What the Cult of the Good School Tells Us About "Meritocracy"

In what I call the "Cult of the Good School"--the mindless fawning respect for instructional rank within a hierarchy universally known and almost universally unquestioned (Harvard is superior to Yale, any Ivy to anything else in America, private colleges superior to public ones, etc.) one sees not only the "habit of invidious comparison" run amok, but what is in fact social snobbery dressed up as intellectual meritocracy. Yes, the "Big Name" schools may have some of the less privileged among their scholarship students, but anyone who is not a complete idiot knows that the colleges people attend (if they do attend them) have far, far more to do with family background and social class than individual merit, and one might add, even to the quality of the educational opportunities distributed in an exceedingly unequal fashion in American society. The readiness to foot the higher bill for a school far away rather than commute, and for a private school rather than a public one; the advantages possessed by children of alumni and donors and persons in a position to make a "donation" or "do a favor"; the channels that lead from the more elite private schools to the more elite colleges entirely apart from what quality of education they furnish; the existence of a colossal "college placement" industry which sells to eager parents their ability to "work the system"; among much, much else (the ethnic quotas, the athletic scholarships handed out for sports that mainly rich kids play, etc.); should never be slighted. Equally the fact that the "power elite" is disproportionately drawn from such institutions speaks not to the superior merit of the attendees, or the quality of the education imparted as one rather poorly argued "defense of the Ivy League" by two of their more senior functionaries implies, but the social networks and inherited wealth enjoyed by the children of the privileged strata who are their principal students (a fact underlined by how on average the graduate of an elite college may not make much more than the attendee of their local state school), with, indeed, those schools' prestige used to pass off social privilege and social snobbery as intellectual superiority. Still, defenders of the system as it exists, staunch believers in the myth of meritocracy profoundly oblivious to the fact that the term was coined as part of an argument against such thinking, and what his thought-experiment showed about just how remote an actual meritocracy would be from the social order of today, slight them as a matter of course in the sniveling think pieces for which the mainstream media's platforms provide infinite space, as they do for all other forms of Establishment expressions of self-pity.