Meritocratic education ruins children
Meritocracy II: The credentialism & technocratic rat race
In Meritocracy is not a good thing, I began a critical examination of the premises inherent in our modern system of ‘meritocracy’.
Meritocracy is a concept which initially appears unassailable; should not the person who merits the reward receive it? And yet, as my friend
recently pointed out in conversation with , this naive definition is tautological and therefore devoid of substantive content.By definition, merit implies that someone merits something. Merit means “someone who is worthy and deserving of reward”. This definition alone - people should get what they deserve - cannot tell us anything new or useful about how society should be arranged.
The substantive questions of what qualifies as worthy and what rewards are appropriate remain. These are timeless political questions. Every political philosophy in history has had to contend with them.
This notion that people merit what they merit is not a new idea, and yet meritocracy is a new idea, only coming into parlance in the 1950s. If the term actually has substance, we must therefore assume that meritocracy is smuggling new, hidden premises into the discussion.
In the first piece in this series we began an attempt to make these implicit premises explicit. What we discovered is that the new concept of meritocracy is actually an anti-definition. It is reductive and exclusionary. It represents an attempt to expel a whole range of human richness from traditional understandings of ‘merit’.
Meritocracy is the notion that it is illegitimate to reward a person based on criteria other than a specific and artificial definition of merit, typically characterized by formal examinations and structured evaluations of performance. Meritocracy adopts tests, reviews, qualifications, credentials, and the quantification of performance and ability. The meritocrat is the Spreadsheet Man.
Under meritocracy, it is illegitimate to elevate an individual based on broader criteria, such as whether they are a friend, relative, local, particular sex, member of a known family, member of your faith, member of your class, or a representative of a range of ‘protected characteristics’.
In other words, meritocracy is the antithesis of the concept of birthright. It is an attack on the integrity of sovereignty, undermining the ability of the steward of an asset to entirely determine to whom that asset is apportioned.
To doubt the moral monopoly of meritocracy is thus not to insist that merit should be restricted in the opposite direction (ie. characterized entirely by birth) but to broaden one’s conception of merit to contain both the notion of qualifications and the legitimacy of other factors, as may be relevant in different circumstances.
This is to say, one can dispose of ‘meritocracy’ - a totalizing technocratic philosophy about how we should be ruled - without disposing of the skill criterion when choosing someone to do a job. People have always been hired, and should always be hired, based on some confidence that they can successfully perform the task at hand.
Meritocracy is the improper elevation of a good to a station beyond its proper place; a fetishization of the good of qualification. It is a blindness to the richness of human existence, and the reduction of life to a system. In Aristotelian terms, it represents a deviation from the golden mean to an extreme of excess.
But if you doubt my argument, indulge me for a few more minutes. If it is the case that meritocracy is a warped and destructive ideology, we would expect to see pathological effects on the most important structures of our societies. To examine whether or not this is happening, let us turn to the focus of today’s essay: the education of our young.
Education has become all-consuming. Aristocrats used to effortlessly pass their holdings on to their children. Now we are in the absurd situation in which a new upper class - every bit as entrenched as the old one and constituted of many of the same families - has to frantically engage in make-work from birth to maintain what they have, destroying what would have been wonderful childhoods in the process.
The ‘Ivy League’ of pre-schools - recognized by many elite parents as a necessary first step to get their children on the path to meritocratic success at top colleges - have admission rates of under 5%.
…the mythic path from cradle to Columbia is well-established: sign up for a baby group while pregnant, sneak in the backdoor of your preferred school via a Parent-Toddler program, submit applications and sign promises in blood, and finally achieve successful matriculation at a Baby Ivy leading to Harvard… “getting into the right preschool can definitely help get into the right private elementary school, and so on. Those feeder preschools are highly coveted, so there's a frenzy around how to get in."
The meritocratic evaluation of children starts when they are toddlers. But this, of course, is a good thing - because meritocracy is synonymous with justice, remember?
The key assertion that lies at the heart of meritocracy is that ‘the person who deserves the reward is the person with the greatest aptitude who invests the greatest effort’. We have reconfigured our education system in an attempt to achieve precise national rankings of children according to this rubric. This ranking determines which children get into which colleges. This involves endless tests, grades, and evaluations of ‘extra-curricular performance’ - a grueling slog.
Our total commitment to this system is a failure to respect the Pareto Principle (also known as the ‘80/20 Rule’). In fact, we could strip out a huge amount of the grueling examination process and still end up with an excellent education system.
It used to be that a small number of simple variables served as a ‘good enough’ indicator of college eligibility. This included which school a child went to, whether their parents were alumni, whether they had a personal connection or recommendation, and their grades.
Coupled with a lack of societal expectation that college was a pre-requisite for many normal jobs, this created an effective but relaxed educational environment. The University of Chicago admitted 71% of applicants as recently as 1995, for example.
Elite education used to be anything but intense. For much of the twentieth century, through the late 1950s, elite universities overwhelmingly awarded places based on breeding rather than merit. The Ivy League did not admit nor even pursue the “best and the brightest” so much as sustain and burnish the social patina of America’s leading families. Even graduate and professional schools selected their students by astonishingly casual means. A midcentury graduate of Yale Law School, for example, recently told an oral historian that he came to Yale after Jack Tate, then dean of admissions, told him at a college fair - straight away, and on the basis of a single conversation - “You’ll get in if you apply.”
