It’s Time to Leave the Elite Disabled Club

We are facing massive challenges as a species and the so-called ‘elite’ educations that were supposed to be helping us might be letting us down - or worse. 

There is an assumption that people who have undergone a thorough and lengthy education - starting at perhaps five years of age and continuing to a graduate degree some 25 years later - are both part of an elite group and able to think and learn effectively. This may not be true. In many cases, it plainly isn’t true as daily events on elite university campuses can attest. They may still qualify as elite in terms of status and opportunity, but could actually be part of the elite disabled. That could include a lot of us.

As G.K. Chesterton said, ‘Without education, we are in a horrible and deadly danger of taking educated people seriously.’

What is the elite disabled and how did we become members of this club? 

This term originates with mentors of mine at The Foundation for Critical Thinking - Richard Paul and Linda Elder. They coined the phrase as a way of describing what they and many others (including intelligence gathering agencies) were seeing from highly educated people. They had achieved advanced degrees and formed technical specialties with shiny graduation certificates from famous schools while demonstrating very low competence in fundamental thinking - critical and moral.

How could this happen?

Well, for lots of reasons. But chiefly because the fundamentals of disciplined critical thinking are not part of anyone’s standard experience in education. Here are some others:

• Generally, standard education systems reward the recitation of correct answers and not open inquiry which builds competence in the formation of excellent questions. This doubles down on our already strong tendency to prefer certainty over uncertainty leading to less comfort with questions that remain open.
• There has been a trend towards high levels of specialization--and away from synthesized cross-disciplinary practice--which builds high confidence in one particular area of study and practice, and that confidence then crosses over into many other areas, though the actual competencies aren't really there. We’ve all met these people, and they are all over the media. They are also often some of the easiest people to manipulate, trick, and mislead because their high confidence in their own smartness leads them to make significant thinking errors when operating outside their specific domain of expertise.
• And then there is status. The pursuit of markers that differentiate us from other people and move us up the social status ladder. Elite degrees from elite schools are some of the most obvious versions of this. It is a placeholder that is supposed to signify elite competence. Sometimes it still does, but often it does not.

This argument is not an academic point. It has a profound impact on how the future unfolds (and is unfolding). People graduating with ‘elite’ degrees from ‘elite’ institutions disproportionately end up in positions of power where they can have outsized influence on the rest of us.

Let’s start the Elite Competencies Club

Truly elite competencies of the mind (the MetaSkills), when shared broadly, contribute to less division and less extremism. People holding these habits of mind examine their core beliefs regularly, are more patient, more comfortable with ambiguity, and more resistant to being badgered into poor choices by charged appeals to their egos or social standing. That is the elitism we should be playing for: the one that simultaneously puts us in better control of our own future while building one that we can all live in.

The good news is that it is never too late to join the Elite Competencies Club. Together, we can practice more disciplined thinking and embed its principles into our day-to-day lives and work so that we gain a new measure of influence on the future.