In the last three decades of the twentieth century, there was an intense debate over meritocracy. This was provoked first by Richard Herrnstein in September of 1971 with his article on "I.Q." in the Atlantic Monthly and in 1973 with his book I.Q. in the Meritocracy. The debate was renewed in 1994, with the publication of Herrnstein and Charles Murray's book The Bell Curve. Herrnstein and Murray warned that with progress towards the egalitarian ideal of equal opportunity--so that every child would have an equal chance for success in life--this would be progress toward a hereditary meritocracy of a cognitive elite. Once the environmental influences such as education become similar for everyone, they matter less than inherited characteristics--particularly, inherited intelligence. I.Q. is largely inherited, and it is a powerful predictor of success in cognitively challenging occupations in a post-industrial society that require high I.Q. So when there is a lot of social mobility with movement up and down the social hierarchy, the smartest people will tend to move up into the upper classes, and the dullest people will move down into the lower classes; and society will be ruled by a cognitive elite.
The danger is that this will create a rigid separation between the classes. Moreover, the separation here really is based on class and not race, because even American whites are separating into a white cognitive elite and a white underclass of people without college degrees. To avoid having these classes set apart from and against one another, Herrnstein and Murray argued, we must organize a society in which the classes can live together harmoniously, in which everyone can find values places for themselves, and thus pursue their happiness, because "most people by far have enough intelligence for getting on with the business of life" (Bell Curve, 536). (I have written previously about Murray's argument.)
Over the past fifteen years, this debate over meritocracy has been renewed. Meritocracy has been attacked both from the Left (people such John Rawls and Michael Sandel) and the Right (people such as Charles Murray and Patrick Deneen). Populist political leaders like Donald Trump have led a revolt against the college-educated meritocratic elites. Trump declared: "I love the poorly educated -- I am your voice." (Oddly, though, Trump also brags about his high I.Q.) Recently, Adrian Wooldridge has published the first comprehensive history of meritocracy (from Plato to the present) and a defense of it against the critics--The Aristocracy of Talent: How Meritocracy Made the Modern World (New York: Skyhorse Publishing, 2021).
MERITOCRACY IN GREAT BRITAIN, 1870-2034
I find it remarkable that every feature of this ongoing intellectual and political debate was predicted 65 years ago by Michael Young when he invented the word meritocracy in 1958 in his book The Rise of the Meritocracy (reprinted by Transaction Publishers in 1994 and by Routledge in 2017). Young was a sociologist who was a prominent thinker and activist in the British Labour Party. His idea in his book was that in a meritocratic society, people get ahead in life based on their individual merit, and merit is defined by intelligence and exertion in developing one's talents. Young reduced it to a formula: I.Q. + effort = merit.
Young's book was an odd combination of history and science fiction. He acted as the narrator pretending to write as a sociologist in the year 2034 in Great Britain. Young as narrator was a proponent of meritocracy who began with the history of meritocracy in England from the 1870s to the late 1950s. He then narrated the fictional history of that meritocracy from the 1960s to 2033 and 2034 when the Populist Movement led a violent revolt of the lower classes against the meritocracy, and Young himself was killed by the populist rebels in May of 2034.
The Early History of the Meritocracy. Young began his story with two great reform movements in the 1870s in Britain. First, there was a new system for the universal primary education of children between the ages of 5 and 12 in England and Wales. Second, there was a growing movement toward civil service reform, so that entry and advancement in the civil service would be based on competitive standards of merit rather than patronage. The most prominent argument for these reforms was that they were necessary if Great Britain was to compete economically and militarily with other nations that were educating their people and recruiting the most talented for administrative and military service.
The First World War stimulated the better use of human talent. The U.S. Army put millions of recruits through intelligence tests, so that those of superior intelligence could be assigned to the jobs requiring intellectual talent. In the Second World War, the British Army made similar use of psychological testing for assigning the most talented people to the most cognitively challenging jobs. The world was moving to a meritocracy of intelligence.
