June 29, 2001

2:03 PM

Michael Young's critique of the meritocracy is brilliant, subversive and quite possibly based on faulty assumptions. "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."
posted by lbergstr (11 comments total)

Specifically, consider the line: "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."

According to him, then, the educational process determines your position in society, and today's upper classes, beneficiaries of the meritocracy, have an advantage in the educational system. But where does this advantage come from? I'll take it as a given that the children of the rich have a great advantage in education, so there's factor one. But it would bother me if Young thought that
"ability of a certain kind" had such a strong genetic component that we're destined to end up with rigid social classes with little mobility.
posted by lbergstr at 2:10 PM on June 29, 2001

lbergstr: I think you misread the article: his claim is rather the opposite. Ability still arises more or less randomly, but, unlike the past, where the able of the lower classes were compelled to remain in the lower classes and rose only as leaders of their class, education now plucks all the highly able quickly from their class of birth and places them into the upper classes immediately, thus "depriving their class of its natural leaders."

He illustrates by reference to the great Labour Party leaders of mid-century who had been manual laborers of all sorts ... but who, in today's educational system, would have found their way to Oxford or Cambridge and ended up lawyers and bankers.
posted by MattD at 2:29 PM on June 29, 2001

Thanks, MattD. That makes a lot more sense. Anybody else like the article?
posted by lbergstr at 2:33 PM on June 29, 2001

I had no idea that the term was so recent a coinage. While I agree that the premise is not flawed, given the author's emphasis on the distinction between his original meaning and that of common usage, my head is still spinning from the shock of learning there's an alternative. At least my arguments against meritocracy will sound more coherent (No more of this: "No, equal opportunity is good, but ... the merits don't have to be ... they go ... you're assuming a level ballcourt...") [Interesting the "common usage" is not reflected in the OED (subscription req'd).]
posted by rschram at 2:46 PM on June 29, 2001

There's also a greater centralisation of business culture nowadays. Many grammar school kids from the working classes used to take their skills back home after university to be the local solicitor, or banker, or engineer. Now they go to London, because that's where the money and the opportunities lie.

And not simply as lawyers and bankers. As consultants. And "consultant culture" is particularly insidious when it comes to destroying any ambition fuelled by principle, and fuels a short-termism that's totally unsuited to public office.

(Compare the French civil service, which is simultaneously meritocratic and nepotistic, and generates grands projects by the sackload.)

I've seen how consultancies recruit people at close range. They wine and dine the most prominent students at Oxford and Cambridge in their final undergraduate year (aka the milk-round), sign them up with huge salaries and welcome bonuses, and work them into the ground for the next ten years. (I chose not to choose consultancy.)
posted by holgate at 2:56 PM on June 29, 2001

I think that whereas a lower-class kid with potential would be automatically groomed into the rituals and cultures of his expected higher class as part of his education (and thus would have a lot of trouble ever "going home again" and making a difference for the group from which he originated, a poor but smart kid from an ethnic culture in the US will pretty much be allowed to remain himself as he rises up.

I think this perspective needs to be qualified a bit. My father, for example, was one of those first-generation college students. He was from a very poor, blue-collar Jewish family ("Jewish white trash" is his own description). He went to a good university, got a Ph.D., and became a succesful academic. And he wound up with nothing to say to his father--indeed, he was completely alienated from the culture in which he grew up. Far from being atypical, this seems to be the case for both poorer white students--a good part of the constituency for the college at which I teach--and academically successful members of ethnic minority groups (Hispanics, African-Americans, etc.). The first-generation college students with whom I've had a chance to talk about these issues have, in fact, reported feeling totally out of place in their "home" communities, now that they've gone to college. I'm not saying that this is a universal experience, by any means, but it's certainly frequent enough.

In fact, he'll probably be prodded quite often during his education to celebrate his heritage and remain in very close contact with it. He could always go back after achieving success, down where he came from, and make a difference to the people still there.

"Prodded" by whom? Not necessarily by the parents (some immigrant cultures consciously push their children toward Americanization through the educational process). And active "prodding" by campus organizations is as like as not to elicit complaints about identity politics, rampaging P.C., anti-Western sentiment...
posted by thomas j wise at 5:37 PM on June 29, 2001

A long, thoughtful response deserves a long, semi-thoughtful reply ;)

What's very true is that the British are interestested in where you've come from; Americans are more concerned about where you're going to.

You could always come home to visit Mum and Dad, sure, but to actually live, it would be considered unseemly by both your old and new classes.

Not unseemly, just very very impractical. Lots of people make their money and invest it in their home town -- the chairman of my local football team is a case in point -- but it's very hard to "make it" in provincial towns. And when you do come back, it's not the same.

