Meritocracy
Meritocracy is a recurring theme in social sciences and especially in sociology. In a simplified or explained way, this concept indicates that the social position of each depends on their merits or effort. That is, positions of social power are a consequence of people's efforts. With this idea, however, we do not limit ourselves to the description, as if social organization were meritocratic, it would also be just at the same time, because what would be in the most powerful positions would be the ones that have made the effort. They are therefore beliefs or ideologies.
Does anyone believe that society is meritocratic? If it is not enough to look at the environment, most of the works on the subject clearly show that people do not believe that society is meritocratic, since their daily experiences demonstrate the opposite: the ways of permanence in the positions of command, and the paths, almost always have little relation to the effort. Evidently, in academic studies they are also marginal views, usually as ideological provocation. However, the concept remains important in the social sciences, if not applied in its entirety to society, in relation to more concrete areas, especially education.
In the sociology of education there is much talk about the meritocracy issue. Paradoxically, contrary to what happens in society as a whole, the educational system is generally related to effort and merit in a relatively natural and uncritical way. What is my academic trajectory, if not the result of my effort or my laziness? Of course, the individual effort in the process a person may have at school is an important variable, but other forces and factors, often covertly, also influence. In other words, as we see more clearly when talking about society, neither everyone in education should make the same effort to achieve similar results.
People do not believe that societies are meritocratic: the ways of being in command positions are almost always unrelated to effort.
Among the hundreds, thousands, of works that have studied the exchange between meritocracy and school in the sociology of education and in other disciplines, I will quote that of the social scientist Paul Willis, who is Learning to Labour: In the ethnographic work How Working Class Kids Get Working Class Jobs (Learning to Work: How Working-Class Kids Get Working Class Jobs), in the 1970s, he looked at the topic that appears in the title itself at a low-class school in the UK. The author highlighted, along with many other aspects, the reproduction of the socioeconomic inequality that occurs at school. Students, rather than participating in a clear game about knowledge according to their merits, were assuming the social position they would occupy in the future, according to the author's long study.
The truth is that in the sociology of education we are in favour of repeating the idea of reproduction of inequality, perhaps because it seems to us that it is not said otherwise. And yet it is also true that the education system is an important instrument for equality. The school shares both characteristics, reproduction and transformation. But, as we are talking about meritocracy today, it should be noted that the educational system has become the last strength of meritocratic ideology, and this perspective is far from fair.
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