniel Bell celebrated that shift, but it's really created not just a redistribution of who's rich and who's powerful in our society, it's created a redistribution of success. We now live essentially in a caste society, where the children of the rich have just huge advantages. By a Raj Chetty study, I said in there, somebody in the top 1%, a kid in the top 1%, has 77 times the chance of going to an Ivy League School as a kid who grew up in a poor household. It's just wildly unfair.

It has produced a caste society, so when the children of the rich have huge advantages, all the way through life, basically, what happens is, you get this inherited Brahmin class. The stunning statistics to me are that we live in two different worlds. The college-educated people live eight years longer than high school-educated people. College-educated people are much more likely to marry than high school-educated people.

High school-educated people are five times more likely to have children out of wedlock. High school-educated people are 10 times more likely to die of opioid addiction. The one that's most crushing to me is that people with high school degrees are 2.4 times more likely to say they have no close friends. People with high school degrees are much less likely than people in college degrees to hang out in parks, to join an organization built around a hobby, to be active in civic life.

It's not only they're living longer, or living less long, people with less education, who have been discriminated against by the system, have fewer friends, have different lives. Guess what? They're really mad about it. One of the ways they express their anger is by voting for Donald Trump.

Brian Lehrer: Yes, clearly. It also seems like, in the way that you describe this current Brahmin class or caste system, based on the wealth of the parents, blows up the whole idea of merit that Conant and the others were trying to establish in the 1930s. I guess you're saying IQ doesn't really measure brain power, or certainly, SAT tests don't necessarily measure brain power. They measure the zip code you were born into, and the privilege that comes with that. Is that what you're saying, in part?

David Brooks: Yes, that's, in part, what I'm saying. I think Conan-- he was a very well-meaning guy. I don't mean to say he ruined America, but he was operating on the assumptions of that era. One of the assumptions of that era is that IQ matters most, and IQ matters a lot. It's probably one of the most important things you can know about a person, but it's not most of what matters, a lot.

Most of what matters is who's tried hard, who's calm in a crisis, who's a good teammate, who's curious, who's a lifelong learner, who's agile in the face of stress. It's not what the-- the people in that era called the non-cognitive skills, to me, that really matters most. The things that are not visible on a high school transcript. The second mistake Conant make was the illusion that IQ would be evenly distributed across society.

If they tested, if they gave people a bunch of SAT tests, then the people who would rise to the top would be very democratically distributed, because in their view, it was all based on genetics, but it's not all based on genetics. There's no such thing as genetics without environment. The kids who grow up in homes where the family is taking you on European vacations, where the family is investing in taking you to the museums, where the family is buying you bunches of books, coaches, and tutors, those kids, from a very early age, have just huge advantages.

Even by pre-K, when they're three or four years old, the children of the affluent are much more likely to be enrolled in a pre-K program than children of the less affluent. Money really can buy you admissions into these institutions, not by bribing the universities, but simply by investing massively in their kids, in these days, for the-- Go ahead.

Brian Lehrer: Well, I was just going to say, even that mid-20th century notion that IQ is the determinant of quality, I hope I'm not mischaracterizing what you're saying, and that those are the people who should run the country. It's not very egalitarian. Right? Even if IQ was legitimately, and achievement was distributed more evenly across strata of society, focusing on IQ as the measure, it's an inherited trait, the way they were framing it.

There would still be a kind of aristocracy that might work against the interests of equality in society. Does the question make sense?

David Brooks: Yes, no, absolutely. It's inherently elitist, if you're admitting people who score in the top 2% or top 1% of the SAT tests. It's an inherently elitist enterprise. That would be fine if it measured something that was worth measuring. IQ is important, I keep emphasizing that, if you want to be a neuroscientist, it's probably helpful to have a pretty high IQ. But it's not all that it's made out to be.

There are lots of things, like personality traits, that are more important. Resilience and grit are more important. The ability to be kind is more important. To me, the most important trait is the ruling passion of your soul. What do people really want? How badly do they want it? That, too, is unrelated to IQ. The problem with our society is that being smart is not the same thing as being effective.

