The Crisis of the Meritocracy: Britain’s Transition to Mass Education since the Second World War | Peter Mandler

Peter Mandler
Peter Mandle | Imagem: Historical Association

Britain has never been a meritocracy. Despite the concept’s widely-evoked vision of a ‘fair’ or ‘just’ social order, one where individuals rise or fall according to their ‘talents’ or ‘efforts’, the rise of the meritocracy has continually been scuppered by the perseverance of inherited privilege or democratic pressure. In part, it is meritocracy’s unrealised status that keeps bringing the nation’s political leaders back to the concept, especially in recent decades. Confounded by growing levels of inequality, successive generations of politicians have sought solace in the popular enthusiasm for education as an arbiter of ‘earned’ social status and a marker of individual responsibility, talent and effort. The contemporary moment feels different, however. It is impossible to browse the shelves in a bookshop or visit a news website without stumbling across several volumes or articles decrying meritocracy’s impact on democracy, its role in the populist backlash of Brexit and Trump, or its collusion with the forces of neoliberalism.(1) Beyond the truism that the word ‘meritocracy’ was coined to describe a dystopia and yet has somehow become a positive vision of a ‘classless’ social hierarchy, these accounts all lack a sense of history. Therefore, Peter Mandler’s latest book, The Crisis of the Meritocracy: Britain’s Transition to Mass Education Since The Second World War, could not be more timely. Leia Mais