The Cult of Smart

How Our Broken Education System Perpetuates Social Injustice

By: Fredrik deBoer

Narrated by: Sean Patrick Hopkins

Leftist firebrand Fredrik deBoer exposes the lie at the heart of our educational system and demands top-to-bottom reform.

Everyone agrees that education is the key to creating a more just and equal world, and that our schools are broken and failing. Proposed reforms variously target incompetent teachers, corrupt union practices, or outdated curricula, but no one acknowledges a scientifically-proven fact that we all understand intuitively: academic potential varies between individuals, and cannot be dramatically improved. In The Cult of Smart, educator and outspoken leftist Fredrik deBoer exposes this omission as the central flaw of our entire society, which has created and perpetuated an unjust class structure based on intellectual ability.

Since cognitive talent varies from person to person, our education system can never create equal opportunity for all. Instead, it teaches our children that hierarchy and competition are natural, and that human value should be based on intelligence. These ideas are counter to everything that the left believes, but until they acknowledge the existence of individual cognitive differences, progressives remain complicit in keeping the status quo in place.

This passionate, voice-driven manifesto demands that we embrace a new goal for education: equality of outcomes. We must create a world that has a place for everyone, not just the academically talented. But we’ll never achieve this dream until the Cult of Smart is destroyed.

A Macmillan Audio production from All Points Books

Contradicting ideas

The core of this book is most entertaining, once you get past the political propaganda. The idea that no two humans are the same, including our intellectual abilities is a valid point oftentimes overlooked. This book would be better served if it focused on the science of this fact, and how it may affect individuals in our current world as opposed to using it as a tool to expound radical beliefs. Even past the contradictions, I would still suggest it as a good read.

This book will challenge your core ideas.

DeBoer is an independent thinker and fantastic researcher. I strongly recommend this book. He will make you reconsider some of your key values.

fantastic

This is a really excellent explanation of the failures of our education system, the larger related failures of our society, and a compelling vision for a better world. It also challenges the left to examine our own received wisdom and ask if our assumptions are indeed supported by evidence and, crucially, if they actually support our real goals. On a personal note, I grew up deeply enmeshed in the cult of smart and the college admissions meat grinder. It set me up for a life of reasonable professional class comfort but did little to make me a good or emotionally fulfilled person, and I can only imagine the harm it continues to do to the people it leaves behind. I wish I had grown up in the world Freddie describes in the last chapter.

Enjoyed theme

I liked the narrator and the topics were important for today. The take on the UBI is interesting. I have my own concerns on UBI.

Profound

Amazing book. Well written, hard to hear, but easy to listen to. Freddie shares his point of view in a way that makes it feel profound and yet obvious all at once!