As for me, personally, I simply can't stay here and do the things I want to do with my life. The opportunities aren't available. It's not dissimilar from growing up in the mid-West. In fact, there's a great joke in my home town about the fact that its most famous son -- Captain James Cook -- is famous for getting as far away from the place as humanly possible. So I'm living with my parents for a few months, just because when I do leave, I want to leave from where I started, rather than somewhere else. (Remember, there's generally much less mobility here than in the US: my parents regularly see the people they went to school with.)

In fact, there's something about being a "local boy made good" which makes you a guest in both communities, and a member of neither. Noel Gallagher (I know, I know) said once that it's impossible to go from being working-class to middle-class in just one generation: your accent, your expectations, your basic attitudes give you away. You leave that job to your children. And it's true: I can play the Oxford part pretty well, since I've spent enough time there. But play the part long enough, and often enough, and you take on enough of the character to become something different than you were before.

What's strange, I think, is -- as the Guardian piece suggested -- there are few real working-class fables any more. Forty years ago, if you were a boy from the terraces who became an MP, or a writer, or a professional footballer, or a musician, it actually represented a tangible progress, something that fitted with where you came from: my dad grew up a street away from Brian Clough; I know people whose parents grew up a street away from Paul McCartney. The transformation of David Beckham or Noel Gallagher isn't quite the same: it's almost a transmutation, and I wish I could describe it in more coherent terms.

And it's also true that the British educational system is much more firmly defined along certain immovable tracks. Depending on your A- or O-levels, you'll either be allowed into the "good schools" or the "lesser" polytechnics, and to a large extent your later career options will be based on that fact alone.

Not really true, at least in the way you suggest. The big division is still between private and state education: while selection is returning to the state sector, it's still not a major factor. What you do get, though, is a class-based skewing of the state sector: middle-class parents tend to know how to get their kids into the better state schools, to the extent of moving house in order to enter the "catchment area". At the same time, the intensive education of the private system provides a kind of prep school for Oxbridge, and thus for the "big jobs". (The state/independent balance at Oxford is 50/50; the national balance is 90/10.)

It was George Walden, a former Tory education minister and a product of this system, who wrote a brilliant book (now, sadly, out of print) on how this system creates a deeply unrepresentative political class: if the British elite were in a position to discuss state schools over breakfast, things would change; but because they either don't place their children in the state system, or hunt out the most rarefied examples of the state sector, they don't need to think about it.

It's hard to equate the UK and US systems: think of the British system as a kind of arrowhead graphed against time: you take exams in around ten subjects at 16, and if you do well in them, you pick three or four subjects in which to specialise, take some more exams, and then go to university to study one subject area. (Unless you're in Scotland, which is so different that I shan't try to compare it.) And then, paradoxically, after spending three years concentrating on a single topic, you're more than likely -- if you're at Oxford, at least -- to become a lawyer, a consultant, an accountant. In London.

It's actually a domestic brain-drain.

(I presume UK 7-year-olds face similar hard black-or-white options as well...?)

Not really: although we have the SATs nowadays, and their league tables, which mark the school, not the pupil: it's what drives the middle-class school-hunting frenzy that I already described. For teachers, the SATs are a nightmare: petrified of a low league table mark, they direct their time from the business of teaching towards the bureacracy of testing. And as we all know, teaching kids to pass tests isn't the same as teaching them.

But this is an essay, not a post, so I'll stop.
posted by holgate at 6:54 PM on June 29, 2001

This may well be the most informative thread that I've read here.
posted by dong_resin at 7:51 PM on June 29, 2001

What is not uniquely british is the way in which academic superiority or achievement is considered the gold standard of career success. The underlying assumption that a university education makes you a better person pervades both countries. No one wants to learn a trade for the prestige after all, but a good, skilled tradesman requires the same keenness of mind that a good, skilled professional does, only applied to a different goal.
posted by cardboard at 8:20 AM on June 30, 2001

No one wants to learn a trade for the prestige after all, but a good, skilled tradesman requires the same keenness of mind that a good, skilled professional does, only applied to a different goal.

I'd say that my father -- a tradesman -- is more professional than many "professionals" I know. He certainly does his job better than those who manage him do theirs, demonstrating the Peter Principle all too well. And I'm frankly ashamed when a one-page review, knocked off to beat a deadline, earns me more in a few hours than he gets in a week. That said, I think I've benefitted from having a tradesman's attitude to my work.

The decline in "the trades", though, will be hard to offset, especially when successive governments have tacitly encouraged 16- and 18-year olds into higher education courses of dubious vocational value, simply because it lowers the youth unemployment statistics and saves on benefit payments. The result: a lost generation of trained apprentices, and a palpable skills gap.

One thing I should add: I don't think the phrase "class traitor" has as much resonance in the US.
posted by holgate at 9:58 AM on June 30, 2001