Being smart is not the same thing as making good decisions. For example, to make good decisions, you have to possess what they call metacognition, which is the ability to think about your own thinking, and be humbly aware of where you may be wrong. IQ does not correlate with that ability. On the contrary, one of the things that people with super high IQs have is the ability to persuade themselves that their own false ideas are true.

There's a guy named Phil Tetlock, who's a good forecaster, who's good at anticipating what will come next. He finds out that academics with tremendous domain expertise are not good at predicting what will come next, because they have one settled way of looking at the world, and they struggle to look at the world through different perspectives. Often, it's the amateur, the person who has mental flexibility, who's better at anticipating what comes next, because they can try on different mindsets

Brian Lehrer: Listeners, any oral history stories from you, as we always take oral history stories when we can, in our 100 Years of 100 Things series, that pertain, in this case, to the last 100 years of American meritocracy. As you listen to David Brooks here talk about his cover story in The Atlantic, how has anything you're hearing here resonated with you in these last few minutes, as something that may have affected you, or anyone who came before you, in your family, over the last 100 years, or, for that matter, is affecting your kids and the future of your family right now?

212-433-WNYC, 212-433-9692, or any questions for David Brooks with The Atlantic cover story, How the Ivy League Broke America, in our 100 Years of 100 Things series. 212-433-WNYC, 212-433-9692, call or text. In the second half of our conversation, David, coming up in a few minutes, I want to get more into what you were saying, because it was pretty much the second half of your article.

How to reform K-12 education so that it emphasizes these different skills that you were just articulating, and whether that would really make a better society or a better form of meritocracy. I want to stay on the history a little bit, because one of the things that jumped out at me from the article, and I did take nine days and read the whole thing, is that this worked both ways. The colleges were judging students and ranking them based on all these standardized tests and other measures of alleged brain power, but it also worked the other way.

You wrote, "The high-IQ students and their parents have spent so many years immersed in the college admissions game, that they, like 18th-century aristocrats evaluating which family has the most noble line, are able to make all sorts of fine distinctions about which universities have the most prestige. Princeton is better than Cornell, Williams is better than Colby. Universities came to realize that the more people they rejected, the more their cachet soars," quoting from your article.

Would you talk about how that worked both ways and that feedback system, that maybe first affected parents of aspiring college students, then affected the schools, as it went back at them?

David Brooks: Yes, the parents, especially affluent parents with college degrees, decided it was really important to get their kids into Harvard, Yale, Princeton, and such schools. Parental anxiety turns out to be a tremendously powerful force. The sad thing, they're not all wrong. If you want your kid to work in law, in business, in media, in entertainment, it really helps if your kid went to one of these schools.

52% of the employees at the celebrated New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, law firms, or in medicine, they went to the same 32 schools. What a lot of employers do is, they don't look at who the applicant is, they look at what school they went to. There's a book on how financial firms, consulting firms, and other firms recruit. Basically, what they do is, they pick three to five target schools, like Carverdale and Princeton, and then they have a few satellite schools, like Williams or Pomona, other highly competitive schools.

They'll accept applicants from the first group and the second group, and if you didn't go to one of these 32 schools, you're basically not seen. One of the recruiters said, "Number one people go to number one schools," and that's just not true. If you look at performance, it's not true. There was a study done where they compared kids from, say, Yale, to kids from Cleveland State, and how they could do in performance tasks, and they basically performed the same.

I think the Cleveland State kids were like 1.9% less proficient than the Yale kids, but basically no difference. I traveled to a ton of colleges every year, and if you put me in the classroom with 25 kids from any university, I couldn't tell if I was the school that ranked number one or ranked number 150, because there are smart kids at every institution. The only difference is, if we were at Princeton, they would tell me we're at Princeton.

To me, it's created this bogus ranking system that parents are super conscious of, which is completely bogus. You can go to Penn State, Penn, Harvard, Yale, Princeton, or Northern Idaho, and get a perfectly good education, but we don't believe that, which is bogus and untrue. Second, the schools are-- they're trapped in the same status system as we are, because they have to pay attention to the US news rankings.

If you're an admissions officer at a school or a president of a school, you'd like to brag that you accepted only 4% of applicants. Another way of putting it is you rejected 96% of applicants. To me, I've spent my life teaching in these places and attending elite schools. The people in them are not the problem. They want to look at the whole child. They want to create a really intellectually diverse student body. The problem is the legacy of the system, that demanded ranking based on a very narrow and very incorrect criteria.