Throughout most of human history, people were put into high positions of status and power based on their inherited family connections (dynasticism and nepotism), patronage, or bribery. Monarchs were chosen by being born into a ruling dynastic family. Nobles were identified by their birth in high-ranking families, or by being granted titles of nobility by monarchs. High positions could also be gained by noble or monarchic patronage or purchased by the wealthy. Therefore, social hierarchy was based on an aristocracy of birth or a plutocracy of wealth. All of this would have to be overturned to achieve a true meritocracy of talent.
The meritocratic reforms that began in the 1870s were not sufficient to achieve this, however. But Young saw a new wave of reforms, particularly in education, that began in Britain with the Education Act of 1944. Although this law was supported by Conservatives, it was the product of British Fabian socialist thinking in the Labour Party, which condemned the evils of inherited aristocratic privileges in education, property, and jobs, and which argued for equality understood as equality of opportunity for those in the lower classes who were talented to rise to positions of high status and power. The first step was for the most intelligent children in the lower classes to have access, beyond the primary schools, to the best education in secondary schools, and higher education in the best universities, particularly Oxford and Cambridge. The talented few with the best education should then have the opportunity to enter the highest ranks of political, economic, administrative, and social power.
Before 1944, most working-class children dropped out of school by the time they were 12 years old, because their families did not have the resources to send them to secondary schools. The Education Act of 1944 set up a Tripartite System of state-funded secondary education that had three types of schools--grammar schools that taught a highly academic curriculum for developing the kind of abstract thinking required for a university education, secondary technical schools to train children for careers as scientists, engineers, and technicians, and secondary modern schools to teach practical skills necessary for unskilled jobs and home management. The allocation of students between these three types of schools was determined by a test during the final year of primary school at age 11. This "11-plus" examination was a series of tests of mathematical ability, general reasoning, and essay-writing. It was understood to be essentially an I.Q. test. The original intention of this system was to foster social mobility by identifying the most intellectually talented children and giving them an education that would develop their talents. Talented children from lower class families would rise, and less talented children from upper class families would fall.
Although it was intended that all three types of schools would be equally esteemed, it did not work out that way. Few technical schools were opened because of a lack of money and qualified teachers. This created a two-level system in which the grammar schools were for the academically talented, and the secondary schools were for all the other children. The 11-plus examination was regarded as a test of success or failure: the successful students scored high enough to go to grammar schools, while the failing students who scored low went to secondary modern schools. About 25% of children went to a grammar school, and they were the ones most likely to win admission to the best universities such as Oxford and Cambridge. About 70% went to secondary modern schools, and they had little chance of going to a university. (Similar systems of state-run selective schools were adopted in other European countries, such as France, Germany, and Sweden.)
Young saw this system as supported by the "practical socialists" who identified equality with equality of opportunity leading to advancement for merit. He saw them as debating the "left-wing socialists" who interpreted equality as equality of outcome, so that all children, regardless of their differences in talent, should attend the same schools and receive the same education: they argued for eliminating the 11-plus exam and abolishing the grammar schools, and replacing them with "comprehensive schools" in which all students would be lumped together. Young rejected this as ignoring "the fact of genetic inequality" and a sacrificing of the few to the many (30, 36). Ultimately, in his story, the left-wing socialists lost this debate in the 1960s and 1970s; and the grammar schools were preserved.
Actually, here is one place where Young's predictions failed. The socialists in the Labour Party attacking the grammar schools succeeded: under the new Labour government of 1974, the 1976 Education Act established comprehensive schools for all children and forbade the selection of students by ability. This abolition of the grammar schools benefitted private schools, because rich parents could take their children out of the state system and send them to expensive private secondary schools that would prepare them for admission to Oxford and Cambridge.
