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The Unfulfillable Promise of Meritocracy: Three Lessons and Their Implications for Justice in Education

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Abstract

This paper draws on a literature in sociology, psychology and economics that has extensively documented the unfulfilled promise of meritocracy in education. I argue that the lesson learned from this literature is threefold: (1) educational institutions in practice significantly distort the ideal meritocratic process; (2) opportunities for merit are themselves determined by non-meritocratic factors; (3) any definition of merit must favor some groups in society while putting others at a disadvantage. Taken together, these conclusions give reason to understand meritocracy not just as an unfulfilled promise, but as an unfulfillable promise. Having problematized meritocracy as an ideal worth striving for, I argue that the pervasiveness of meritocratic policies in education threatens to crowd out as principles of justice, need and equality. As such, it may pose a barrier rather than a route to equality of opportunity. Furthermore, meritocratic discourse legitimates societal inequalities as justly deserved such as when misfortune is understood as personal failure. The paper concludes by setting a research agenda that asks how citizens come to hold meritocratic beliefs; addresses the persistence of (unintended) meritocratic imperfections in schools; analyzes the construction of a legitimizing discourse in educational policy; and investigates how education selects and labels winners and losers.

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Notes

  1. In fact, the entire oeuvre of the most widely cited social scientist, Pierre Bourdieu, can be read as describing and confronting the broken promise of the French Revolution, its meritocratic ideals in particular, as nepotism and aristocratic remnants of the Ancien Régime linger on today (Yair, 2007, 2008).

  2. Deutsch, in a long line of research, empirically studied how different justice principles come up in group interactions as a result of the type of social relations that marks the group, i.e., cooperative or competitive (Deutsch, 1985). The next section, pp. 22–24, suggests an alternative approach to a similar question: Where do meritocratic beliefs come from?

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Acknowledgments

I am much obliged to the late Daniel Bell for interrogating me on the topic of meritocracy on a cold Boston winter day 3 years ago, and for thereby consolidating my interest in writing this article. I thank Jason Beckfield, Thijs Bol, Filiz Garip, Sandy Jencks, Chris Marquis, Beth Truesdale, Herman van de Werfhorst, and the two anonymous reviewers for their helpful suggestions and comments on prior versions of this manuscript. Errors and conclusions are my own.

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    Jonathan J. B. Mijs

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Mijs, J.J.B. The Unfulfillable Promise of Meritocracy: Three Lessons and Their Implications for Justice in Education. Soc Just Res 29, 14–34 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11211-014-0228-0

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