Teaching for the middle

One of the basic strategies that educators, political advisors, radio programmers and movie producers use is to aim their message for the middle of their target audience, if you are a school teacher, you focus on the lower half of your class, with the assumption that the top quartile will take care of itself.

Once upon a time, the mantra was for excellence and gifted programs, but now the safer strategy is to formulate a message that will easily appeal to the largest subgroup.

For decades, Hollywood films have been marketed towards young men with the assumption that women will also buy a ticket if their guys want to see the show.

In radio that means endless classic rock, because in large markets you only need a small percentage of listeners onboard in order to make advertising profit. Three percent of the market and you are doing well, so all you need is some mix of old tunes to get the necessary audience.

Nevermind the forty percent of listeners who are completely ignored by the station programmers. It takes too much effort to develop a play list for them, maybe because they have a diverse range of interests, maybe because their tastes don’t boil down to a simple profile.

In my small academic town, the public schools seem to assume that professors' kids will do just fine, so the curriculum is aimed at kids who do not have PhD parents. This then reinforces the ancient divide between geeks and jocks, town and gown. If you can get the football fans interested, then the chess players will figure it out for themselves.

Similarly, the end game of any political campaign follows much the same logic: the endless pursuit of the undecided voter, those handful of people who after months of campaigning have not yet figured out where they stand. In the last months before an election, political discourse, ads, speeches, television commentary, etc, are all aimed at the lowest possible common denominator with occasional glances at everyone else to see if they are still onboard.

In the end, the best you get is the song, movie, class, or policy that you can tolerate, and the hopeless hope that the next one will be more to your liking, in other words the basic principle of early MTV.