@theatlantic: America’s meritocracy is broken, David Brooks argues—but it’s still fixable. James Conant, the president of #Harvard from 1933 to 1953, and other elite #university administrators “set out to get rid of admissions criteria based on bloodlines and breeding and replace them with criteria centered on brainpower,” Brooks writes. Conant’s “system was predicated on the idea that the highest human trait is intelligence, and that #intelligence is revealed through academic achievement.” Conant aimed to create a nation with more social mobility, less class conflict, and a more democratically selected elite. But the administrators’ idea backfired. “Today, 59 percent of Americans believe that our country is in decline, 69 percent believe that the ‘political and economic elite don’t care about hard-working people,’ 63 percent think experts don’t understand their lives, and 66 percent believe that America ‘needs a strong leader to take the country back from the rich and powerful,’” Brooks writes. “Many people who have lost the meritocratic race have developed contempt for the entire system, and for the people it elevates,” Brooks continues. “This has reshaped national politics. Today, the most significant political divide is along educational lines: Less educated people vote Republican, and more educated people vote Democratic.” The administrators set out to create a system in which any talented person could achieve #success , no matter their lineage. But in some ways, Brooks writes, “we’ve just reestablished the old hierarchy rooted in wealth and social status—only the new elites possess greater hubris, because they believe that their status has been won by hard work and talent rather than by birth.” And in reality, studies have shown that pure intelligence alone does not necessarily correlate with success in life. At the link in our bio, Brooks explores how to redefine merit, and identifies solutions for how educational institutions should operate. #education #college #highereducation

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Friday 15 November 2024 17:21:31 GMT