Randomized School Admissions and the Return of the 1950s Nerd
Feeling our way back to Springfield.
A public magnet school in (future Bell Riot epicenter) San Francisco, California, called Lowell High School, is switching from being super-selective and “academically elite” to basing admissions on random lottery:
https://www.sfgate.com/education/article/sf-school-lottery-Lowell-High-15663889.php
This story got me thinking about the implications of a random-selection school system applied across an entire society (this is putting aside, for now, the question of private schools). It seems to me that a regime of randomized school assignment means that the “nerdy” kids simply will not find each other—or if they do, it won’t be until much later in life. It may shock readers of The Bell Riots Review to learn that the Review’s founder was something of a teen nerd himself (though, truth be told, a nerd who did not exactly fit in seamlessly with the other nerds who were more into Neo from the Matrix than neoclassical urbanism). At any rate, it seems to me that in a society-wide regime of randomized schooling, the nerdy kids will wind up in school situations where they are simply not surrounded by other nerds. A juvenile/adolescent status system that I associate with a more retro culture could make something of a comeback. I am not invested in asserting whether this is a good or a bad thing (I could see solid cases both ways), but it will certainly be different than the situation which has predominated over the last few decades.
Now, I can see a few objections to my whole premise here. One objection might be that “the nerd” is a historically contingent sociological phenomenon, and randomization will allow kids to grow into other kinds of personae—or, to simplify that idea a bit, nerds will become “normalized”, and normie kids will become nerdier. But my impression of kids’ social instincts is that, instead, they create little hierarchies, without having to be prompted by “adult society” to do so, and if among 100 kids, 30 prefer sports and 1 prefers solving math puzzles, the petty-hierarchy which the total group of 100 settles upon will be sporty, and the math kid will be something of an outcast (unless she or he “compromises” and avoids doing what they prefer). I could be wrong about this though, and the objection quite right! Maybe everything I’m remembering from school during early-ish childhood was just a biproduct wider Cold War dynamics during the 1980s which enshrined the tough “Rambo” kids. Maybe kids in the 2020s and 2030s will adopt whatever type of social structure they’re told to, and there’s no such thing as “kids’ social instincts,” let alone hierarchical ones. I really have no idea on this front.
Let’s move on. Another objection might be that randomization won’t actually work, because parents will simply respond by elbowing their way into exclusive school districts, so the exclusion mechanism will just transfer (that is, even more than is already the case) to the arena of real estate. Well…yes. That objection is probably right! In fact, if I might make myself irritating for just this one sentence: the same parents who think there’s “no such thing as kids’ social instincts” will probably be the exact parents elbowing harder than everybody else.
The only way I can think of to prevent this district-hopping would be to impose an entire political-economic shift where people live and work in spaced-out towns and thus have no choice but to make the best of the one school district where their employer happens to be located. Something like the “retro” social and spatial paradigm of the 1950s. So maybe we’ll transition to (or back to?) the world of Riverdale from the Archie Comics. Or to the world of Springfield, the setting of The Simpsons, which is a kind of counterfactual where a 50s-style town with a stable industrial basis of employment has somehow survived into the final decade of the 20th century and (though less funny by this point) the opening decades of the 21st.
Maybe it was dilemmas like this that caused Lewis Mumford to say that the ideal city size is about 60,000 people. Nerds on The Simpsons (Lisa, Martin) endure relatively solitary childhoods but turn out…all right. Riverdale High’s local academic nerd, Dilton Doiley, is actually well-liked, his skills well-appreciated by “the gang.” So—anyone have a plan to get stable employment back to the small, spaced-out towns of middle America?