Princess Celestia’s School for Gifted Unicorns, Academic Elitism and Social Mobility · 11:37pm Feb 27th, 2016
Getting an education can be a stressful experience.
I’ve now almost finished the draft of a sequel to The Brightest and the Best, which, I hope, will be ready for submission in a few weeks, or possibly months. This concerns the events at Princess Celestia’s School for Gifted Unicorns in the aftermath of Twilight Sparkle’s entrance examination. I gave it the working title: Academic Eggcellence, but I plan to change it to something slightly less cringeworthy before submission.
It’s about time to return to Twilight’s old school. Season 5 has significantly boosted our knowledge of this ivory tower of the unicorn elite, but there is still a lot we don’t know.
The show gives us two contrasting views of the Equestrian education system. At one end, the Ponyville schoolhouse is the nostalgic image of a small village school from the turn of the last century, where a single teacher takes charge of everything, like something from favourite old books like Anne of Green Gables.
And at the other end of the scale, we have the elite selective racially-segregated Canterlot academy where a chosen group of talented foals are groomed to be the future leaders of Equestria.
Is such an elitist approach a fair or desirable way to run an education system? The answer to this provocative question is a complicated ‘It depends…’
A real world equivalent is Bronx High School of Science, the world-renown New York high school which selects the best students by a highly competitive entrance examination. It’s a seductive idea that among the masses of children across the metropolis, there will be quite a few as brilliant as Twilight Sparkle. If you can find them, and put them together in a school with the best teachers, abundant resources, and supremely well-equipped science labs and other facilities, then at least a few will excel and go on to change the world. And it would seem it works - their website boosts an impressive list of Nobel Prize winning alumni.
Good for them. Such schools can be the ideal place for gifted children. A small number of students will always have the uncanny ability to learn things much faster than their peers, and providing them with a stream of challenges tailored to their ability can tax the best of teachers. Some have difficulty socialising (like Twilight at Crystal Prep), and some may deliberately ‘dumb themselves down’ to try to fit in. The more pressing problem for most teachers is how to get all students to a basic standard. The brighter kids will always be able to fend for themselves, but teaching a less-able child basic literacy could make the difference between whether they end up in paid employment or in prison. When you have to deal with children with serious learning difficulties, problems at home, and those who arrive at school barely able to speak English, it’s tempting to just give the eggheads a book to read and tell them to go away.
Elite schools can provide bright students from disadvantaged families with the chance they need to escape poverty and make it in the world. Indeed many of their proponents are from these backgrounds and love to tell stories of how well it worked for them. But it doesn’t necessarily work like this. Rich pushy parents are very good at getting a place for their child, and it is quite common to find such schools are full of the likes of Diamond Tiara.[1]
[1] Although interestingly, Diamond Tiara herself attends Ponyville school, and her mother is on the school board, despite disapproving of her daughter associating with confused insignificant lowlifes. Equestria may have separate schools for gifted unicorns, but not, it seems, for spoilt rich brats. Although Spoilt Rich herself seems to have missed a few lessons…
...I just happened to be here for the school board meeting, and this is what I see when we adjourn? My daughter associating with confused, insignificant lowlifes? Socializing with their kind is not how you move up in Equestria!...
In Britain, selective education is very controversial. Historically (until the 1970s) British high schools were divided into selective grammar schools, and the secondary modern schools (for those who failed the test). This two-tier system was seen as divisive, condemning 75% of children to an inferior education, and splitting up childhood friends (think Starlight Glimmer and Sunburst). So it was replaced by the inclusive comprehensive schools. But grammar schools remain in a few conservative counties.
While in theory grammar schools allows bright pupils from poor backgrounds to get an excellent education, in practice nearly all the places in such schools are taken by upper-middle class kids whose parents pay for private tuition to coach them for the entrance exam. This has caused a lot of resentment, and well-justified criticism. There is evidence that in these counties, poor kids fare worse.