But according to Young's history, modern education and social mobility in Great Britain throughout the end of the 20th century and into the 21st century was guided by I.Q. testing as a guide to the allocation of students in the schools and the assignment of the most talented graduates to the most cognitively challenging jobs. While the left-wing socialists criticized the intelligence tests as biased against lower-class children, the practical socialists insisted that they were less biased than all other means for selecting students for the best schools and the best jobs.
Every person was entitled at any age to apply every five years for a new intelligence test. If their score changed, they could have their National Intelligence Card destroyed, and a new card substituted (66).
Intelligence testing was extended from children to adults. And gradually, in all the most important occupations, promotion by the principle of seniority yielded to the principle of merit as measured by intelligence, so that exceptionally talented young people could advance beyond older people in their profession who were less talented. There was no longer any unfair discrimination based on age (75-84).
Because of this social mobility up and down based on intelligence, smart children who were the offspring of lower-class parents joined the upper class, while stupid children who were the offspring of upper-class parents joined the lower class.
Young saw this as the fulfillment of "the ideal of Plato" in The Republic, because everyone was assigned to a higher or lower class position based on their natural intellectual talent. The talented offspring of parents in the Silver or Bronze classes could be raised to the Gold class, and the less talented offspring of parents in the Gold class could be dropped down to the Silver or Bronze classes (52, 93).
And yet, like Plato, Young saw how difficult it was to do this when it denied the natural propensity of parents to a nepotistic bias in helping their children to gain and hold high positions even when the children did not deserve this. Even in a meritocracy where those in the upper class have earned their rank by their individual merit, upper-class parents will try to pass on their high status to their children. Young described this as a moral conflict between the principle of kinship and the principle of merit. Plato solved this problem by abolishing the family for those in his ruling guardian class. Young did not foresee that this would be attempted in his meritocratic society.
Now, to the extent that people with natural talent pass on their genetic advantages to their children, their children will have some of the natural talent that merits high status. But since children share only 50% of their genes with each parent, and because of the scrambling of genes from the two parents, children will differ from their parents, and some highly talented parents will have dull children, just as some dull parents will have highly talented children. That's why a true meritocracy can never be a rigidly inherited class system because it will require social mobility up and down in each generation.
The Decline of the Lower Classes. Looking back from the perspective of 2034, Young said that the twentieth century in England was the "golden age of equality," because "inequality of opportunity fostered the myth of human equality," and "myth we know it to be; not so our ancestors" (93-96). Before the achievement of meritocracy through true equality of opportunity at the end of the century, no class was uniform in its intelligence or talents. The lower classes had as many intelligent and talented members as the upper classes. People in the upper classes could not confidently declare that they all deserved to be in the superior class, because they could see many lower-class people who were equal or superior to them in intelligence and talents. People in the lower classes did not have to feel degraded by their low social status, because they could always say to themselves that if they had had a fair chance to compete, they could have shown that they were as good as anyone else and perhaps even better. A workman could say to himself: "Here I am, a workman. Why am I a workman? Am I fit for nothing else? Of course not. Had I had a proper chance I would have shown the world. A doctor? A brewer? A minister? I could have done anything. I never had the chance. And so I am a worker. But don't think that at bottom I am any worse than anyone else. I'm better" (96). Consequently, everyone could believe that in principle all human beings are naturally equal or created equal in the eyes of God.
But by the beginning of the twenty-first century, this was no longer the case. Through equality of opportunity, those with high cognitive ability in the lower classes had risen into the higher classes, and those with low cognitive ability in the higher classes had fallen into the lower classes. This opened a wider gulf between the classes than had ever existed previously. Now, those in the ruling class knew that they deserved to be in the superior class; and those in the lower classes knew that they deserved to be in a lower class.
For the first time in human history, people in an inferior class must recognize that they have inferior status not because they have been denied opportunity but because they are inferior. The danger is that those in the lower classes, who are the great majority of society, will be so deprived of self-respect that they will be thrown into a "helpless despair" that cripples them and makes them miserable (97-98, 114).