— Daniel Markovits, The Meritocracy Trap: How America's Foundational Myth Feeds Inequality, Dismantles the Middle Class, and Devours the Elite
Such a system would be preferable because de-indexing the importance of resume-building and exam results for children would give them their childhoods back - but also, it would actually make society healthier in a myriad of ways for all of us.
For one: which university someone went to would be less important for recruiters if it was known that these were not rigorously meritocratic institutions. Likewise, it would be a feature, not a bug, if a good percent of the most intelligent and capable people in society did not just attend a small number of university programs, but remained dispersed across various localities, classes, and institutions. This would be good for both national and local resilience.
Instead, we have achieved the opposite of resilience.
The millennial generation - the first to have lived entirely inside the mature meritocracy - appreciates these burdens most keenly. Elite millennials can be precious and fragile, but not in the manner of the special snowflakes that derisive polemics describe. They do not melt or wilt at every challenge to their privilege, so much as shatter under the intense competitive pressures to achieve that dominate their lives. They are neither dissolute nor decadent, but rather tense and exhausted.
— Markovits
Markovits provides a case study of the elite Palo Alto High, which sends 60% of its young to elite colleges, but also has regular suicide clusters and ten-year suicide rates four to five times the national average.
More broadly, students at ‘high achieving’ high schools are bad and getting worse when it comes to rates of drug and alcohol abuse, as well as depression, anxiety, and other serious mental health issues.
[40 years ago] studies… showed that kids who attended schools in low-income communities were at higher risk for substance abuse, anxiety, and depression, compared with kids who attended schools in more affluent communities. Suniya Luthar, then at Columbia University, was among the first to document a change. Beginning in the late 1990s, she found that the previous association had flipped. In a seminal study published in 1999, Luthar and her Yale colleague Karen D’Avanzo documented that affluent kids were now at higher risk for substance abuse, and scored higher on measures of anxiety and depression, compared with low-income kids…
In 2018, Luthar and her colleague Nina Kumar published new research showing that the risk associated with affluence derives not from household income per se, but from the school. They found that schools that prioritize getting into top universities, schools that place a premium on superior academic and extracurricular performance - so-called “high-achieving schools” - are now associated with increased risk of anxiety, depression, and substance abuse… Affluent kids who attend schools that are not considered high-achieving are not at risk. The toxicity apparently comes from the school, not the income bracket.
The people who thrive in such a system are those who are able to conform to the ‘study drone’ lifestyle. Anyone who has been to a top university now is familiar with the class of students (if we’re being honest - primarily those from Asian backgrounds) who have doubtless achieved perfect grades in order to attend but greatly detract from any genuine atmosphere of intellectual curiosity and wonder. These students are insular, cliquish, and silent in seminars. Too many of them seem to be there to game, rather than relish, the system. They’re pretty miserable to study alongside.
Shunning legacy students, these elite colleges have lost all sense of place, identity, and history. Rather than continuing family traditions of attending particular schools and remaining in particular regions - students now fly anywhere to get the most prestigious education available to them in their narrow specialty, and then on to the job somewhere else which takes advantage of it.
The truth is that it’s necessary to have upper-class students grandfathered in to elite colleges, even if they’re sometimes a little dim. They are able to continue tradition, fashion, culture - and would have the time and resources to allow these aspects to flourish if they weren’t being crushed by the meritocratic machine.
These people also have family names to protect and a certain sense of honour. They bring connections to elite networks, wealth, and a healthier relationship to the study and place. They speak the language and are at ease with one another. When they’re there it’s a more beautiful and relaxed place. College isn’t really romantic without them.
A grinding meritocratic study culture destroys life’s beauty, and much of its value. As
noted in a recent piece hosted by :Further, being socially competent, and not solely skilled in academics, is predictive of lifetime earnings, as one study demonstrated that participating in college fraternities (and presumably similar social orgs) enhances lifetime earnings despite lowering grade point averages…
Students with athletic backgrounds have higher lifetime achievements and are more likely to be the most successful, generous, and loyal alumni.
Instead we have a godless state of affairs which Daniel Markovits summarizes well:
Indeed, mature meritocracy’s demands to exploit the self as an instrument of caste literally overwhelm elite life. Elite parents—reluctantly but self-consciously—allow their children’s educations to be dominated not by experiments and play, but by accumulating the human capital needed for getting admitted to an elite college and, eventually, securing an elite job…
By these and myriad other means, meritocracy transforms childhood itself from a site of consumption into a site of production. Its product is the human capital of the future adult superordinate worker.
I hope you are finding this series on meritocracy insightful. Later this week, we will continue examining the effects of the ideology: a collapse in fertility, the destruction of tradition, the erosion of nationhood, countless lives consumed by toil, and the corruption of elites.
This series will ultimately inform my forthcoming book, Leaving a Legacy, which charts a course for the patriarch who wishes to guide his own family out of this destructive practice and into greatness. Stay tuned.
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Sic transit imperium,
Johann
I lived in China for many years -meritocracy central- and have seen some kids broken by the system, others succeed in it, and many exploited by it, come what may. And -a related matter- what do you think of the "Tiger Mom"?
Yes, this is exactly what you should judge somebody on their merit and yes, they should get an award if they put hard work into something get credentials for it and earned a award. What would you rather be judged by the color of your skin or your gender? No, you wanna be judged by the work you put into something your integrity what you stand for what you believe in and what your passion is. Not superficial things.