Take a trip with me to 1968. I am about to graduate from my all-boys, nearly all-white (exceptions fewer than the fingers of one hand) independent school. I had pretty good grades and even better standardized test scores, and I am bound for an Ivy League college.
I happened to be a legacy at that college, the son of a schoolteacher who was himself the son of a schoolteacher who had earned his way through college, Class of 1906, by winning academic prizes with money attached. Not bad for a first-generation collegian and the child of immigrant parents. White, Protestant, English-speaking immigrants from the British isles, let it be said. My grandfather later developed a way to teach dyslexic students how to read and write and founded an independent school of his own—that is, he actually owned it—and saved enough money to send his kid to college. My father had worked in his father’s school all his life and saved enough to do the same for his kid. Mine wasn’t some stereotypical story of plutocrats lavishing gifts on Old Alma Mater in order to make sure its portals remain open to offspring of otherwise questionable merit, but I cannot deny that it is a story of privilege.
Well, I and mine protested and hopefully shortened the Vietnam War as tens of thousands of our coevals left their names on a wall in Washington. I had a low draft lottery number but was deemed unfit for military service, probably because my mother had had the savvy and the wherewithal to take me to the eye doctor when I was eleven. I had been fitted then with bifocals, which I have worn every waking hour since, and I have to assume (now that retrieving my draft records has been made impossible, thanks to a Trump administration change in access policies—gee, why?) that my eyes and not my state of mind or blood pressure relieved me, after graduating from college, from the duty of being among the last American combatants in Southeast Asia.
Having watched dogs and fire hoses do their work on civil rights protestors, too—thanks to the insistent interest of a grandmother to whom I realize now that I owe much of my social conscience—I did what I could to support the cause of civil rights from the time the issue was just called “integration.” Was I a social justice warrior, by any stretch of the imagination? No, just a well-intended—I believed—young, educated white guy too young to have been a Freedom Rider and just trying to make a difference where I could, which wasn’t in very many obvious places.
After a college and graduate school education paid in full by family savings—no student debt for me—I followed the family pattern and became a teacher. I was fortunate that two of my first four independent school employers were progressive by nature and scrambling as underdogs in competitive metropolitan New England markets to improve their practices, which meant that I was inspired in those places to think hard about the craft of teaching and about the real lives of my students and the future world in which they might live and work. I was trained and became ever more interested in the intersections of social justice and education.
You might be snickering now, thinking, Hey, he’s working in fancy private schools in New England, not exactly known for its bastions of progressive social change. You’d be right and you’d be wrong; think what you will about the schools of which you have heard, but please accept that many of the lesser known and, by meritocratic metrics, “academically lesser” places (by reputation, yes, but that’s how “merit” works much of the time; consider the weight “reputation” carries in the college rankings that drive industries that extract millions from families desperate to give their kids the right leg up in the meritocracy sweepstakes that is college admissions) made early bets, some perhaps forced upon them by demographic realities, that diversity, equity, and inclusion are worthy and sustaining institutional goals. St. Grottlesex may or may not be so progressive, but many smaller, less august places have been and remain on the cutting edge.
But this is beside the point. I’ll even add, humbly and maybe apologetically (but at the time I didn’t feel as though I had any control over the situation), that half a century ago I worked toward and gained certification to teach in public schools—just at a moment when early taxpayer revolts where chipping away at school budgets and hiring. Added to a shrinking job market, I was advised that my few years teaching in private schools would work against me as an applicant.
We’ve built a world on grades and test scores and on where a family’s money can send its scions—school choice, but especially for those who can afford to choose. I am a part of that world. Most of my college classmates seem to have become corporate executives, white shoe lawyers, and other versions of the standard capitalist success story. Not a few, mind you, have worked to make the world a better place, some very successfully and at scale. There may have been other humble schoolteachers and the like among them, but we lesser folk—regardless of the fancy Latin on our diplomas—have kept a very low profile as we pursued whatever modest careers we chose “to make the world a better place.” And yes, as a servant of tuition- and philanthropy-driven schools, selective in their admissions, I, too, was serving The Beast in my own way.
And what a world The Beast has created. Overt, explicit, and violent hatred and racism are come anew to our civil(ized?) society, or they’ve just resurfaced in droves from the depths to which we well-meaners had thought them banished forever. The social contract is broken, as anyone who has driven a car lately well knows. The planet’s climate has been ruined, and capitalism and nationalism have teamed up to make sure it will not be fixed. Basic human rights are being rolled back like a soiled rental carpet after a boozy wedding reception. The winners in the meritocracy have taken care that even their own grandchildren and perhaps a level or two beyond may be the last generations of humans on this earth.
What might I, personally, have done to change all this? I don’t know. I have tried as a teacher to tell my students the truth, to help them develop the skills and dispositions to make change as they live their lives. Many of them have been trying. But all, like me, were caught up in the hamster-wheel world of educational meritocracy, white and Black and Christian and Jew and wealthy and poor: each striving to make the grades, earn the scores, and build the resume that would merit admission to a “top” (How I HATE that term!) college.
I guess I’ve lacked the vision, the imagination, or the courage to break free, but what would that even have looked like? A Kerouac protagonist, roaming the map and demanding that the literate world accept new truths? A come-again John Brown, impassioned, righteous, but in practice mostly feckless until a symbolic death? I have relied on my good intentions and my modest positions and resources to establish, as much for myself as for any other audience, my bona fides as a worthy person, not just worthy of my privileges and advantages but worthy of existence. Within the perhaps over-generous definitions of The System, I am a worthy person.
But the world of 2022 cries out for a new and better kind of worthy person. I daresay that at this moment many of those whom I would embrace as worthy fellow travelers in the effort to make the world a better place are feeling just what I feel right now: sadness and shame. We could have done better.
So much for your “meritocracy.”