Stephen Downes

I hadn't read this 2024 article before, because (of course) it was behind a paywall, but via Fredrik Graver there's an archive link available, and so I was able to enjoy it in full. The premise, which I do not dispute, is that the system of 'meritocracy' in American society has failed. David Brooks offers several explanations, which divide into three categories (in my view): 'intelligence' measures the wrong thing, the game is rigged, and the result divides society into elite progressives and more conservative working class. The problem, for Brooks, isn't that the system divides the nation into a hierarchy - a stratification of society is inevitable, he says. It is that it divides it the wrong way, putting the wrong people in charge. Merit ought to based on four crucial qualities: curiosity, drive, social intelligence, and agility (the ability to learn from experience). To develo and recognize these, he argues, schools should emphasize project-based learning, an independent assessment system ought to be established, and what he calls 'opportunity pluralism'. I think there's a lot of merit in this article, but the faith in an elite, however defined, undermines it. You just can't put that much power into the hands of that few people, however defined. Society cannot survive as a scale free network; there have to be limits. Contemporary American society (and to an large extent, global society) represents a failure to set such limits, with a small elite living to excess, and the large majority suffering the consequences of that.