Brian Lehrer: Let me read a couple of texts that have just come in, that exemplify what you were just saying. One person writes, "Hello, local one stagehand here. I am college-educated, but I work with plenty of people who aren't high IQ or college-educated, but many who are incredibly intelligent, and just never had an opportunity to go to college because of background circumstance. This version of meritocracy also passes people like that by, who may be able to contribute to society in bigger, more impactful ways, but for their access to resources."

Another one that kind of turns that on its head says, "I tested as the smartest kid in my school in the 70s. Since I came from a poor, broken family, college was never even discussed." Though, that person adds, "Since I was smart, I made it anyway." I wonder if you have a reaction to either of those texts."

David Brooks: Yes, one of the things we sort for is who's really good at taking tests between ages of 15 and 18. A lot of people are good at age 15, but to me, what matters in life is not, "Are you a shiny object at age 18?" What matters is, "Are you a substantive person at age 45?" I was teaching at an elite school one year, and I did this. I've done this most of my life. I asked my students on the final day, "Tell me about a book you read during your four years at this school, and that really changed your life."

There was a long silence in the classroom. Finally, one of the students said, "You have to understand that's not how we read here. We don't have time to really bury ourselves into a book, no matter how much we love it. We just read enough to get through class." That symbolized, for me, that a lot of the people who can get into these schools, they're not passionately committed to the intellectual life of the mind. They're just good at managing their time, and they become players of the game.

There's a book called Lost in the Meritocracy, by a guy named Walter Kirn. He said, "As a young meritocrat, I was all concerned about having momentum, of getting through life. I was willing to shape-shift myself into whatever thing the system rewarded." The kids who are clever and canny at that, are good at getting into places. They're the ones who can write the essays, talking about how they unicycle across Thailand while reading to lepers, and have all these interests.

It's just a narrative they're telling to get themselves in, and they know it. They're not fooled by this. They just know it's a game they have to play, and they become good at playing the game.

Brian Lehrer: Listener writes, "I also think that DEI efforts should focus on intellectual diversity." You do write about affirmative action and where it fits into this whole 100-year narrative of the meritocracy, the way it developed in the 21st century. Would you talk about that a little bit?

David Brooks: Yes. I think this is a great time for universities to really reconsider how they're doing their business, in part because the caste system has become so unfair, in part because it's produced this populist backlash. The Republicans, especially MAGA Republicans, are about to take an ax to the universities and really threaten them in all sorts of ways. Another reason this is a good time to look at this is, the Supreme Court struck down affirmative action.

Affirmative action at least allowed the universities to go outside some of the official criteria and get more diversity into the classes, and when the Supreme Court took away that ability to get outside just straight-up SAT scores or whatever, then the number of Black students from marginalized communities went down. If the schools want to keep the diversity, which they cherish, and should cherish, we've got to rethink how admissions works.

That's, to me, one more reason why this is a great moment. I will say a final reason, by the way, is the advent of AI. If we're measuring young people by their ability to write papers and get A's at Harvard, and to take standardized tests like the LSATs, the SATs, or the MCATs, AI can already do all that stuff. It's already writing papers that get A's at Harvard. It's already really good at taking tests. We need to change our definition of ability into something that AI can't do, something that's not about to be obsolete.

Brian Lehrer: By the way, another listener writes, "The SAT does not measure IQ." Have we been conflating the two here a little bit?

David Brooks: Maybe a little. They're related, but the listener's right. They're not exactly the same, but there are plenty of experiments that look straight up at IQ. The most famous one is called the Terman Experiment, and it was done in the 20th century. They looked at kids who had IQs in the top 1%, super duper high, maybe even the top percentile of 1%. They followed them all through life, and when they started the experiment, it was back in the Conant era, where they had tremendous faith in IQ tests, and IQ really translated into terrific accomplishment.

They thought that the Termites, as they called these smart kids, would be the leaders of society over the next decades. They did well. They became doctors and lawyers. They did especially well in academia, but there were no big Nobel Prize winners. There were no geniuses. There were no creative people who transformed the arts. They were perfectly acceptable, professional-class people, but IQ is not the same as creativity. IQ is not the same as drive. IQ is not the same as great leadership ability.