To avoid this demoralization of the lower classes, Young reported, the British meritocracy had found five ways to relieve the psychic depression of the lower classes. First, the secondary modern schools taught not only the elementary mental skills of reading, writing, and arithmetic necessary for using simple tools, but also a cult of esteeming physical prowess as superior to abstract mental achievement--the Mythos of Muscularity. This included an appreciation of competitive sports, handicrafts, craftmanship, and manual work. Even without the high cognitive abilities of the upper classes, those in the lower classes could respect themselves for their artful physical achievements.
Secondly, there was a system of adult education centers where low-I.Q. people in the lower classes could continue their education as adults with the hope of raising their I.Q. scores, which would allow them to join the upper classes. This rarely occurred but it held out hope for advancement for those who had been consigned to the lower classes in their childhood.
Thirdly, even when people in the lower classes had abandoned hope for themselves, parents could be consoled by the thought that their children or grandchildren could show the high I.Q. that would allow them to rise into the upper classes.
Fourthly, the very stupidity that causes people to be assigned to the lower classes makes most of them so humble that they have no ambition to rise and thus do not feel discontented with their lowly status.
Finally, those in the lower classes could be assigned jobs requiring manual labor or personal service and as domestic servants that did not require high cognitive ability, and so they were free from the frustration of being in jobs that were beyond their capacities.
Some socialists complained about the "indignity" of treating the lower classes in this way, because it denied the equal moral dignity of all human beings. Young responded by saying that these socialists had not understood the moral implications of what the meritocracy had achieved. "What is the purpose of abolishing inequalities in nurture," he observed, "except to reveal and make more pronounced the inescapable inequalities of Nature?" (105) "Socialists did not see that . . . equality of opportunity meant equality of opportunity to be unequal" (119).
The socialists did not see that the victory of the working class in opening the gates of opportunity to their most talented children was a defeat for their class and for the Labour Party that had led them (130). Previously, the leaders of the Labour Party had been some of the most talented children of working-class parents who had had no opportunity to rise into the upper classes. But once the talented working-class children had joined the upper classes, there was no longer a pool of talented working-class children from which leaders could be recruited. By 1960, hardly any of the Labour Party's leaders had ever been manual workers.
The new upper-class leaders of the Labour Party recognized the complaint of the poor that the rich had more money than they really needed, and that more money should be redistributed to the poor. Eventually, there was a compromise truce that satisfied the poor while allowing the distribution of rewards to become far more unequal. The Equalization of Income Act of 2005 stipulated that every employee would receive an equal salary, but the differences between grades of jobs would be recognized by having the employer pay for varying expenses that could be justified by efficiency. So, for example, employers might pay for secretaries, domestic servants, and luxurious holiday travel for elite professional employees, with the justification that such employees need the special conditions that sustain their intellectual productivity. The poor are satisfied by the complete equality of all incomes, and the elite are satisfied by the inequality of benefits from employers.
The populist revolt against meritocracy. Despite the apparent success of the meritocracy in winning acceptance by all classes, Young reported that there was enough discontent to support a left-wing Populist Movement in challenging the meritocracy as unjust. The most prominent leaders of the Populists were women, particularly upper-class women who graduated from the women's colleges at Cambridge (Newnham and Somerville) who refused to take the professional jobs for which they had been educated, and instead they chose working-class jobs.
The primary idea of the Populists was the need for a "classless society" with "plural values," so that manual work would be as valuable as mental, and the arts and manual skills should be as important as science and technology. This would promote a new meaning for human equality of opportunity that would allow human diversity to express itself, and every man would be respected for whatever was good in his life. "Every man is a genius at something, even every woman, they say: it is the function of society to discover and honour it, whether it is genius at making pots, growing daisies, ringing bells, caring for babies, or even (to show their tolerance) genius at inventing radio telescopes" (158).
