One of my heroes and a public intellectual is David
Brooks. He went astray on the issue of
the educated elites creating a new upper class by pressuring their
children to be well educated. That was
a subject he discussed a few months ago.
David, two points: first, a class created by working hard, developing skills and having narrow life goals is not a class, even when parents with the same values try to create such a class. Class by its nature is birth derived.
If anyone can get into your group and anyone in it can fall out, it’s not a class.
Second, and least understood by nearly everyone I know, is
that your children (and my children and my grandchildren) have inherited a few
dominant genes from me (mostly appearance, physical structure and perfect tone,
if I had it). In all other regards,
children are nearly identical to everyone else in the gene pool. Their parents created them with sex so 99.9%
of their 30,000 genes are common to all mammals, all humans and a compromise
was made for the tiny remaining number between the cluster of each of the
mother’s and the father’s ancestor’s genes.
Net result: all offspring (except incest) are from the average gene pool.
Five generations of blue mice with a long tail disappears when one blue mouse mates with an ordinary mouse. The offspring is not blue with a long tail.
Yes, our children are immediately drawn from the general
gene pool. The general gene pool, if
you speak English and live in San Francisco, is English speaking
Americans. If you have four children,
two will most likely be above average and two will be below. The fact that children may show test results
more like their parents reflects the ability of parents to pass on cultural
attributes. When parents start at
birth, cuddling, cooing, smiling, and talking to their infants they are
beginning the process of making the child like the parent. But the general gene pool is still the
source, for good and bad.
Consequently, when the educated elite have no way to create an exclusive benefit for their offspring except to inculcate striving-learning attributes ... that is great, it isn’t something to worry about and it will never be class.