But this system of selective education is how many schools are run in some continental European countries, such as Germany, without nearly as much controversy as it attracts in the UK. In Germany, it appears the selective system works better, maybe because the alternatives are not seen as such a second-rate option. It seems that it is not so much the principle, but how it is implemented that makes the difference. That said, I know my German friends have plenty to say on the faults of their system…
In international rankings of social mobility, Germany is ranked ahead of the US and UK. Indeed Britain and America are the worst performers of Western developed countries, below Australia and Canada, and much worse than Finland, Sweden and Denmark. Education really should be what drives social mobility, allowing everyone to go as far as their talent will take them. But it doesn’t always work out like it should...
And what of Equestria? A society where the princesses happily mix with ordinary ponies, but still maintain a sufficiently large class of Canterlot snobs to allow some fun and games at the gala...
In this world the Sparkle family appear to be unusually successful social climbers. By accident or design both Twilight and her brother were elevated to the pinnacle of Equestrian society. But even if she did have Cadance as a foalsitter, Twilight doesn’t act as if she comes from a privileged background. The insecurity she shows in Lesson Zero points rather more to a student from an ordinary background, who can never entirely believe that she really deserves to be where she is. But she matures into a princess who is equally at home with ponies from all trots of life.
Of course Equestria is a fairy-tale land of opportunity where we can be sure that Rainbow Dash will become a Wonderbolt and Rarity a top fashion designer with the same certainty with which a young child declares that she will be an astronaut, compete in the Olympic Games, or be the next CEO of Hasbro.
I've never felt like Ponyville's schoolhouse was just a one-room affair. If you look at the dimensions given on the outside, and then the inside of the schoolroom where most of the scenes are, it's far larger than accounts for that.
Instead, I feel that they have Japanese-style schooling, where a teacher will follow one class throughout their time at school.
And I mean, even if it were, Ponyville's schooling seems more comprehensive and advanced than ours- their middle-school aged foals are taught calculus.
I've always vaguely wondered whether this aspect of the show is damaging. Shoot for the stars, land on the moon, they say, but if you really wanted to see Betelgeuse up close ...
It aint what you know, its who you know, and if there can only be so many people at the top, even if you have a large pool to select from, you have to roll dice and take very small values.
Having a lesser supported school makes it all that more difficult, but theres far more people to roll on, so every so often theres someone makes good and is held up as an example that they system works,
If middle-school foals are taught calculus, then I shudder to imagine what college or university students are learning.
Oh, come on. Academic Eggcellence is a fine title. (of course, you have to consider my sense of humor.)
3780874 Yeah, I can see the conversations now.
Sweetie Belle: Rarity! Can I get your help with my homework? We're covering quaternions this month.
Rarity: So soon? Why, when I was going to school, we didn't cover them until your next semester.
3781045
More evidence that ponies are superior to us in every way.
Hey Pineta, are you coming from the future ? Season 6 isn't out yet !
3781045 vignette1.wikia.nocookie.net/mlp/images/f/fa/Cheerilee_describing_how_she_got_her_cutie_mark_S1E12.png/revision/latest?cb=20120718030435
Orbital physics equation on the blackboard of a class that's currently going through the "adulthood" talk.
Hey Teach, is this gonna be on the exam?
Applying real-world metrics for social mobility seems a bit of a leap, given that we've seen a member of Equestrian society catapulted from librarian to ruler of a domain so quickly that it would make Anne Hathaway's head spin.
3781219 Yeah, but it's ruler of a rather obscure domain. The Kingdom of Friendship seems to be about the size of one castle, and she only reigns over a single resident, although he is a dragon.
Twilight acts shy because she's an introvert without a lot of socialization experience in formal settings, but she's almost certainly a member of a noble family. It's not just the speed at which her brother rose up the ranks in the Royal Guard or getting a princess as a foal sitter before she got her cutie mark. Her and Shining Armor's uncle got the special sash for his own service in the military, and generations of military service is quite often seen as a requirement of noble families in countries with an aristocracy.
The other thing to keep in mind is that screenshot you have of the little unicorn foals is not Celestia's School for Gifted Unicorns. Notice how none of the students has a cutie mark yet? And yet Twilight get her cutie mark before she starts the CSfGU. I think what you're looking at there is magic kindergarten, which really seems to be the Canterlot equivalent of the Ponyville Schoolhouse, for a city with mostly unicorns.
