by Daniel Bell
The question, however, is whether this changed relationship requires the de-schooling of society or a very different conception of education and schooling. Illich is a romantic Rousseauian. His picture is drawn from Emile, and has the same farrago of rhetoric, the emphasis on the “authenticity of being”—those cant words of modernity which can never be defined. There is the same idea that a person should not obey social convention but “make up his mind for himself,” as if there are hundreds of millions of independent truths rather than multiple subgroups of socially circumscribed conventicles of thought. There is the same anti-intellectualism which regards experience alone as truth, rather than disciplined study. There is even the same manipulation by the master—the “noble lie” which Illich tells, in order to destroy institutions—to re-create the “state of nature” in order to align desires and powers. But in the end, as in Emile, the search is not for knowledge, or an education, but for an identity, the identity of lost innocence, the identity of the naif.63
The difficulty with the exoteric argument of Illich—as with so much of modernism—is that it confuses experience, in all its diversities, with knowledge. Experience has to be made conscious, and this is done, as Dewey remarked, “by means of that fusion of old meanings and new situations that transfigures both.”64 Knowledge is the selective ordering—and reordering—of experience through relevant concepts. Reality is not a bounded world, “out there,” to be imprinted on the mind as from a mirror, or a flux of experience to be sampled for its novelties according to one’s inclination (or its relevance for “me”), but a set of meanings organized by mind, in terms of categories, which establishes the relations between facts and infers conclusions.
Nor need there be, in principle, a contradiction between a cognitive and an aesthetic mode in which, as alleged, the technocratic orientaion is concerned only with the functional and the adversary culture with sensibility—much as this may be true in sociological fact. In the very nature of knowledge, as Dewey observed, there has to be an interplay of the two: The cognitive makes the variety of experience more intelligible by its reduction to conceptual form; the aesthetic makes experience more vivid by its presentation in an expressive mode. The two reinforce each other in a singular way.
What has to be common to both is a reliance on judgment—the making of necessary distinctions and the creation of standards which allow one to sort out the meretricious from the good, the pretentious from the enduring. Knowledge is a product of the self-conscious and renewable comparison and judging of cultural objects and ideas in order to say that something is better than something else (or more complex, or more beautiful, or whatever the standard one seeks to apply), and that something is truer. Inevitably, therefore, knowledge is a form of authority, and education is the process of refining the nature of authoritative judgments. This is the classic, and enduring, rationale of education.
But to this is added a special burden of the post-industrial society. One need not defend the technocratic dimensions of education—its emphasis on vocationalism and specialization—to argue that schooling becomes more necessary than ever before. By the very fact that there are now many more differentiated ways in which people gain information and have experiences, there is a need for the self-conscious understanding of the processes of conceptualization as the means of organizing one’s information in order to gain coherent perspectives on one’s experience. A conceptual scheme is a set of consistent terms which groups together diverse attributes of experience or properties of an object, in a higher order of abstraction, in order to relate them to, or distinguish them from, other attributes and properties. To see what is common and what is different about modes of experience—the theme I raised in the introduction on the need for prisms for the comparison of societies—is the function of education. And just as the resolution of an identity crisis for individuals is the amalgamation of discordant aspects of growing up into a coherent whole, so is knowledge an organization of experiences, tested against other patterns of experience, in order to create consistent standards of judgment.
The function of the university, in these circumstances, is to relate to each other the modes of conscious inquiry: historical consciousness, which is the encounter with a tradition that can be tested against the present; methodological consciousness, which makes explicit the conceptual grounds of inquiry and its philosophical presuppositions; and individual self-consciousness, which makes one aware of the sources of one’s prejudgments and allows one to re-create one’s values through the disciplined study of the society. Education is the “reworking” of the materials of the past, without ever wholly surrendering its truths or bending to its pieties. It is a continuing tension, “the tension between past and future, mind and sensibility, tradition and experience, [which] for all its strains and discomforts, is the only source for maintaining the independence of inquiry itself.” It is the affirmation of the principle of intellectual and artistic order through the search for relatedness of discordant knowledge.65
II
THE REDEFINITION OF EQUALITY
The issues of schooling, of income, of status all have become matters of social policy because equality has been one of the central values of the American polity. But there has never been a clear-cut meaning to equality, and the earliest form of the idea in the seventeenth century was quite different than what it assumed in its popular form by the third decade of the nineteenth century. Those who founded the colonies—in New England, at least, beginning with the Pilgrim Fathers of the Mayflower Compact—had an image of themselves as a “community of virtuous men who understood themselves to be under sacred restraints.” There was equality, but in the Puritan sense of an equality of the elect. Among the Constitutional Fathers, the idea of virtue, and election by ability (if no longer by grace), dominated their thinking. A curious blend of Roman republican imagery and Lockean thinking—since both emphasized agrarian virtues and labor—informed their language. The central theme was independence, and the conditions whereby a man could be independent. But in the very use of Lockean language there was an implicit commitment to a hierarchy—the hierarchy of intellect. Since thought was prized, it was assumed that some men “thought” better than others, were more able, more intelligent—and so formed the natural aristocracy.