In 2009, a local Populist group issued the "Chelsea Manifesto" that declared:
"The classless society would be one which both possessed and acted upon plural values. Were we to evaluate people, not only according to their intelligence and their education, their occupation, and their power, but according to their kindliness and their courage, their imagination and sensitivity, their sympathy and generosity, there could be no classes. Who would be able to say that the scientist was superior to the porter with admirable qualities as a father, the civil servant with unusual skill at gaining prizes superior to the lorry-driver with unusual skill at growing roses? The classless society would also be the tolerant society, in which individual differences were actively encouraged as well as passively tolerated, in which full meaning was at last given to the dignity of man. Every human being would then have equal opportunity, not to rise up in the world in the light of any mathematical measure, but to develop his own special capacities for leading a rich life" (159).
What finally provoked the Populists into violent protests in 2033 and 2034 was the argument of the right wing of the Conservative Party for a new "hereditary principle." By 1990, all adults with I.Q.s of more than 125 belonged to the meritocracy, and they were marrying other people with high I.Q.s; and consequently, through assortative mating, they were passing on their inherited intelligence to their children. Thus, the elite was becoming hereditary by joining the principles of heredity and merit. The right-wing conservatives argued that there should be public approval for this new hereditary meritocracy.
This tendency to hereditary meritocracy was strengthened by having high I.Q. couples adopt high I.Q. orphans. It became easier to do this as scientists learned how to identify the I.Q. in young children and even newborns. Some scientists could even predict the I.Q. of a foetus in the womb based on a study of the I.Q.s of the foetus's ancestors. Moreover, genetic engineering was making it easier to control the mutations in the unborn to raise the level of I.Q.
Against this, Young wrote, the Populists made some concrete demands: "the banning of adoptions; the preservation of primary schools and adult education centres; more allowance for age and experience in industrial promotion; giving the technicians a share in increasing productivity; and, most revolutionary and perhaps most meaningful, even a trifle nostalgic, to a historian, the raising of the school-leaving age to eighteen, and the creation of 'common secondary schools for all'" (177-78).
Young thought this last "most revolutionary" demand was a hundred years too late. "If the hopes of some earlier dissidents had been realized and the brilliant children from the lower classes remained there, to teach, to inspire, and to organize the masses, then I should have had a different story to tell" (180). But since the lower classes no longer have any talented leaders of their own, and since the leaders of the Populist Movement were only an odd collection of a few people from the upper classes, Young predicted that the Populist protest at Peterloo in May of 2034 could not be a serious threat to the meritocracy.
But as the book ends here, there is a footnote: "Since the author of this essay was himself killed at Peterloo, the publishers regret they were not able to submit to him the proofs of his manuscript, for the corrections he might have wished to make before publication. The text, even this last section, has been left exactly as he wrote it. The failings of sociology are as illuminating as its successes."
Remarkably, then, it seems that Young's prediction of a populist revolt against meritocracy has been fulfilled, although it came at least 20 years earlier than he predicted.
TOO KINDS OF MERITOCRACY
In the "Introduction to the Transaction Edition" (1994), Young complained that most of the people who had referred to his book without ever reading it--"the most influential books are always those that are not read"--mistakenly assumed that he was arguing for the meritocracy that he described, because they did not see that the book is satirical in that it makes fun of the Michael Young who narrates the book. Actually, he explained, the book was "intended to present two sides of the case--the case against as well as the case for meritocracy"; and the decision for one side or the other was left to the reader (xv). In fact, as I have already indicated, all of the arguments in the debate over meritocracy in the past 50 years can be found in Young's book.
In 2001, a year before his death, Young wrote an article for The Guardian entitled "Down with Meritocracy," in which he criticized Tony Blair for praising meritocracy and attributing this to Young's book. "The book was a satire meant to be a warning (which needless to say has not been heeded)," he observed; and he went on to write a good brief summary of the argument:
"It is good sense to appoint individual people to jobs on their merit. It is the opposite when those who are judged to have merit of a particular kind harden into a new social class without room in it for others."