A third thing to keep in mind: Somewhere Maud Pie is earning a "Rockterate." So either the CSfGU actually takes in non-unicorns, or there are other schools offering advanced degrees to the other tribes.
3781252
The table legs, the string of pictures on the blackboard, and the blackboard itself look awfully similar to the ones in the top image.
3781219
Twilight Sparkle was never a librarian; she was an academic - indeed, possibly the foremost academic in Equestria - who happened to live in a library and sometimes do library duties because she really, really loves books. Seriously, she reshelves books for fun.
She's a bit eccentric, is what I'm saying.
Moving from "personal protegee of the ruler of the land" to "coruler of the land" is not exactly much of a surprise or a sign of social mobility.
3781329 That building in the top image looks like basically every other building in Canterlot, this is the town where the donut shop looks like the Palace of Versailles.
3781413
That's how ponies roll - their Magic Kindergarten is basically Hogwarts.
Anyway, regarding the actual OP:
The reason the US's social mobility appears to be so much lower is because of our large black and Hispanic population, which makes up more than a quarter of the US but makes up a disproportionately large portion of the bottom of America and have relatively poor social mobility.
nces.ed.gov/Pressrelease/reform/images/figureM.gif
4.bp.blogspot.com/-c5iJYDF4wXk/T5eTOLuW8AI/AAAAAAAAAbc/tva9PPBhPGA/s1600/sat%2Bbw%2Braw.png
pewresearch.org/files/2014/07/incarceration1.jpg
Roughly a third of black people are poor. Half of those will die poor. And many of those who are in the lower middle class will revert to poverty in the next generation. One in three (if not more) black male high-school dropouts will wind up in jail or prison, and black women are about as likely as white men to end up in jail. Not coincidentally, being a criminal tends to greatly lower your earning prospects. And blacks are much more likely than whites to drop out of school due to poor academic achievement, which makes it all the more likely you'll end up in this group.
Conversely, only 9.9% of non-Hispanic white people are poor, and 2/3rds of them will escape poverty. Only 7% of white men who are high school dropouts will end up in jail, and the overall imprisonment rate for white men is only about 1 in 17. And whites are a third less likely to drop out of school than blacks are.
Asians are in even better shape - slightly more (12%) of them are poor, but they have better academic achievement on average than whites do.
Note that Germany's poverty rate is about 15%, by comparison; 12.5 million of their 80 million residents are poor.
Note that it also varies by region; the South has very little social mobility for members of any race. Other areas have much higher levels of social mobility.
3781419 Oh definitely, I feel like Celestia's School for Gifted Unicorns is clearly an expy of Hogwart's School for Gifted Wizards and Witches. (Not least because the headmaster is also a national politician in both cases).
3781150
No, I just can't count
3781404
Is that so? Despite being Celestia's personal student, I don't recall a single instance of Twilight's academic prowess being recognized until after she became a princess, when she is lecturing to an assembly about Friendship in the most recent episode. Sure, you can argue it just wasn't that important to the show's plot, but it leaves us with a lack of supporting evidence to how Twilight was shaping the study of magic. All we really know is that Celestia saw something in her entrance exam performance and the rest is history.
We all know that dear Celly loves to play the chessmaster.
3781225
True enough, though hints toward season 6 episodes suggest that may change. I guess we shall see!
3780874 The Ponyville school is an odd affair that we can't really make statements on with regards of whether it's one-room. We only see one room and one teacher and I wouldn't really be certain the building is so large to have more. But here's the thing: there's only one class of students demographically. We've never seen any kids in Ponyville that were older or younger than the Crusaders, baby Cakes notwithstanding. So clearly there's something big we aren't being shown.
As for the whole post itself - it rests on a really fragile premise of taking the name of Celestia's School for Gifted Youngsters really seriously. None of Twilight's school friends appear to be wealthy, have lots of talent or have gotten into high society upon graduation. The highest any of them got is apparently Lemon Hearts, who works in the palace - a phrasing suggesting more of a maid or caterer than high government employee.