The singular changeover was symbolized by the “Jacksonian persuasion” (to use Marvin Meyer’s phrase). Thought was replaced by sentiment and feeling, and each man’s sentiments were held to be as good as any others. This is what gives point to the striking observations of Tocqueville. The opening lines of Tocqueville’s Democracy in America are:
No novelty in the United States struck me more vividly during my stay than the equality of conditions. It was easy to see the immense influence of this basic fact on the whole course of society. It gives a particular turn to public opinion and a particular twist to the laws, new maxims to those who govern and particular habits to the governed.
And, reflecting on the power of this new principle, Tocqueville concluded:
Therefore the graduate progress of equality is something fated. The main features of this progress are the following: it is universal and permanent, it is daily passing beyond human control, and every event and every man helps it along. Is it wise to suppose that a movement which has been so long in train could be halted by one generation? Does anyone imagine that democracy, which has destroyed the feudal system and vanquished kings, will fall back before the middle classes and the rich? Will it stop now, when it has grown so strong and its adversaries so weak? 66
In nineteenth-century America, however, the notion of equality was never sharply defined. In its voiced assertions it boiled down to the sentiment that each man was as good as another and no man was better than anyone else. What it meant, in effect, was that no one should take on the airs of an aristocrat and lord it over other men. To this extent, it was a negative reaction to the highly mannered society of Europe, and travelers to this country at the time understood it in those terms. O
n its positive side, equality meant the chance to get ahead, regardless of one’s origins—that no formal barriers or prescribed positions stood in one’s way. It was this combination of attributes—the lack of deference and the emphasis on personal achievement—which gave nineteenth-century America its revolutionary appeal, so much so that when the German ’48ers came here, including such members of Marx’s Socialist Workers Club as Kriege and Willich, they abandoned European socialism and became Republicans instead.
What is at stake today is the redefinition of equality. A principle which was the weapon for changing a vast social system, the principle of equality of opportunity, is now seen as leading to a new hierarchy, and the current demand is that the “just precedence” of society, in Locke’s phrase, requires the reduction of all inequality, or the creation of equality of result—in income, status, and power—for all men in society. This issue is the central value problem of the post-industrial society.
The principle of equality of opportunity derives from a fundamental tenet of classic liberalism: that the individual—and not the family, community, or the state—is the singular unit of society, and that the purpose of societal arrangements is to allow the individual the freedom to fulfill his own purposes—by his labor to gain property, by exchange to satisfy his wants, by upward mobility to achieve a place commensurate with his talents. It was assumed that individuals will differ—in their natural endowments, in their energy, drive, and motivation, in their conception of what is desirable—and the institutions of society should establish procedures for regulating fairly the competition and exchanges necessary to fulfill these individually diverse desires and competences.
As a principle, equality of opportunity denies the precedence of birth, of nepotism, of patronage or any other criterion which allocates place, other than fair competition open equally to talent and ambition. It asserts, in the terms of Talcott Parsons, universalism over particularism, achievement over ascription. It is an ideal derived directly from the Enlightenment as codified by Kant, the principle of individual merit generalized as a categorical imperative.
The social structure of modern society—in its bourgeois form as the universalism of money, in its romantic form as the thrust of ambition, in its intellectual form as the priority of knowledge—is based on this principle. Estate society—that of the eighteenth century and earlier—had given honorific precedence to land, the army, and the church, and only the birthright of inheritance could provide access to these institutions. Even where there was nominal mobility—the institutions of the Red and the Black—commissions in the army (as in England up to the middle of the nineteenth century) were open only by purchase, and benefices in the church available through family connection. Modernity meant the uprooting of this stratified order by the principle of openness, change, and social mobility. The capitalist and the entrepreneur replaced the landed gentry, the government administrator took power over the army, and the intellectual succeeded the priest. And, in principle, these new positions were open to all men of talent. Thus there occurred a complete social revolution: a change in the social base of status and power, and a new mode of access to place and privilege in the society.