It was a sign that, even when you measure IQ specifically, and not through the SAT prism, you're still not measuring most of what matters in a person.

Brian Lehrer: That was an interesting longitudinal study in the context of 100 year series, because if I remember correctly, the Termites, as they were called, started being measured in the 1920s and were followed for decades after that, through their lives. Did Terman come up with any theory about who does become transformative, who really do become the geniuses in their fields and change society, change the arts, change anything?

David Brooks: Yes, I don't know. He was pretty deep in that era and really believed in IQ. I'm not sure he totally revised his view by the time the Termites were old, that he was gone. I have my own theories. We can all have our own theories. To me, as I say, it's not what goes on in the frontal cortex, the ability to take tests, do rational thoughts, it's what goes on in the midbrain. That's where motivations are formed. That's where desires are formed.

That's where the ability to just control your own desires and control your passions happens. To me, it's deeper into the human mind. I have found that the shiny 18-year-olds are awesome to be around, but the people I admire are the people who just learn through life. They learn every single day. They're just curious. They just have drive to keep getting better, better, and better at something. I just happened to be reading, or listening, on audiobooks, to Tina Turner's memoir, and of course, she was in this famously terrible marriage.

It took her years, I think 14 years, to get out of it, because she didn't know how to balance a checkbook. She didn't know how to manage her way in the world. She thought so little of herself because her husband, Ike Turner, was beating her, but she had this insatiable desire to get better, to learn how to operate in the world, to learn to be an independent woman. That insatiable desire to get better, to grow as a person, to me, that's vastly more important than how you were as an 18-year-old.

Brian Lehrer: When we continue in a minute, with David Brooks, we'll get to what he writes in his Atlantic article about how to transform K-12 education, to emphasize emotional intelligence and those other things, and how he thinks that could relate to more success, across the board, for people, financially and in the workplace, and more of your calls and texts. Stay with us.

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Brian Lehrer, on WNYC, in our 100 Years of a 100 Things series. Thing number 45 today, 100 Years of the American Meritocracy, with David Brooks, who has The Atlantic magazine cover story this month, called How the Ivy League Broke America. Rich, in the Bronx, has a story to tell, I think. Rich, you're on WNYC. Hello.

Rich: How you doing? Thanks so much for this topic. I'm African American. I was raised between the Bronx and Harlem, and I actually went to Harvard. My mom went to Harvard as well, for graduate school. After sophomore year, I ran into some academic difficulties and had to take a year off. I had a background in music, and thank God, I made some headway in the hip-hop industry. I was actually doing a lot of stuff in Diddy's studio.

What I realized when I was there was, I didn't have enough respect for the people who came from the hip-hop community, from the ghetto. What I had learned was that hip hop was actually a function of how anti-establishment you are, how nonlinear you are, how much you could stray from the King's English. It's funny now, but at the time it was frustrating for me to try to get over the linearity and rigidity of being raised on classical music, to actually be able to make soulful, gritty, funky hip hop.

To this day, some of my greatest heroes are people who did not go to college at all, but just have uncanny genius of creativity, charisma, courage to talk to people, to get on stage, to dress in ways that people might laugh at you, take risks, people like Flavor Flav. To me, he's a hero, because the average person who goes to Harvard or Yale, would never be as charismatic and courageous as he is.

Brian Lehrer: Rich, what's the moral of the story, as you might apply it to, let's say, your own kids, if you have kids?

Rich: I think it's about being infinitely humble. No one is better than anybody else. There are skills that you have and there are skills that other people have. Depending on your context, your skills can be either paramount the important, or completely worthless.

Brian Lehrer: That was awesome. Please call us again. John in Manhattan, you're on WNYC. Hi, John.

John: Hi, Brian. Great to talk to you and Mr Brooks.

Brian Lehrer: Go ahead.

John: My question for Mr Brooks was that much of the discussion seems to center on the native-born children and young adults going through the system, and as a hot-button issue of today, with immigration, I was wondering if he thought of the vast pool of talent out there that we try to attract to this country, as immigrants.

Brian Lehrer: John, thank you. We have a related text, David, that says, "Wondering about the top schools in New York City, Stuyvesant, Bronx Science, 80% Asian, not necessarily privileged and wealthy kids."