"Ability of a conventional kind, which used to be distributed between the classes more or less at random, has become much more highly concentrated by the engine of education."
"A social revolution has been accomplished by harnessing schools and universities to the task of sieving people according to education's narrow band of values."
"With an amazing battery of certificates and degrees at its disposal, education has put its seal of approval on a minority, and its seal of disapproval on the many who fail to shine from the time they are relegated to the bottom streams at the age of seven or before."
"The new class has the means at hand, and largely under its control, by which it reproduces itself."
"The more controversial prediction and the warning followed from the historical analysis. I expected that the poor and the disadvantaged would be done down, and in fact they have been. If branded at school, they are more vulnerable for later unemployment."
"They can easily become demoralised by being looked down on so woundingly by people who have done well for themselves."
"It is hard indeed in a society that makes so much of merit to be judged as having none. No underclass has ever been left as morally naked as that."
What I see here and in his book is that Young is criticizing one kind of meritocracy and at least implicitly recommending another kind of meritocracy. He is attacking the closed and monistic meritocracy that he saw emerging in the modern world, particularly in Great Britain and the United States. But instead of arguing for the abolition of meritocracy, he is suggesting that what we need is an open and pluralistic meritocracy.
A meritocracy is open when there is no restriction on social mobility up and down the hierarchy, so that the most talented children of lower-class parents are free to rise into the upper ranks of status, wealth, and power, and the less talented children of upper-class parents are allowed to fall into the lower ranks. A meritocracy is closed when upper-class parents, who may have originally earned their high rank, can secure that high rank for their children even when they are less talented, by giving their children privileges that are denied to the talented children in the lower ranks.
So, for example, parents who as children were admitted to Harvard University based on their cognitive ability and academic achievements might then help their children be admitted to Harvard as "legacy" applicants who are the children of Harvard alumni or as applicants on the "dean's list" because the parents are a big donors to the university. A closed meritocracy allows this. An open meritocracy forbids it.
A meritocracy is monistic when merit is measured by only one standard of value. A meritocracy is pluralistic when merit is measured by many standards of value.
So, for example, we have a monistic meritocracy when the only standard of merit is abstract cognitive ability of the sort that can be measured by an I.Q. test. We would have a pluralistic meritocracy if we saw merit in many different moral and intellectual virtues and talents.
Even if the critics of meritocracy have rightly identified some defects in the monistic and closed meritocracy as we know it today, they have not made the case for abolishing meritocracy, because they have not shown that any alternative social order would be better than meritocracy. And they have not considered how a defective meritocracy could be corrected by a more open meritocracy and a wiser pluralistic meritocracy, as proposed by Adrian Wooldridge.
MORE MERITOCRACY
For hundreds of years, modern societies have shown a conflict between two opposing principles--the principle of selection by family inheritance and the principle of individual merit. Throughout most of human history, one's position in society was largely determined by one's parents, because children tended to inherit the status of their parents. Upper-class parents produced upper-class children, while lower-class parents produced lower-class children. The argument for meritocracy is that this is unfair, and that children should be free to achieve whatever position in society they can earn by their individual merit, regardless of the status of their parents.
The most common criticism of meritocracy is that this argument for meritocracy is hypocritical, because in a meritocracy, upper-class parents will always find ways to give special advantages to their children. After all, nepotism is a natural human tendency. If one were truly serious about meritocracy and equality of opportunity, one would have to abolish the family and rear children communally so that parents would not be allowed to favor their children over others. Plato in The Republic understood that.
An obvious example of nepotistic bias in a seemingly meritocratic society is provided by America's elite universities. Admission to those schools is supposed to be based purely on individual merit, so that only those children with the highest cognitive ability are admitted. But as we have seen in the recent Supreme Court decision on affirmative action, the admission process for the elite universities is biased in favor of the children of very wealthy families. Recently, a study of admissions at the 12 most elite universities--the eight Ivy League schools, as well as Stanford, the University of Chicago, MIT, and Duke--shows that these schools actually promote a kind of affirmative action for rich kids. The children of the richest 1 percent, with parents earning more than $611,000 a year, are 34 percent more likely to be admitted than the average applicant with the same test scores. And those from the top 0.1 percent are more than twice as likely to be admitted.