There is an entrance examination, but the only part of it we see is something the whole fandom agrees can't have been meant to be passed the way Twilight did. An exam is only expected for a magic school when most unicorns can only cast spells related to their cutie marks.
If you change this title I will never forgive you.
3781404
3781978
Other than those "Friendship Reports" which were really just anecdotal observations with a hypothesis generated at the end, did Twilight do any scholarship during the show? Did she write any actual reports or papers, pass any written or academic tests, conduct any rigorous and scientifically valid or experiments on friendship?
Thank God Celestia got her a royal title, I can't imagine how she would have defended a dissertation with original research on friendship otherwise to earn a PhD.
3783287
Given that by the end of season 3 she was capable of channeling raw friendship magic, I'm pretty sure she was up to something.
We did see her study things from time to time, but frankly, watching someone study something is only rarely all that interesting. Twilight studying Pinkie Pie was amusing. We've seen Twilight study during season 4, but she mostly did it in the background, like in Castle Mane-ia, where she spent all episode studying but only popped back out at the end.
3783573 She certainly studied a lot, that's true. Mostly she seemed to be studying magical spells and theories, though I suppose by the transitive property of magic=friendship that counts as studying friendship as well. I'm not questioning her academic input, merely her output. If Twilight didn't expect to become a Princess eventually, shouldn't she have been preparing a body of work?
Now that I think about it, the closest we've seen to a Twilight formally studying friendship is when human Twilight mentioned working on a study of human-canine companionship with Spike.
Guh, did you have to mention the canon breaking nonsense of both shining armor and lesson zero?
Your essay kinda forgets that the word Academy is defined as: a school that provides training in special subjects or skills. The idea of “academic elitism” only applies if the specific skills being taught are being taught by another school in competition.
Equestria is based on the European Renaissance period where education was limited to what parents bothered to teach, private tutors, and skill specific apprenticeships. For all we know, Celestia's School for Gifted Unicorns may be the only unicorn magic academy in Equestria. If Equestria matches the Renaissance, then there is no standard of education, instead, there is the appearance of what is useful and what is not useful to specific trades and interests. A pony can feel proud that they know more than somepony else, but that's as far as it goes because there would be no certificates of achievement and even if there were, they would be inconsistent. It is more likely that a pony would have to prove their abilities.
Just to note, I have witnessed many programming employers going back to these methods by asking candidates questions like “how many golf balls would fit into this room”, because graduation does not prove retention.
This really sticks in my craw. For one thing, the phrase “future leaders” usually refers to political leaders – the only political leaders in Equestria are Princess Celestia and Princess Luna. “Future leaders of business” would have been at least closer to reality, but probably not closer to the truth. The goal of the common Canterlot snob is to be lazy and have other ponies do things for them. They may work to a certain extent to achieve this, but they do so by conventional means, not through the creative use of magic.
If half of the unicorns who attended Celestia's School for Gifted Unicorns took learning and doing magic seriously, then Equestria would be overrun with high magic, but throughout the whole show we do not see anypony with as much magical ability as Twilight. Celestia's School was probably made for ponies like Twilight who had a natural interest in learning, and needed more attention than the average pony to stoke that fire into a self-fuelling lust for knowledge which she always synthesizes into ability. The rest are just there under the pretence of prestige.
In other words, you can lead a pony to knowledge, but you can't make them think.
3783594
Given the technology in the show, it appears to be more turn of the 20th century than anything else, though it is something of an anachronism stew of the 1860s - 1960s. No television, no radio that we've seen, Vinyl records, electrical appliances, hydroelectric dams, no telegraphs or telephones, railroads, hot air baloons and airships over planes, ect.
It isn't terribly consistent about it, obviously, but it is way, way more advanced than the Renaissance, both culturally and otherwise.
Plus, you know, public schools weren't a huge thing until the Industrial revolution.
3783605 I do not accept the whole show as a vision of Equestria. Only the first season under Faust can be a sure thing. In the first season, there were a few gags concerning technology. At the time, the sci-fi equipment in Twilight's basement was seen as so off the wall that it went without question that its existence was nothing but a gag. It's the same for the train pulled by ponies. The effort for laying out a track of that sort just to have the train pulled by ponies who could choose the direction in which they travel was quite nonsensical. Then again, I think both of these episodes were thrown together when the Discord episodes were shunted to season two by the demands of hasbro.