David Brooks: Right. That's a case where I say IQ matters. The ability to take tests is not nothing. A lot of schools last year took away the SATs. A lot of political figures in New York City wanted to make Hunter, Stuyvesant, and Bronx Science not so test-driven, because they want to increase diversity. I think it's important to take the SAT because it does tell you something. If you're a poor kid in Chinatown and your parents are running a grocery, or whatever it is, the SAT may be your only shot to get into these places.

I'm not one of those people who wants to get rid of the SAT, but I do want to emphasize, especially with the first caller, who was talking about the hip hop stars. A lot of the stars-- I'm just thinking routinely of Jay Z, or somebody like that. They didn't grow up in an atmosphere where, at 17, they were doing the sort of things that get you into a fancy school. Yet, somebody like Jay Z or, back in the day, Biggie Smalls, or somebody like that, obviously very smart, obviously very dexterous.

What they have is freedom. The meritocracy is a set of extrinsic rewards where, every day of your life, and I lived through this, you're either judged, you succeeded on the test, or you failed on the test. Basically, you're responding to the standards that other people are putting in front of you, but to be a creative artist, it takes the self-start, or it takes the burning passion to express what's going on inside you. It takes a level of intellectual and emotional freedom.

These are two different ways of going through life, in my view. I think the SATs are super important to give poor kids a chance to get to places like Bronx Science or Stuyvesant, but I emphasize the freedom to really be a creative human being through life as something much more important. I will say, when I talk to the teachers in a school, an elementary school, a high school, or a college, they totally understand this.

The teachers know they're stuck in a certain sort of system, and they'd love to teach in ways that encourage that kind of intellectual freedom, but they have to teach to the test. They have to teach to the state standards. They, too, are prisoners in a system that's not pulling out the best in people.

Brian Lehrer: The whole last section of your article is how to reform the system. How to redefine merit and reinvent the meritocracy. I'm going to squash it into a question here, because we only have two minutes left in the segment. Things like project-based high schools, and you give some wonderful examples of that. I guess my question is maybe creative, maybe engaging for the students, and maybe measuring more things than brain power, emotional intelligence, ability to work with others, things like that.

Don't they still have to learn reading, math, and history to do something like that well, and be prepared for the workplace?

David Brooks: Sure. Knowledge begets knowledge. If you don't have the basic facts of history, you can't really form a theory about what's going on in the world. I do think knowledge begets knowledge, but there's zero correlation between having a high GPA in high school, college, and how you do in life. School is not like life. In life, you're not just sitting in a classroom having somebody lecture at you. You're working on projects with teams, most of the time.

Project-based learning is one way I think we should shift, that will arouse a greater widening set of abilities. I said in there, a movie about a place called High Tech High, which is in San Diego, where the movie, the documentary, shows you a bunch of students. They had to study why do civilizations decline. They had to learn history, but then they also had to build this big wooden gizmo, gigantic thing, with all these gears and levers, were supposed to symbolize all the different causes of why civilizations decline.

That project meant they had to do it together. That project meant a series of different set of skills, including engineering and management skills were required. That thing, that project, meant they had to clarify what really causes a civilization to decline, more than just regurgitate something on a test. Students in such schools, they leave with grades and test scores, but they also leave with a portfolio that says, "This is what I achieved, this is what I built while I was in high school."

That portfolio, in my view, says a lot more about a person than a GPA. They can do something called a portfolio defense, where they have to go before the teachers and answer questions about, "Why did you make the decisions you did? What did you learn here?" That, too, is more like life to me, than just getting a high GPA.

Brian Lehrer: David Brooks, cover story in The Atlantic this month, it's called How the Ivy League Broke America, and it's our latest entry in our 100 Years of 100 Things series. It's been thing number 45, 100 Years of the American Meritocracy. David, thank you so much for sharing it with us.

David Brooks: Brian, always a pleasure to be with you.

Brian Lehrer: And that's The Brian Lehrer Show for today, produced by Mary Croke, Lisa Allison, Amina Srna, Carl Boisrond, and Esperanza Rosenbaum. Andres Pacheco-Girón and Olivia Green are our interns. Stay tuned for Alison.

 

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