American Idyll, Chapter 1: Meritocracy

 Chapter 1 is written as a summary of history and thinkers. She covers a lot of things I've heard before, including standardized tests and Hofstadter's critiques of anti-intellectualism. I could summarize everything she's said, but that would be a lot of space (she packs a lot in) and frankly I don't take issue with much. The meta issue is that she is critiquing meritocracy as a technocratic hierarchy. I have more than enough issues with that, so I don't disagree. But meritocracy is an idea with two very different usages, subject to two different critiques. Besides an overall societal hierarchy based on technocracy, "meritocracy" also refers to hiring workers or selecting students based on qualifications for the particular position in question. Merit for the job is narrower than merit to run society. Being qualified to study a particular subject at a particular level is different from being qualified to enter the leadership class.

Liu critiques standardized tests alongside efforts to make education more "relevant" that Hofstadter critiqued. I'm not sure that the two things really belong together for critique. Sure, testing can be combined with tracking to give some people a less "academic" and more vocational education, while others get more traditional liberal arts or whatever. Whatever the advantages or disadvantages of such tracking, when you DON'T track you wind up having to dumb things down. (Ask me how I know.) Testing and tracking is the best hope for offering rigorous education at all. Otherwise we have to go to the lowest common denominator.

I'm not sure that I'm seeing how Liu will tie these things into anti-elitism. Testing is elitism.

Now, Liu does note that if we make teachers accountable for test scores then we can wind up stripping the richness from education and make it into desperate attempts to boost scores. That ultimately weakens intellectualism and is a form of anti-elitism. But testing is also one of the few tools we have to actually preserve some truly academic education. Educators who know their students are ready can demand more than educators who fear that their students aren't ready. (Ask me how I know.)

Now, Liu does make the point that one of the early goals of testing was to smash a hereditary elite by opening it to smart kids of every background, e.g. Columbia opening up to children of immigrants instead of traditional WASPs. That's a type of anti-elitism, but also a new type of elitism.