The End of Average: How We Succeed in a World That Values Sameness

by Todd Rose

I’m not going to pretend that the Taylorization of our workplace and the implementation of standardization and rankings in our schools was some kind of disaster. It wasn’t. When society embraced averagarianism, businesses prospered and consumers got more affordable products. Taylorism increased wages across society as a whole and probably lifted more people out of poverty than any other single economic development in the past century. By forcing college applicants and job seekers to take standardized tests, nepotism and cronyism were reduced and students from less privileged backgrounds attained unprecedented access to opportunities to a better life. Though it is easy to disparage Thorndike’s elitist belief that society should divert resources toward superior students and away from inferior ones, he also believed that wealth and inherited privilege should play no part in determining a student’s opportunities (on the other hand, he attributed different levels of mental talent to different ethnicities). Thorndike helped establish a classroom environment that made Americans out of millions of immigrants and raised the number of Americans with a high school diploma from 6 percent to 81 percent.41 Overall, the universal implementation of averagarian systems across American society undoubtedly contributed to a relatively stable and prosperous democracy.