This piece by Arnold Kling, which basically says that the longer you spend in the real world the less of a socialist you get to be, while if you spend your whole time mired in the unreal world of education you are liable to remain a socialist all your life, reminded me of an earlier essay by Robert Nozick, which I believe deserves to be remembered for a very long time. I'm referring to his Why Do Intellectuals Oppose Capitalism?

Kling's piece is about what changes. Nozick's is about what doesn't change.

Says Nozick:

The intellectual wants the whole society to be a school writ large, to be like the environment where he did so well and was so well appreciated. By incorporating standards of reward that are different from the wider society, the schools guarantee that some will experience downward mobility later. Those at the top of the school's hierarchy will feel entitled to a top position, not only in that micro-society but in the wider one, a society whose system they will resent when it fails to treat them according to their self-prescribed wants and entitlements. The school system thereby produces anti-capitalist feeling among intellectuals. Rather, it produces anti-capitalist feeling among verbal intellectuals. Why do the numbersmiths not develop the same attitudes as these wordsmiths? I conjecture that these quantitatively bright children, although they get good grades on the relevant examinations, do not receive the same face-to-face attention and approval from the teachers as do the verbally bright children. It is the verbal skills that bring these personal rewards from the teacher, and apparently it is these rewards that especially shape the sense of entitlement

But I found the next bit, under the heading "Central Planning in the Classroom", especially interesting.

There is a further point to be added. The (future) wordsmith intellectuals are successful within the formal, official social system of the schools, wherein the relevant rewards are distributed by the central authority of the teacher. The schools contain another informal social system within classrooms, hallways, and schoolyards, wherein rewards are distributed not by central direction but spontaneously at the pleasure and whim of schoolmates. Here the intellectuals do less well.

It is not surprising, therefore, that distribution of goods and rewards via a centrally organized distributional mechanism later strikes intellectuals as more appropriate than the "anarchy and chaos" of the marketplace. For distribution in a centrally planned socialist society stands to distribution in a capitalist society as distribution by the teacher stands to distribution by the schoolyard and hallway.

However, for evidence that things can sometimes fail to conform to theory, however enticing, you need only look to this Aug 18th posting by Andrew Ian Dodge, and to the comments that are attached to it. Here the intellectual is a libertarian, and he hates the non-intellectuals – specifically the sports jocks – for being bullies. Here the vital factor is not central planning; it is force. The geek hates the schoolyard, because the schoolyard is the arena of unapologetic force. (In the classroom, the force is apologetic.) And the geek is a libertarian for the same reason. The market may be anarchic, but at least it never beats you up.

As far as sports building character in young adults, all I have to say is: bollocks. It turns young adults into obnoxious bullies who think they are better than everyone else. It also helps to fuel the "it's not cool to show you are smart" attitude that pervades much of secondary education.

I'm now lurching way away from my original point, which was about whether schooling encourages socialism. Nevertheless, this is an interesting comment, about the differences between the USA and the UK, and I include it here anyway:

The British have a much healthier system for all of this. You are much less likely to be messed about with by jocks at British universities or schools than you are in the US. Of course, in the UK, they value intellectual capacity far more than in the US. It is not "uncool" to be intelligent. Jocks are a major blight on the education system in the US, and something needs to be done about it.

I fear this may be somewhat romantic. Besides which, the fact that sport counts for less and less in Britain's schools these days doesn't mean that the people who would have been doing sport necessarily behave any less nastily towards the geek tendency.

But my original point is that although in general the observations of Kling and Nozick may be right, there will always be people who won't fit into the boxes. Andrew Ian Dodge was a geek, but is no socialist. I was a geek, and I'm no socialist either. But what Dodge and I both have in common is that we both indulge in intellectual complaint about that "real world". It isn't socialist complaint, but it is still complaint. And although I can't speak for him on that, although I personally believe in capitalism, I'm pretty damn bad at actually doing it.

(And to complicate things still further, unlike Dodge, I like love to watch sport, even though, like him, I'm no good at it.)