Bri Lee’s Who Gets to Be Smart

In A Room of One’s Own, Virginia Woolf roams the town and colleges of Oxford decrying the iniquity that sees Women scholars living in relative squalor compared to their male peers. Woolf’s solution is the aforementioned ‘room of one’s own’ along with a five hundred pound a year. She is decrying the lack of money, and consequently resources available to women to write. Generations of words, thoughts and perspectives lost.

Nearly a century later, walking those same streets, Bri Lee seeks to go further. Where Woolf worried at the lack of money, Lee questions where the money comes from. In the money and power that prop up the colleges she finds a system of institutionalising education that reinforces the very systems that fund them.

Who Gets to Be Smart challenges the rationale of the academy and its stranglehold on intelligence. Lee takes on a tour through the racist legacy of Cecil Rhodes and his bequest that founded the Rhodes scholarship, to the its contemporary parallel in the Australian Ramsay Centre. The Ramsay Centre’s mission to fund scholarships in ‘western civilisation’ highlights that tertiary institutions are not simply neutral spaces of so-called higher learning, but active participants in a process of consolidating power through ideas.

I admit to going into Who Gets to Be Smart with some unease and preconceptions. My leftie heart sang at the call to equity, but I was also proud of my sandstone alma matter and felt that I had earned my time at uni. I was unsure where I’d emerge at the end of the book because it seemed I was part of the problem.

I encountered a different iteration of the ‘institutional’ problem on the same day I edited this post. Looking for a professional development course in clinical supervision I found two options. One from a reputable looking provider, and the other from a university. Despite similar costs, coursework and outcomes I found myself leaning, seemingly without thought, towards the university option.

My problem was an almost unconscious bias. It’s a bias I share with many, as together we work on many levels to maintain the prestige of our academies. It’s work that is often unpaid, indeed many pay for the privilege, and we do it because we feel it elevates us. The problem is a system that centralises wealth, power and privilege to maintain its own prestige under the guise of scholarship.

Throughout Who Gets to Be Smart Lee explores the various mechanisms of centralising power through smarts. We are treated to the dubious history of ‘intelligence’ and intelligence testing, a system that has sought to simplify a complex system and sort us all into our places. School systems and the ongoing battle for funding in Australia comes under the microscope. The training grounds for institutionalised thinking, Lee gives us the numbers on how a country that prides its egalitarian spirit will commit to Olympic level mental gymnastics to justify inequality.

At the core of these institutional examples is the concept of Kyriarchy. Now there are multiple wonderful, much better qualified explainers of Kyriarchy including Bri Lee and Omid Tofighian. Read them if my examples make no sense. My understanding is Kyriarchy is that it is interrelated systems in our social world that work to keep us off-balance and subservient, and thereby controlling us indirectly. Kyriarchy plays on your job insecurity and worries about getting a home loan, even as you strive to have an Insta-perfect life and send your child to the best school. And Kyriarchy relies on multiple, intersecting systems that worsen as you move away from my white-bread example above. Kyriarchy is particularly cruel if you do not follow the dominant religion, speak another language and don’t look like your neighbour.

Who Gets to Be Smart explores the myriad ways in which knowledge is held and denied and at its heart is the way that systems of power work to keep us always further down, while looking up. It asks to question why we are so fractured, viewing potential friends and allies as competition, while raising up our oppressors as paragons.

Reading, I wondered how we pry ourselves from this trap of forever working in service of a system designed against our interests. With its focus on the academy Who Gets to Be Smart fails to address the varied and increasingly visible knowledge systems that occupy learning. This is not a criticism so much as a caveat that Lee’s book is a leaping off point. To where? Well as with any evolving space that’s to be determined and I’m wary that in discussing knowledge systems that are not currently ‘sanctioned’ we are not simply discussing fringe theories but thousand(s) year old teachings and learning. In Australia Indigenous cosmologies, land stewardship and justice systems are just some of the knowledge that we are as yet failing to attend. There are books, articles, websites and podcasts all giving insight into these ways of being and knowing. Perhaps more importantly there are scholars and knowledge holders striving for recognition and the opportunity to tell stories that will give new/old perspectives. To do so though we must rethink the whole way we organise our settler colonial, stolen land.

Having read Who Gets to Be Smart I have questions (for myself and my world) and a new-found need to interrogate how I find the answers.