EXTENDED BOOK REVIEW: HISTORICAL REFLECTIONS ON THE MERITOCRACY-DEMOCRACY TENSION IN THE UNITED KINGDOM, UNITED STATES AND JAPAN

First coined by British sociologist Michael Young (1958) in The Rise of the Meritocracy, the concept of meritocracy has transformed from its initial satirical meaning and is today a focal discourse informing global and national education. Recently, literature has questioned whether, given rising inequality, the notion of meritocracy is appropriate or indeed is a desirable approach by which to organise society (e.g., Littler, 2018). This extended review will introduce three recent additions to this literature, concentrating on the United Kingdom, United States and Japan, and reflecting on the meritocracy-democracy tension threading them together.

In The Crisis of the Meritocracy, Peter Mandler ‘pull[s] together the … often unconnected work of historians of education, sociologists, economists, and modern British historians’ to examine the transformation from elite to mass secondary and higher education in Britain (2020, p. viii). Chapter 1 introduces the two concepts of meritocracy and democracy, which run throughout the three books discussed in this review and that are inseparable from the educational change in Britain during the twentieth century. Emerging as strong ‘forces’ challenging the rigidity of the highly stratified English education system (p. 4), these are shown in Chapter 2 to have given rise to attitudinal change and debate around the expansion of education in the first half of the twentieth century. Here, Mandler traces the emergence of a public which disposed of ‘former inhibitions about accepting state aid’ (p. 29), in addition to a political class gradually coming to terms with public demands for a better educational offering.

Chapters 3 and 4 query whether a tripartite system ever manifested and the ongoing tussle between the principles of meritocracy and democracy throughout the post-war period. The former reflects on the combination of ‘three incalculables’ that are claimed to have produced the move away from selective, meritocratic education (p. 39): (1) the baby-boom (‘bulge’), (2) growing desire for more education (‘trend’), and (3) ‘structure of feeling engendered by the welfare state’ (p. 49). From Chapter 3, we gain a fresh understanding of post-war educational change, not as something imposed from the state but from working- and middle-class rejection of the supposedly meritocratic 11+ examination and desires for mass grammar school education for all children. Chapter 4 provides an informative account of the twenty-year transition from bipartite to comprehensive education. Here, Mandler stresses the bottom-up nature of such reforms, wherein ‘central government policy followed rather than led local government’ (p. 55) in ending ‘the clearly undemocratic ordeal of a public examination at 11+ which then allocated children to “better” or ‘worse schools’ based largely on social background (p. 70).

Chapters 5–7 move onto higher education, which ‘was coming under searching democratic scrutiny’ by a more demanding public (p. 71). Chapter 5 traces the embracing of the Robbins Principle from 1963 onwards, ushering a democratic rather than meritocratic higher education system. Chapter 6 then juxtaposes the growth in Age Participation Rate (APR) during the 1960s with the decline in university student numbers from 1969, underpinned by a jointly felt lack of confidence among young people, parents and policymakers in the returns of higher education, and the retreat from the Robbins Principle upon the advent of the Thatcher government in 1979. Chapter 8 tracks the return to mass higher education policy in the late 1980s and continuing into the 1990s, in addition to the associated transition to the marketisation of secondary and higher education. The shift away from science enrolments and the consequences of widening participation for social mobility are examined in chapters 8 and 9. Mandler concludes these chapters by arguing that ‘the period from the late 1950s into the 2000s can be seen as a single arc of massifying educational provision with parents and students firmly in the driver’s seat’ (p. 154), counterposing this with data showing the effective maintenance of inequality despite higher levels of education for all (p. 209). In the Epilogue, Mandler reflects on the relationship between education, meritocracy, and democracy and ends by pondering whether widening participation and the domination of democratic principles over meritocracy will continue into the future.

Relatedly, The Tyranny of Merit: What’s Become of the Common Good? represents a journey through which Michael Sandel (2021) reflects on the damage the meritocratic discourse has done to American society at the personal, community, and societal level by hollowing the political sphere, denying dignity to the uncredentialed, and unravelling the bonds forming the basis of American democracy. Sandel begins the book by reflecting on the 2016 election victory of Donald Trump, an event attributed to the ‘dislocation wrought by the rapid pace of change in an age of globali[s]ation’ and to the humiliation inflicted on its losers by technocratic elites. Chapters 2 and 3 spiritually, politically, and culturally situate this rhetoric and the meritocratic ethic underlying it in contemporary US society. Chapter 3 focuses on the way the rhetoric of rising has given rise to a technocratic elite embodying, what Sandel coins, a meritocratic hubris: ‘the tendency of winners to inhale too deeply of their success, to forget the luck and good fortune that helped them on their way’ (p. 28). The rampant self-confidence this has instigated among the technocratic elite is shown in Chapter 4 to have cemented a credentialism, acting to justify the maltreatment of the uncredentialed and the rewards lavished on the highly educated. Sandel problematises meritocracy on moral grounds in Chapter 5, before using the stratification of educational opportunity to refute the very basis of the credentialed meritocratic hubris. However, this credentialism defining meritocratic age is argued in chapters 6–7 to be harmful for the winners and losers. For the former, the wounds are reflected in the psychological toll inflicted on privileged children. For the latter, ‘the tyranny of merit undermines the dignity of work’ (p. 146), with significant impacts on the self-esteem and lives of the uncredentialed. This causes Sandel, in his Conclusion, to advocate for a rethinking of the place of merit as the foundation of success in America today. For Sandel, it is only by ‘reckoning with merit’ and seeking ‘a common good beyond the sorting and the striving’ that American democracy can come back from the brink and all people can live more meaningful lives together (p. 20).

