Middle-Class and Meritocracy

In her terrific book on (middle-class) parenting, All Joy and No Fun, Jennifer Senior has a chapter on how (over)involved parents are in their kids’ activities. Apparently, there’s even a term for it: “overscheduled kids”! It refers to all those play dates and extracurricular activities, almost “as if (kids had) all suddenly acquired chiefs of staffs”. And the term for this aspect of parenting? It’s called “concerted cultivation”.

Most Indians can relate to all this, but it’s bit surprising that the same is increasingly true of American middle-class parents as well. In fact, in the US, there’s an increasing backlash now against (hold your breath) meritocracy! Huh?

Joan Wong put together 10 academics’ take on what this is all about. One panelist, Agnes Callard, makes an interesting point on two types of merit: “(backward-looking) honor and as a (forward-looking) office”. Most people are OK with the first, it’s the second one, the future-looking one (aka college admission) that is the bone of contention.

But why? After all, the kid who got the most marks got into the best college, what’s wrong with that? Daniel Markovits counters with an argument most Indians have long been familiar with:

“The United States has one of the steepest educational hierarchies in the world. Not just colleges and universities, but also high schools, elementary schools, and even preschools all come in shades of eliteness. At every level, elite schools invest much more in training their students than their ordinary counterparts.”

And:

“Children of rich and well-educated parents imbibe massive, sustained, planned, and practiced investments in education from birth through adulthood.”

You’d think that, in the US, where everyone goes to the neighborhood school, this shouldn’t be an issue. Wrong. Everyone tries to move into the neighborhood with the best schools, which drives up real estate prices, and that then means only those with more money go to the best schools.

On top of that choice of school, Caitlin Zaloom points out the well-off then add even more advantages for their kids:

“Glowing applications are not merely produced by good grades; they’re largely the result of test tutors…”

And that’s the gist of the argument against meritocracy: Those who couldn’t afford all this initial investment don’t stand a chance. The opportunities aren’t equal, so the outcome is guaranteed to be skewed. The kids whose parents can afford/provide the opportunities will always win the race. Or as Thomas Chatterton Williams says:

“Is this — the presence of an engaged parent who values education — itself a form of privilege and therefore unmeritocratic? Some would say yes.”

All this reminds of this Calvin and Hobbes strip:

The middle-class has found something that is “unfair in my favor”, and so meritocracy ends up being the way Williams describes it:

“But life is neither perfectible nor equalizable, and success through competition — even success derived from grit, hard work, and merit — is often intergenerational.”

And, let’s face it, there’s really no choice in this rat race, as Senior wrote in her book:

“It’s the problematic psychology of an arms race: the participants would love not to play, but not playing, in their minds, is the same as falling behind.”

Fair or not, I don’t see how anything can change on this front…