The post-industrial society adds a new criterion to the definitions of base and access: Technical skill becomes a condition of operative power, and higher education the means of obtaining technical skill. As a result, there has been a shift in the slope of power as, in key institutions, technical competence becomes the overriding consideration: In industry, family capitalism is replaced by managerial capitalism; in government, patronage is replaced by civil service and bureaucratization; in the universities, the exclusiveness of the old social elites, particularly WASP domination of the Ivy League colleges, breaks up with the inclusion of ethnic groups, particularly the Jews. Increasingly, the newer professional occupations, particularly engineering and economics, become central to the technical decisions of the society. The post-industrial society, in this dimension of status and power, is the logical extension of the meritocracy; it is the codification of a new social order based, in principle, on the priority of educated talent.
In social fact, the meritocracy is thus the displacement of one principle of stratification by another, of achievement for ascription. In the past—and this was the progressive meaning of liberalism— this new principle was considered just. Men were to be judged—and rewarded—not by attributes of birth or primordial ties but on individual merit. Today that principle is held to be the new source of inequality and of social—if not psychological— injustice.
THE CASE AGAINST MERITOCRACY
The sociological and philosophical objections to the meritocracy are of a contradictory and overlapping nature:
1. Genetics and intelligence: If one assumes that a meritocracy is purely a selection by intelligence, and that intelligence is based on inherited genetic differences, then one obtains privilege on the basis of a genetic lottery, and this is an arbitrary basis for social justice.
2. Social class: There can never be a pure meritocracy because, invariably, high-status parents will seek to pass on their positions either through the use of influence or simply by the cultural advantages their children would possess. Thus, after one generation a meritocracy simply becomes an enclaved class.
3. The role of chance: There is considerable social mobility in the United States, but it is less related to schooling or ability or even to family background than to intangible and random factors such as luck and competence in the particular job one falls into. Christopher Jencks and his associates, in a review of the effect of family and schooling on mobility, conclude:
Poverty is not primarily hereditary. While children born into poverty have a higher than average chance of ending up poor, there is still an enormous amount of economic mobility from one generation to the next. There is nearly as much economic inequality among brothers raised in the same homes as in the general population....
... there is almost as much economic inequality among those who score high on standardized tests as in the general population. Equalizing everyone’s reading scores would not appreciably reduce the number of economic “failures.” ...
Our work suggests, then, that many popular explanations of economic inequality are largely wrong. We cannot blame economic inequality primarily on genetic differences in men’s capacity for abstract reasoning, since there is nearly as much economic inequality among men with equal test scores as among men in general. We cannot blame economic inequality primarily on the fact that parents pass along their disadvantages to their children, since there is nearly as much inequality among men whose parents hold the same economic status as among men in general. We cannot blame economic inequality on differences between schools, since differences between schools seem to have very little effect on any measurable attribute on those who attended them. Economic success seems to depend on varieties of luck and on-the-job competence that are only moderately related to family background, schooling or scores on standardized tests.67
Thus, a situation of inequality exists which is justified on the basis of achievement or meritocracy but does not actually derive from them, so that the rewards of mobility, or, at least, the degrees of inequality in reward, are not justified.
4. The principle—or illusion—that a meritocracy instills a competitive feeling into society which is damaging to those who succeed and even more so to those who fail. As Jerome Karabel writes: “A meritocracy is more competitive than an overtly-based class society, and this unrelenting competition exacts a toll both from the losers, whose self-esteem is damaged, and from the winners, who may be more self-righteous about their elite status than is a more traditional ruling group. Apart from increased efficiency, it is doubtful whether a frenetically competitive inegalitarian society is much of an improvement over an ascriptive society which, at least, does not compel its poor people to internalize their failure.” 68
5. The principle of equality of opportunity, even if fully realized on the basi
s of talent, simply re-creates inequality anew in each generation, and thus becomes a conservative force in society.69 In its most vulgar form, this is the argument that equality of opportunity has been the means of some (e.g. the Jews) to get “theirs” in society, and deny latecomers (e.g. blacks) a fair share of the spoils. This is the argument used in New York City, for example, where it is charged that in the school system Jews “used” the merit system to dispossess the Catholics, who had risen through patronage, but that the merit system was now a means of keeping out blacks from high place in the system. In its pristine form, this argument states that social justice should mean not equality at the start of a race, but at the finish; equality not of opportunity but of result.
This change in social temper—the distrust of meritocracy—occurred principally in the last decade. The Kennedy and Johnson administrations, as a double consequence of the civil-rights revolution and the emphasis on higher education as a gateway to better place in the society, had made equality the central theme of social policy. The focus, however, was almost completely on widening equality of opportunity, principally through the schools: on compensatory education, Head Start programs, manpower training to improve skills, school integration, bussing ghetto children to suburban schools, open admissions, and the like. It was clear that black and poor children were culturally disadvantaged, and these handicaps had to be eliminated. It was felt that these programs would do so. In justifying them, the image that President Johnson used, in proclaiming the policy of affirmative action, was that of a shackled runner:
