Our American Culture has Venerated Mediocrity Over Excellence

Contact Your Elected Officials

The reason top tech companies often hire foreign-born and first-generation engineers over โ€œnativeโ€ Americans isnโ€™t because of an innate American IQ deficit (a lazy and wrong explanation). A key part of it comes down to the c-word: culture. Tough questions demand tough answers and if weโ€™re really serious about fixing the problem, we have to confront the TRUTH:

Our American culture has venerated mediocrity over excellence for way too long (at least since the 90s and likely longer). That doesnโ€™t start in college, it starts YOUNG.

A culture that celebrates the prom queen over the math olympiad champ, or the jock over the valedictorian, will not produce the best engineers.

A culture that venerates Cory from โ€œBoy Meets World,โ€ or Zach and Slater over Screech in โ€œSaved by the Bell,โ€ or โ€˜Stefanโ€™ over Steve Urkel in โ€œFamily Matters,โ€ will not produce the best engineers.

(Fact: I know multiple sets of immigrant parents in the 90s who actively limited how much their kids could watch those TV shows precisely because they promoted mediocrityโ€ฆand their kids went on to become wildly successful STEM graduates).

More movies like Whiplash, fewer reruns of โ€œFriends.โ€ More math tutoring, fewer sleepovers. More weekend science competitions, fewer Saturday morning cartoons. More books, less TV. More creating, less โ€œchillin.โ€ More extracurriculars, less โ€œhanging out at the mall.โ€

Most normal American parents look skeptically at โ€œthose kinds of parents.โ€ More normal American kids view such โ€œthose kinds of kidsโ€ with scorn. If you grow up aspiring to normalcy, normalcy is what you will achieve.

Now close your eyes and visualize which families you knew in the 90s (or even now) who raise their kids according to one model versus the other. Be brutally honest.

โ€œNormalcyโ€ doesnโ€™t cut it in a hyper-competitive global market for technical talent. And if we pretend like it does, weโ€™ll have our asses handed to us by China.

This can be our Sputnik moment. Weโ€™ve awaken from slumber before and we can do it again. Trumpโ€™s election hopefully marks the beginning of a new golden era in America, but only if our culture fully wakes up. A culture that once again prioritizes achievement over normalcy; excellence over mediocrity; nerdiness over conformity; hard work over laziness.

Thatโ€™s the work we have cut out for us, rather than wallowing in victimhood and just wishing (or legislating) alternative hiring practices into existence. Iโ€™m confident we can do it.

By Vivek Ramaswamy

The Thinking Conservative
The Thinking Conservativehttps://www.thethinkingconservative.com/
The goal of THE THINKING CONSERVATIVE is to help us educate ourselves on conservative topics of importance to our freedom and our pursuit of happiness. We do this by sharing conservative opinions on all kinds of subjects, from all types of people, and all kinds of media, in a way that will challenge our perceptions and help us to make educated choices.

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