“Meritocracy” is one of the great taken-for-granteds of our times. When the Productivity Commission looked at social mobility rates recently it reported in tones of relief and pleasure that we’re doing okay, pausing not for a moment to wonder whether social mobility and the social set-up it serves might have a downside. So too many of the myriad researchers of meritocracy’s loyal sidekick, schooling, critics of its persistent inequalities but rarely of the meritocratic kind of schooling thereby encouraged.
Both hymns in praise of meritocracy and criticisms of schooling’s inadequate service have come first and loudest in the United States, global pioneer of “opportunity for all” and of mass secondary schooling and then mass higher education. American commentary on “opportunity” has recently taken a decidedly different turn, however.
Far from sharing the general assumption that meritocracy is right and necessary in a democratic society, an increasing number of these critics argue that it fundamentally damages the social fabric and the body politic. In Bottlenecks: A New Theory of Equal Opportunity (2014) Joseph Fishkin argued for a more diverse “opportunity structure” rather than more equal opportunity within a “unitary” opportunity system. Daniel Markovits’s The Meritocracy Trap (2019) blamed the meritocracy for making life an endless and terrible competition. Prominent political philosopher Michael Sandel called his contribution The Tyranny of Merit (2020).
The anti-meritocracy case has recently taken a significant further step toward mainstream thinking with the publication in the Atlantic of a compelling digest of these and other sources. The Atlantic, it should be emphasised, is not just another magazine; it has been a leading voice of US progressivism ever since it supported the anti-slavery cause during the Civil War of 1861–65. And the Atlantic’s chosen author, David Brooks, is not just another long-form journalist; he is a prominent centre-right fixture on the US talk circuit.
The great value of Brooks’s substantial essay is in connecting so many and such disparate dots: family life and child-rearing practices; the shape and preoccupations of the education system; the definition, distribution and use of capability; the psyche of elites; the opportunity structure and inequality; and, above all, the current tumults of American social, cultural and political life. Some of these connections are more securely made than others of course, but Brooks’s scope and ambition are formidable, and valuable.
Shorn of often striking illustrations and elaborations, Brooks’s argument goes like this. In the early 1930s a small group of administrators at Harvard led by its president, James Conant were convinced that America needed “more social mobility and less class conflict” as well as more high-powered expertise in every sphere of life, including government. That meant that the old elite of eastern-seaboard WASP families and their “good-looking, athletic, graceful, casually elegant” menfolk with their “refined manners, prudent judgement and habit of command” had to go. Conant was determined to end admissions based on “bloodlines and breeding” in favour of “criteria centred on brainpower.”
It took two decades, but he got there. And where Harvard went, Brooks says, America soon followed. “It was as though someone had turned on a powerful magnet and filaments across wide swathes of the culture suddenly snapped to attention in the same direction.” The “Age of the Cognitive Elite” had arrived. Middle-class parents took to “concerted cultivation” of their offspring to ensure admission to elite universities; working-class families did not. Schools narrowed their curricula so that students could spend more of their day “enduring endless volleys of standardised testing.” Good jobs went to the educated, bad ones to those who weren’t. University recruiters obsessed over prestige: “Number one people,” they assumed, “go to number one schools” (by which he means universities). The “leisured class” was replaced by data-mad workaholics.
Not all of this massive social shift was bad, Brooks concedes. Bigotry declined, among the educated anyway, and productivity increased. But the patrician ethic that gave America (and the world) the New Deal, victory in the Second World War, the Marshall Plan, NATO and the postwar Pax Americana was lost. Trust in the country’s leadership plunged. Parents, teachers and the students were trapped in a rat-race that robbed childhood of its curiosity and exploration.
The meritocracy, according to Brooks, is guilty of no less than six “deadly sins”: it overrates intelligence; it assumes that success at school will mean success in life; it’s rigged; it is creating a system of segregated castes; it has shrivelled the psyches of elites; and, above all, it has “provoked a populist backlash that is tearing society.” To these six we could add at least two more sins: social mobility is a relative thing, a game of snakes as well as ladders; for every up there is a down. And meritocracy’s incessant talk about equality and opportunity convinces people that if they’re having an unsatisfying life it’s their own fault; meritocracy is a powerful social legitimation device.
What to do? The challenge, Brooks argues, is “not to end meritocracy” but to “humanise and improve it.” Given the chance, he Brooks says, he’d redefine merit around four crucial qualities: curiosity; a sense of drive and mission; social intelligence; and agility (ie. keeping your head when all about are losing theirs, as Kipling put it). This different conception of merit would pave the way to Fishkin’s more diverse opportunity structure.
In this future, society “would no longer look like a pyramid, with a tiny, exclusive peak at the top” but more like a series of pyramids, each constructed around a different definition of merit and therefore offering a different way of being successful. The focus is not equal opportunity but maximising opportunity. With this different social order comes a different elite, people “who are smart, yes, but who are also wise, perceptive, curious, caring, resilient and” (following Sandel) “committed to the common good.”
For all its brio and generosity of spirit Brooks’s analysis is — what? — not quite solipsistic, but certainly circumscribed, in a familiarly American way (pax Americana!), and by the stratum of American society whence it comes. Brooks’s is another articulate voice in a conversation among the highly articulate Ivy League men. He reports he has spent his working life in and around elite institutions. Joseph Fishkin is a product of Yale and Oxford. Markovits is a professor at America’s top law school, Yale; Sandel, another professor, is just a couple of hours’ drive up the road, at Harvard.
