Dumbing down top notch schools will penalize the brilliant and ultimately harm its intended beneficiaries. From Fred Reed at theburningplatform.com:
It is Time to Stop Celebrating Inadequacy
China has an upcoming maglev train that will run at 373 miles an hour. By comparison, the United States increasingly looks like a country from an earlier age. Pop Quiz: Was this train engineered (a) by heartwarming, puzzled, oppressed, suffering, agonized minorities who ought to be making pizzas, or (b) by the brightest people China could find regardless sex, color, or “adversity quotient”? (If you choose (a) you are probably a Democrat.)
Perhaps it is time to recognize the stupid as an ethnic group. They are the country’s largest voting bloc. They are hugely influential, having agendas, lobbies, and demands. They work tirelessly to put the cognitively undetectable into positions of power. Usually they succeed. They are the enemies of reason, the sciences, mathematics, schooling, high culture, thought, and recognizable grammar.
For example, New York debates eliminating the entrance test for the city’s elite high schools–e.g., Bronx High School of Science, Stuyvesant, and Brooklyn Tech. Mayor De Blasio, presumably preferring reelection to sanity, backs the idea. He knows the stupid can’t solve a quadratic, but they can pull a voting handle, at least with preparatory training.