When I said that Equestria is based on the European Renaissance, I meant the technology. Because the term is so broad, I don't understand what you mean when you mentioned culture.
3780875
I wrote that paragraph as an afterthought as after finishing the draft of this post I picked up my copy of "everyday sexism" and read the foreword, where Sarah Brown explains that children are optimists, not because they think they can beat the odds, but because they don't really understand that there are such things as odds. The idea that something might not be for 'the likes of us' simply does not compute... Then they grow a bit older and they are introduced to the idea of 'know your place'. Skipping ropes are for boys, science kits are for boys... Nice girls don't...
It occurred to me as I read this that this is exactly the issue that Lauren Faust was addressing with her kickass female characters. I was just talking about social mobility from high school up, but the 'Follow your passions and ambitions, not what others expect of you' message is aimed at little girls.
Anyway, to address your point - is urging children to aim too high damaging? Potentially... But I don't think this is a real problem when they are young. It's more important when they get to being teenagers that they get sensible advice instead of just blind encouragement. I still like the old quote: The greater danger for most of us lies not in setting our aim too high and falling short; but in setting our aim too low, and achieving our mark.
3783605
3783695
From Jayson Thiessen's foreword to The Art of Equestria:
It strikes me that 'once in a while' is a bit of an understatement
3783695
Sugarcube Corner has a pretty modern kitchen:
The show has always presented a world which had a lot of 19th/20th century technology in it. Rarity has always had a sewing machine. Green Isn't Your Color featured color photography and color printing. They had light bulbs and lamps and suchlike in episodes like Feeling Pinkie Keen. Fluttershy has a mechanical clock in Stare Master.
They don't have telephones or telegraphs, but they have a bunch of other technology suggestive of the late 19th up to the mid 20th century.
3784570 Most of the tech in the background, I have largely ignored because it's the background of a cartoon, or accepted it under the fact that children wouldn't really understand the concepts if it were shown to be completely accurate to the world. In the kitchen example, most English speaking families are going to have blenders and some form of electric mixer that a child, even in their young life, would have used for making a cake, so removing these things to do it completely by hoof would be alien to the target audience of MLP.
The same applies to Rarity's dress making. We have seen Rarity stitching with a manual needle in the air with magic for brief periods, but never to bind two pieces of cloth together. I have always presumed the thread in the stitch was applied for fashion. When she uses her sewing machine, she drives it with magic, and this is the part that shines the light on the complication. For starters, a period sewing machine would look like a steampunk nightmare and the target audience wouldn't understand what it was by sight any more than most of the adults watching the show, but if the devices were shown as it should be from a society that had magic before technology, then they would be alien to nearly everyone.
If you take something as simple as a lamp, and imagine that that need was filled by magic, the first thing that comes to mind is that it would be made of a gemstone that floats in the air. It would also be touch, voice, thought, time, and proximity activated being able to be programmed by non-unicorns by voice commands. Its ability to float in the air would be mobile both moving to commanded locations and following a user as a hoof-free flash light. The beam of the light could be focused to one or more specific points allowing the lamp to serve as a spotlight, flashlight, accent light, and mood light as the color of the light could be selectable for each beam. Even if the crystal itself was say red, through magic there are no bounds to changing the light that the crystal projects or even the color of the crystal. In fact, all of the spells included in this lamp do not have to be cast on a crystal, they could just as easily be cast on a wall, the space inside of a room, a random space in midair, or even a pony.
At this point the word “lamp” no longer refers to a physical object that serves a specific purpose, but instead refers to the concept of “light source”. When this level of creativity is applied freely to everything, it is safe to say that there will be concepts brought into existence that play off of one another in ways that are simply too hard to imagine for the mere mortal. Writers for the show would outright quit. The only way to reconcile this level of potential down to the level that the professional writers and the audience of the show can comprehend, is: for the writer's benefit: limit ponies' creativity to mimic the current world in which we live, and for the audience: fudge the items and technology used in the show to mimic their current real world counterparts.
