Meritocracy

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Meritocracy refers to the idea that the best people are in the best places. A meritocratic society is thus a place where the distribution of wealth and power exclusively depends on people's ability and intelligence. For this purpose of distinguishing the best from the rest, education in a meritocratic society is reduced to a mechanical cycle of giving the standardized test, finding the students with greatest academic achievements, and only fostering learning of these best students. Ideally meritocracy is reasonable both in society and in education, because it seemingly eliminates inequality of different backgrounds by only valuing diligence and aptitude; however, neither a fair evaluation of talents nor the elimination of inequality is easy to …show more content…
Because people can be talented in diverse aspects, it is unrealistic to design tests that can be so exhaustive that all people's talents receive fair measurements. Even assuming that there are tests that provide weighted judgements, meritocracy is hard to achieve given that people who do best in tests are not necessarily the most talented. For example, a poor person X may be more intelligent and diligent than a rich person Y. However, because of his poverty and therefore a lack of access to better education and resources, X is defeated by Y in this ideally inclusive tests and Y then gets better paid occupation and has some say in public. In this example, the failure of X represents the paradoxical situation resulting in the fact that people ranking higher are probably not people with more intelligence or hardworking. For achieving equality the society have to first eliminate inequality, and it goes into a loop which can be explained in this example that for their full ability to be tested, X and Y should first have the same starting point or same resources, a prerequisite impossible to
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