Click the cover to see the book on Amazon (affiliate link)
I’ve just reviewed this book for a magazine called Teach Secondary. The author has an interesting thesis. We like to believe that meritocracy is a good thing, in that it rewards effort, and acts as a great leveller. In this scenario, it doesn’t matter how lowly the circumstances into which you are born, you can climb the ladder of success and get to the top.
Markovits argues that there is now what he calls ‘high-end inequality’: that is, inequality between the middle class and the upper class elite. Whereas absolute poverty still elicits sympathy (or ought to), few people are going to lose sleep over a middle class person having to work harder and longer to enjoy certain benefits.
When I reviewed the book for Teach Secondary, I was looking at it very broadly: it’s the sort of book that could be useful in several subjects. For example, Citizenship perhaps, Sociology definitely, Economics absolutely. But now I am reading it specifically with regard to the role played by technology, and I hope to revisit this book on the ICT & Computing in Education website having done so.
One thing that strikes me is the lengths to which parents will go to further the interests of their children, and I think this is where I might disagree with Markovits. First, unless I am very much mistaken, that attitude is not solely the province of middle class parents. Perhaps I am judging too much from my own experience (always a danger), but while my parents could not afford to pay for private tuition for me, they encouraged me to keep on in full-time education despite the financial hardships which that entailed. Secondly, why should the disparity between middle class and upper class bother anyone, if jobs in the upper echelons of society are open to all?
Now, you might argue that that’s the point: they are not open to all. It depends on who you know, most jobs are not advertised and so on. But that is the case in all levels of society, at least in Britain. Now, I might change my mind when I’ve read this book for a second time, but so far I remain unconvinced that meritocracy no longer works. I wonder if it’s like that old view of democracy: the worst of all systems apart from the alternatives?
Despite my reservations, I would like to recommend this book. It has a very different take on meritocracy, at least in the way it is working out in practice. Although it’s American, there is a postscript that deals specifically with the UK. And unlike a lot of academic books, it’s actually quite readable.