The primary reason for this is that all of these schools--except for MIT--give a preference for "legacies"--the children of alumni--and those alumni tend to be wealthy. Among applicants with the same test scores, the children of alumni from families in the top 0.1 percent of wealth are seven times more likely to be admitted. The reason schools do this is that wealthy alumni are more likely to make big donations to the schools if they think their children will be preferentially admitted.
A few weeks ago, three Boston-area groups filed a request that the U.S. Department of Education review this practice of legacy admissions at Harvard. The leader of one of the groups complained: "Why are we rewarding children for privileges and advantages accrued by prior generations. Your family's last name and the size of your bank account are not a measure of merit and should have no bearing on the college admissions process."
Defenders of meritocracy like Wooldridge would say that this is an example not of the failure of meritocracy but of the need for more meritocracy. What Wooldridge calls "more meritocracy" is what I would describe as moving to a more open meritocracy (The Aristocracy of Talent, 376-87). The first step to making the elite universities an open meritocracy would be to eliminate all of the admission standards that favor rich white students--legacy admissions and favorable treatment for the children of faculty, for athletes, and for those on the dean's "special interest" list (the children of big donors).
The next step would be to identify talented children in the population at large who have not had the advantages conferred by being reared in upper-class families. We need to revive the emphasis on IQ testing and tests like the SAT that are close to IQ tests. There is no better way to test for raw cognitive ability.
It is often said that the children of the affluent can have their scores on these tests raised by having their parents pay for coaching in test-taking. But studies have shown that the improvement in scores from coaching is small. And most of the improvement can be gained by lower-class children if they practice taking the test, which can be done without much expense.
We also need to revive those highly selective elite high schools that once existed in many of America's big cities for educating the most talented but underprivileged children: for example, the Boston Latin School, San Francisco's Lowell High School, and many schools in New York City (such as Stuyvesant, Brooklyn Tech, and Bronx Science). The graduates of these schools were better prepared to win admission to the most elite universities. But most of these schools have had their admission standards lowered so that they are no longer selective, and so they no longer serve to cultivate the most talented students.
In England, the state-funded grammar schools for students who scored highest on the 11-plus examinations prepared their students for entrance into Oxford and Cambridge. In 1959, the graduates of expensive private schools (like Eton, Winchester, and Harrow) filled 55 percent of the places in Oxbridge. In 1967, this had declined to 38 percent because of the increase in grammar school graduates winning admission. But with the abolition of the grammar-school system, graduates of the expensive private schools are today seven times more likely to win admission to Oxford and Cambridge.
But even if we were to open up the educational meritocracy of the elite universities to the most talented children from the lower classes, we would still face another problem--the narrowing down of merit by defining it as cognitive ability as measured by IQ tests, so that meritocracy means nothing more than the rule of the cognitive elite. Why shouldn't we recognize that there are many standards of merit that should be esteemed besides cognitive ability?
For that, we need a wiser meritocracy.
A WISER MERITOCRACY
What Wooldridge calls "a wiser meritocracy" is what I would describe as moving to a more pluralistic meritocracy (The Aristocracy of Talent, 387-96). The cognitive ability for abstract and analytical reasoning is certainly a human good. But all of the moral and intellectual virtues are also human goods. And those who display those virtues should be esteemed. A pluralistic meritocracy would respect and reward the merit in all of those virtues. Michael Young pointed to this when he described the vision of a social order that saw the human dignity in "plural values," so that every human being might have the equal opportunity to develop his or her special capacities for leading a good life.
A good argument for a more pluralistic meritocracy has been made recently by David Goodhart in his book Head, Hand, Heart: Why Intelligence is Over-Rewarded, Manual Workers Matter, and Caregivers Deserve More Respect (Free Press, 2020). To use his vivid terminology, in recent years, we have given too much prestige and reward to Head (cognitive work) and not enough to Hand (manual work) and Heart (care work). People who excel in manual work or caregiving should derive as much self-esteem and public honor from that as people who excel in knowledge work.
There should be a meritocracy in each of these three spheres of work, which would reflect the diversity of human excellences. This is what Herrnstein and Murray had in mind when they said there should be a "place for everyone": everyone should be able to find an honored place for themselves by developing whatever moral or intellectual talents they might have.
There is a lot we could do to promote this. For example, we could revive the system of vocational schools and industrial colleges for the working class that once existed in America and Great Britain. To some extent, this still exists. Much of what the community colleges in America do is vocational training. We could also revive the "shop classes" in high school that were once common.
We could also promote the growing cultural movement among young people who have decided that they do not need or want a college degree to be successful, and that even many of those with high cognitive ability would be happier taking jobs in the manual trades and caregiving professions that require little or no college education. In many cases, the salaries for such jobs are higher than for the jobs taken by college graduates.
Even within the academic world of cognitive work in the colleges and universities, we should see not just one linear meritocracy with Harvard, Yale, and Princeton at the top, but multiple meritocracies differentiated into different kinds of intellectual endeavor.
I think about my life. My parents grew up in a lower-class farming community in Southern Illinois. They dropped out of high school after my father knocked up my mother, and they were forced to get married. No one in my extended family had ever attended college. But I was a bookish kid who wanted to go to college.
My SAT scores were high enough to win admission to the University of Dallas. I wanted to go to UD because of their reputation for their liberal education and "Great Books" style of teaching. My GRE scores were high enough to get admitted to the University of Chicago. Chicago attracted me because of their strength in political philosophy in the Political Science Department, and because I hoped to teach in Chicago's Basic Program in the Liberal Arts for Adults, which had been established by Mortimer Adler as a Great Books program. Although the University of Chicago is considered one of the 12 elite universities in the U.S., it is usually ranked below places like Harvard and Yale. But I preferred Chicago because it had a stronger reputation as standing for liberal education rather than professional training.
After teaching in the Basic Program for four years, I taught at Rosary College (now Dominican University), Idaho State University, and Northern Illinois University. At NIU, I taught predominantly political philosophy and biopolitical theory (part of the "Politics and the Life Sciences" program at NIU). I taught both undergraduates and graduate students. Almost all of my courses were taught as small seminar discussions organized around reading classic texts. Most of my graduate students secured tenure-track teaching positions in higher education.
I tell this story because it illustrates the diverse meritocracy in American higher education. I often think that if I and my students had been born anywhere else in the world at any prior time in human history, almost all of us would have become illiterate peasants. But because of the American educational meritocracy that emerged after World War Two, we were given the opportunity to exercise our cognitive abilities in pondering some of the deepest philosophic and scientific questions about human life and the nature of the universe.
We were not in the academic hierarchy with Harvard and Yale at the top. But we were in a separate academic hierarchy that includes hundreds of liberal arts colleges and universities. Most of the people in higher education are in those schools. The students enrolled in the 12 elite private universities comprise less than 1 percent of the students in higher education.
Suzanne Keller once compared American higher education to a deck of cards with different suites and each suite having an ace. Harvard and Yale belong to one suite. But there are other suites that include state universities, Catholic colleges for Catholics, Evangelical colleges for Evangelicals, Great Books Colleges (like St. Johns College) for great bookies, and so on. And all of them are open to those applicants who can show they have the intellectual talent for academic work.
That's what an open and pluralistic meritocracy in higher education looks like, and there is a place for everyone to satisfy their natural desire for intellectual understanding.
I will be forever grateful that I was one of those people lucky enough to enjoy a life in such a meritocracy of the mind.