One purportedly meritocratic education system previously valourised in the US and UK alike is that of the Japanese. In Education, Equality, and Meritocracy in a Global Age: The Japanese Approach, Takehiko Kariya and Jeremy Rappleye (2020) attempt ‘to restart a discussion that was once far more rigorous and scholarly on the topic of meritocracy, education and equity’ (p. 11). This follows a recent precipitous decline of work on Japanese education, following a period of intense interest in the late-twentieth century when Japan was perceived as ‘a powerful counterpoint and corrective to assumptions in the West’ and the model of meritocracy to strive for. Dispelling with essentialist cultural explanations, Kariya and Rappleye advance a ‘historical-finance perspective’ to account for the development of standardised education in post-war Japan, where post-war changes in the ‘logic of educational resource distribution’ is of central importance (p. 12).

Following an introductory chapter, chapters 2 and 3 set the political, social, and educational context of the post-war Japanese society which instigated the equalisation of educational provision from the late 1950s. This foregrounds the regional inequality observed in post-war Japanese education and explains how, given the austere educational conditions, such inequalities were and would continue to be ‘an unavoidable fact’, especially if lofty ideals of democratic, child-centred education were imported from the West (p. 46). It was resource austerity, a product of defeat in the Second World War, which gave rise to the unique approach to resource allocation in education: spatial equality; the organisation of all educational space based on universality, comprehensiveness, and generality. Chapter 4 begins to sketch the post-war blueprint of Japanese education, which was informed by the principle of equality of opportunity and educational standardisation. This principle distinguishes two approaches to educational financing – ‘world of per head’ and ‘world of standardisation’ (p. 88) – that form the basis of differences observed between Japanese and Western education systems. The latter bases resource allocation on the individual student, whereas the former, which underpins Japanese education, defines resource allocation via spatial units, such as homerooms and geographic territory. It is this which gives rise to spatial equality, the unintended consequence of an approach to educational financing imposed in a context of financial austerity, which Kariya and Rappleye attribute significance in the development of post-war Japanese educational standardisation and forms the basis of Chapter 5. In this chapter, the realities of the ‘world of standardisation’ adopted in Japanese education are explored by showing the marked decline in regional disparities from the 1970s. These consequences are further explored in Chapter 6, specifically progressive changes in the relationship between achievement scores and prefectural financial strength. Yet, this also makes clear the murmurings for change that were emerging during the final decades of the twentieth century. Resultant reforms, including neoliberal borrowings from the West, introduced in the 1990s that were aimed at dismantling the standardised post-war education system, are discussed in Chapter 7. This chapter focuses specifically on the individualisation of learning, internationalisation of education, and administrative and fiscal decentralisation, all of which are argued to ‘contradict and often acutely clash with the logic of spatial equality, which is built on the principle of the world of standardi[s]ation’ (p. 173). Chapter 8 concludes the volume by returning to the dystopian ideas of Michael Young and espousals of Japanese utopian post-war education, with the authors arguing that such dichotomous thinking misunderstands the different conceptualisation of equality of opportunity which underpinned Japanese education, as compared to English education on which Young based his writing. For Kariya and Rappleye, Japan represents neither a meritocratic dystopia nor utopia. Instead, it is ‘ambivalent’ (p. 200), posing for the (Western-centric) global conversation on meritocracy a counterpoint to stimulate discussion of ‘what comes after neoliberalism’ (p. 210).

Of interest to readers is how Kariya and Rappleye, Mandler, and Sandler offer differing understandings on the emergence of meritocracy. Kariya and Rappleye’s analysis of Japanese meritocracy situates it clearly as an unintended consequence of post-war education reforms implemented under financial austerity, and something which is being eroded by creeping neoliberalism in Japanese education policy. Similarly, Sandler provides a contrasting picture, associating meritocracy unambiguously to the technocratic turn during the 1980s and poses a more critical stance on how it has shaped recent social change, such as the rise of populism. Mandler perceives meritocracy as a twentieth-century phenomenon, gradually being superseded by a citizen-led ‘democratic’ education system in the post-war period. By arguing that democratic values have superseded meritocratic principles in education Mandler delivers a unique contribution to contemporary literature on meritocracy; a literature where meritocracy is more problematically a barrier to more equitable, democratic education systems (e.g., Littler, 2018). Whilst providing an interesting historical account, Mandel appears to overlook the continued corroding influence that meritocracy is still shown to have by Sandel.

Collectively, these books are salient to policymakers tackling the current dilemmas of meritocratic education systems. The books by both Mandler and Kariya and Rappleye hint at the inefficacy of central government policy alone to confront contemporary issues in education that is underpinned by the tension between democratic and meritocratic discourses. One significant factor suggested by Mandler is broader social changes which powerfully shaped post-war education in Britain, with the role allotted by Kariya and Rappleye to resource austerity and the subsequent approach to educational financing adopted agreeing with this claim.

In this context, the social change which Sandel argues is needed to reverse the erosion of democratic systems and the common good – a new way of understanding ‘success’ not dependent on the meritocratic ethos – seems unlikely to materialise from the intended actions of individual citizens and policymakers alone. Instead, this change may require wider social changes to invigorate a shift away from meritocracy towards a conceptualisation of success and deservingness that is conducive to a politics of the common good. Whilst Mandler (2020, p. 214) concedes it ‘would be a mistake for me to conclude with any long-term predictions’ as to what those changes in the future British education will be, what is clear from these books is that meritocracy and democracy are today in a state of unresolvable tension in both the East and the West, with Sandel making a compelling case for change to today’s global meritocracy.