I accept this annoyance as a duality in that in some places in Equestria there probably are people and places that put magic/technology to extreme use and at the same time, the ponies we see in the show, are simply convinced that doing things the old-fashioned-way are easier somehow. For example, in one work of fiction written in 1995 or so, cell phones were becoming popular, but were still quite clunky, the fiction took place in an alternate universe where it was explained that because earlier models of cell phones were even more clunky and inconvenient, people didn't buy them, so the technology never grew and was abandoned. This was an important plot point to the story because if even 1995's cellphones were available to these characters, it would have changed the structure of the adventure down to something far less exciting.
One could say the ponies never thought about applying magic in these ways, but that would be calling the characters stupid when it's actually the writers' mental laziness that is to blame, so I prefer to think that the ponies are doing what they think best. For example, in the modern human world, there is no need to go to a live concert ever: they are dangerously loud and full of noise that ruins the quality of the performance, the singers and musicians must preform in a different way than their recorded music, they often involve people and situations a person would never want to encounter, such as a forty minute parking ordeal then an hour and a half exiting ordeal, but in Equestria there is value of going to a live concert rather than listening to a recording, because: Equestrian music is not altered through synthesizers and recording effects, the crowd is not intolerable, and there is a real chance to meet and talk with the artist.
This is what I meant when I said:
and I have no doubt it is what was meant from Jayson Thiessen as Pineta quoted, although if you asked Jayson, he'd probably focus more on the audience's ability to relate to current technology.
As this all relates to education, I still see it as an annoyance. Just as I have pointed out, people value what they understand to be useful, so if shows for children and adults, focused on showing an expanded and advanced world and not just living in the one we currently occupy, then the value of synthesized knowledge could grow from the desire to live in the worlds depicted in fiction.
3782651
Re the Ponyville schoolhouse, they've also got (at a minimum) the room with the printing press (cf. the Gabby Gums episode), or some sort of hammerspace in which to store the equipment for what is apparently one of Equestria's most popular newspapers. The building certainly looks like a one-room schoolhouse, but I dunno, maybe Equestria educates its foals in Tardises.
See 3781252's point about the timeline of the schools we're shown. If you accept the comics as canon, we do see CSfGY as a separate institution in one of the mini-series; even if you don't, it looks like the one we saw in the show was just some prep school (or mainstream school) she was at before the CSfGY entrance exams.
3784570
3785397 There's another possibility there: Enchanting magical items is incredibly difficult, to the point where only ponies like Twilight Sparkle have the mana reserve/intelligence and talent to enchant magical objects (like Tank's flying machine). Depending on the nature of magic in Equestria, industrial scale creation of magical devices may simply not be possible. That lamp your describing would probably require an hour or two from Twilight Sparkle, Moon Dancer, or maybe a dozen other unicorns in Canterlot, most of whom are professors at Celestia's School. Most unicorns couldn't enchant that lamp, and I doubt even Twilight Sparkle could enchant the machine that regularly enchants those lamps.
Meanwhile, Manehatten, which is mostly earth pony, has pretty advanced industrial technology, far more than anywhere else we've seen. I think magic in Equestria just doesn't scale the way technology does.
3786578
All of Twilight's friends showed up in the first episode, though, which heavily implies they did all go to Celestia's School for Gifted Unicorns.
I think a lot of people have unrealistic ideas about what it means to go to a top school, though; while many important people come from top schools, most people who go to top schools don't end up being all that important.
3786595
I never said it wasn't difficult, but you are thinking about magic in the single caster concept. A computer board is designed by a team of highly trained people, then a machine pumps out millions of them. A magical machine that produces other magical machines could be powered by several unicorns channelling their magic into it. Raw, simple magic in; highly developed processed magic out.
Even if such a magical machine was a life long project, it would have been made by the time Equestria is shown, but even before that point, it would have been just as effective to push magic from several unicorns into one who was educated in magic crafting, and here again we come full circle: the means to possess such high magic is present, but the society's desire for such things, as a whole, is limited.