No worries, Martin, I normally check out who I’m responding to before I respond. I just do want to clarify that I’m a progressive, not a liberal, and in America, there is a lot of overlap between the two.

So let’s talk about potential.

I think a lot of people who talk about potential not being fulfilled because there are gatekeepers keeping them from fulfilling their potential actually don’t realize that it’s not the gatekeepers – it’s their own lack of ability. Unfortunately, Americans are taught from birth that they can do anything, provided they work hard enough and believe in themselves. This has spewed generations of people who think more highly of their abilities than they ought to.

Let me tell you about a girl I met at college. She was in her mid-20s, had inherited millions from her grandparents and really had no need to work. But she wanted to be a singer. One of her relatives was a very famous singer, and she wanted to be one, too. So she signed up for classes. Only she kept failing the singing class. Finally, she went to the professor and asked him what she had to do in order to pass the class. He told her that she couldn’t sing, that she would never pass.

She was very upset when she told me so I suggested that she simply go and audition for singing jobs because if she could sing, she would get the job. She never ever spoke to me again.

Now why would that be? She actually believed that someone could teach her to sing. She thought the guy was a gatekeeper, and he was preventing her from singing.

The bottom line is that many of these people who are moaning about gatekeeping don’t realize that they don’t have what it takes.

I don’t know how you arrive at your conclusions, but I most certainly don’t agree with them. For a start, to loosely quote Einstein, human beings are stupid. Or to quote his exactly words, ““Two things are infinite, as far as we know – the universe and human stupidity.”

No amount of opening gates and training people is going to convert someone with a less than average IQ to become an Einstein. Education is about knowledge. Intelligence is about the ability to problem solve. The former can be taught. The latter is strictly genetic.

Permitting someone to drive a Ferrari when he cannot pass a basic driver’s licence test (gatekeeping) is tantamount to putting a weapon in the hand of someone who has no idea what that weapon can do.

I’m also not quite sure what you mean by outdated standards. For me, the standards are quite simple. If you want to be a writer, you know how to spell, how to put a sentence together, and you have the kind of intellect that propels readers to read you. The first two can be taught – the latter is genetic. It’s also interesting that everybody gets to go to junior school in the States, but 54% of American are semiliterate. There were no gatekeepers preventing them from learning to write well.

Ah, the 1986 Challenger. My daughter taught about that when she was working for the NASA Science Museum. The rocket disintegrated because it had substandard parts, and you see, someone who didn’t know any better used those parts. Now, somewhere along the line, the gatekeeping failed.

I also have no idea how the 1986 Challenger disintegrating has anything to do with groupthink. Basically, someone substituted parts – that was a one person decision, not a group of people. What am I missing here?

The reason that general competence has decreased is because most of the gatekeeping has been removed. I am 71 now. When I was at school, here’s what I needed to get into university:

1. Three languages.

2. Math

3. 1 or 2 sciences (physics, chemistry, biology)

4. Another academic subject like history or geography.

You also had to have a very high pass work. The only thing that mattered was your year end exam results. And your teacher did not mark them. They were marked by the impartial teachers who lived in other places and who didn’t know the students. These people were selected by government.

To give you an idea of the standard of work in those days, for history, I studied Eolithic, neolithic, and Palaeolithic man, the Babylonians, Hittites, Greeks, Romans. I studied European history – Germany, Italy, Russia, etc. I did South African history, British history, but very little American history. We were still in the British Empire in those days. We also never had the American option of being given multiple choice questions. In junior school, you simply had to answer the question. There were no clues. In senior school, you wrote essays, and there was not a chance in hell that you got to university without writing to a publishable standard in your home language. You had to be fluent in your second language, and you had to be able to translate a third language.

What has happened in the education system, is in order for everybody to get through the system is that they did away with most of the gatekeeping. So now most people get that little piece of paper.

I’m afraid that there is absolutely nothing that can accelerate one’s intellectual capability. It’s genetic, and it’s set in stone. What can be done is that people can be much better educated than they are now. That means gatekeeping. It means when someone hasn’t learnt something well, one keeps them back until they have learnt it. Or one does what the Fins do. They teach every single child, and if the child doesn’t have as much capacity as others, then they give that child extra time. In the end, they all pass out with more or less the same marks.

I believe 100% in gatekeeping, but I want to come back to my initial point. The people who are moaning about gatekeeping think that they can do something that they can’t. Sure, there are exceptions, but those exceptions are very rare, and when they have that kind of ability, they sometimes find a way.