When Brooks speaks of the sins of the meritocracy he is speaking to and about the Atlantic’s readership. Published in the days following yet another election defeat, “How the Ivy League Broke America” speaks to the disappointment and disillusion of an elite reared in one reality but now facing quite another, as personified in Donald Trump. It also speaks well of that elite’s patrician sense of social responsibility. But that comes with limitations. To borrow from Gramsci, the new critics of meritocracy are organic to their class of origin, not to the “broad masses” purloined by Trump. They see some things, even if it hurts, but they are blind to others.
Brooks’s story about the origins of meritocracy in changes to Harvard’s admission arrangements in the 1930s is not just solipsistic; it is hokum. The beginnings of the meritocracy can be found in the middle of the nineteenth century in the confluence of an expanding division of economic labour, a consequent increase in competition for social places, and an expanded role for the education system and its positional good, the credential, in the allocation of those places.
This three-way dynamic revolved around a particular economic form and its relentless expansion and remaking, steadily gathering weight and speed for a century or so before taking off with the postwar economic and baby booms. It was in that postwar world that Harvard changed its admission requirements; those changes were product rather than producer, as was the apparently instantaneous alignment of those filings and filaments. It was at this point too that the new order was apparent enough to be named; Michael Young obliged with his The Rise of the Meritocracy (1958).
“Merit” was not at the centre of the emerging pyramid but a kind of scaffolding around the division and re-division of economic labour. The vision of two, three, several social pyramids, each granted parity with the others, is, sad to say, fanciful at best. Only the very privileged could imagine that the path to a better America leads through a new diversity in life destinations rather than through a radical shift away from galloping inequality of wealth and income.
About schooling, however, Brooks may not be so wide of the mark. He wants schooling to be more embracing of students and of human capacities, and points to American schools with a core curriculum more like the extra-curriculum of current arrangements, schools where students organise their work around activities and projects, where assessments record progress and development rather than a mark, and where assessments combine with a portfolio displaying capacities and achievements rather than rank order position.
That kind of schooling is, in my view, desirable. But is it feasible? Could schooling develop its own broader “opportunity structure” despite ties to meritocracy going back, in the Australian case, to the late nineteenth century? Schooling is both a servant of the wider meritocracy and a meritocracy in itself. It ranks its graduates for external consumption, a practice that schooling’s noisiest clients, the universities, have generally regarded as being what schools are there to do. And schooling ranks students for its own purposes too. Over the course of a century or more it has increasingly come to resemble a cognitive-speed racetrack.
It nonetheless remains the case that many who work in and around schools have never quite lost a hankering for something more, for the “formation of character” (the conservative version), for “educating the whole person” (the progressives’ idea) or for “emancipation” (the left’s hope). By whatever name, that kind of thing is not so far from what Brooks is after. Nor is it far from what in Australia are now called the “general capabilities” or “twenty-first-century skills” or, simply, “non-cognitive” capacities.
Clearly anxious to avoid gilding the lily, Brooks points to two substantial technical problems arising: assessments of “non-cognitive” capacities are inherently less “objective” than the scores generated by standardised tests; and they generate evidence that makes selection for university difficult or impossible. As Brooks points out, admissions officers just don’t have time to study five-page narratives of a students’ intellectual progress and capability development.
Well, no, and maybe no.
As it happens, among the many developments referred to by Brooks is the International Big Picture Learning Certificate, or IBPLC. And as it also happens the IBPLC is an Australian invention. Big Picture schools started out in the US but have been flourishing in Australia for more than a decade. The Big Picture curriculum is organised around each student’s intellectual growth and personal development; students are producers, not consumers. The Australian branch of Big Picture worked with its collaborator, Melbourne Metrics at the University of Melbourne and with MM’s forty-odd partner schools, representative of the system as a whole, to figure out how to assess and certificate that kind of schooling. Hence the IBPLC. (“International” because it is now used in the United States as well as in Australia.) Before elaborating, a disclaimer: Melbourne Metrics is led by my partner Sandra Milligan.
The construction of the IBPLC included developing and testing the “learning progressions” on which both learning and assessments are based; trialling and refining techniques of assessment against those progressions; working out methods of monitoring and reviewing assessments; finding ways to represent each student’s intellectual progress and personal development in profile form and then representing profiles in certificate form; and, finally, devising reliable and efficient ways to warrant certificates.
The first thing to say is that Melbourne Metrics insists that the IBPLC’s underlying assessments are at least as robust, technically speaking, as assessments generated by standardised tests (as well as being a lot more useful). The second: Brooks is not wrong in pointing to admissions officers and five-page narratives, but Big Picture has nonetheless succeeded in negotiating entry for many of its graduates into a wide range of university courses, and it may be that more-or-less one-off negotiations will soon be redundant: Melbourne Metrics has convened a group comprising universities, university admissions centres and other agencies committed to working out whether and how student profiles can be routinely “matched” with the profiles of courses, apprenticeships, and jobs.
Now that the technical problems of assessing and certificating a very different kind of kind of learning and growth have been overcome and associated problems in selection are being addressed, political and institutional obstacles to a fundamental shift have come to the fore. With the possible exception of the South Australian government schools, Australian school systems are moving away from rather than towards that very different form of schooling.
Should we conclude that Australian schooling is finding it difficult to get the necessary degree of independence from the meritocratic social order it serves? Or should we conclude that schooling’s ancien regime — notwithstanding its deep anxieties about “wellbeing,” “engagement,” “school refusal,” “classroom disruption,” “bullying,” “harassment” and “mental health” — has set its face against a kind of schooling that works for the great majority of children and young people, preferring instead to double down on testable cognitive performance? •
