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At least Germany has a pragmatic approach to things, those who can't crack the requirements for a typical white collar job that needs college are put on a different track far earlier in schooling, or simply can opt for that if they feel like it.
There's a lot of disinterest in "tracking" (dividing students by ability groups) in the United States because it makes the racial divides in educational outcomes very obvious. This isn't to say that such things don't exist (most notably magnet schools), but there's also a portion of the political left that attempts to stunt or eliminate such systems: selection to attend Lowell High School in San Francisco, one of the best (public) schools in the city, was switched from an academic basis to a random lottery in 2020. This led to a huge increase in failing grades in incoming classes, and a successful recall election of several school board commissioners in 2022 -- the school has returned to merit-based admissions as of this academic year. Stuyvesant in NYC also sees similar calls to end merit-based admissions from time to time.
Well, there’s also the history of tracking as a tool to dodge Brown v. Board. I’d say that’s one of the stronger cases for racism actually causing disparate outcomes.
More generally, tracking runs afoul of a particular brand of aggressive egalitarianism, and that brings a lot of centrists into the coalition. It’s the same sort of attitude that fuels pushback against charter schools. Americans get really nervous around anything that suggests a class system. Of course everyone should be given the same opportunity. It’s the American Dream!
This mindset may not survive close contact with public schooling, but it absolutely plays into the politics.
Yes, and the incident in junior high that greatly contributed to my becoming a reactionary monarchist (and when I tell people about it, they seem surprised at that, thinking it should have made me a leftist instead) was learning that we still quite clearly have one anyway, all "American Dream" rhetoric to the contrary.
(Most people try to make the system live up to the rhetoric; I say, simpler to make the rhetoric match the reality.)
Interesting: my deep-rooted American egalitarian sentiments do show up occasionally, most recently in a "um, hell no" reaction to rumors that Meghan, Duchess of Sussex was considering running for office in California. Royal titles are cute, but very un-American.
A school administrator told me to my face that, with regards to state education law and their ongoing violation of it in my case, "The law doesn't matter. The law can say whatever it wants," but what matters is what you can get a court to enforce "and I know your parents can't afford a lawyer."
But when a friend of mine was about to be in the exact same situation, except this friend's last name is on a major street of this city and a whole bunch of buildings (including the former mall that is now the school district's headquarters), suddenly they were able to shake loose the supposedly-nonexistent resources to do for him what they couldn't possibly do for me, law or no law.
Because I'm a peasant nobody, and he's local petty nobility. It's that simple. Over two centuries of "the American Experiment" attempting so hard to create a society free of hereditary class in line with those "deep-rooted egalitarian sentiments," and look at how little we've accomplished. Apparently, most people think the response to looking at this utter failure should be the conclusion that we need to double down and try even harder. Me, though? It may be that us autists are apparently resistant to the "sunk cost fallacy" and other common forms of human irrational persistence, or it may just be that I'm personally given to calling it quits on things, but I look at that, and I just see trying harder as "throwing good money after bad," that we should just accept the sunk costs as sunk, admit the goal, however noble, looks impossible, declare the whole "experiment" a failure, write it all off, and just openly acknowledge who are born to which class and how that still matters (will always matter).
No offense, but that's very ... autistic. Sure there's still large differences and resentment is not inappropriate. Especially given the often extreme hypocrisy and prejudice of our woke betters. But nevertheless, it's also important to keep in mind that we did in fact make great advances. My parents come from poor rural super large families (I literally don't know the number of my cousins) and didn't even enter high-school. Nevertheless, they build up a comfortable middle class existence and I'm now a postdoc at a decent university.
My gf, who is also a postdoc, comes from a post-soviet background where they lost EVERYTHING, twice (once her grandparents due to being silesian germans, then her parents due to their entire education not being accepted by west germany, so they were suddenly untrained workers with no private ownership).
We lived together with a thai girl for a while, whos parents most prized possession was ... a donkey I think? Some large animal like that. And they lived in a literal shack. She's now a nurse with, comparatively, amazing living standards in germany.
And so on. Re-introducing monarchy, or even just formalizing classes/castes solves exactly no problems, and in fact just makes everything worse. What we need is an honest perspective on what real privilege looks like, and less (sometimes literally) royal girls lecturing everyone on how they deserve to get special treatment. The current petty woke framework is so popular because it's very easy for even the most privileged to conjure up some kind of oppression. Monarchy, as we have seen in the past, would just make them go "actually, I deserve this", which is even worse.
Read Gregory Clark's The Son Also Rises. Most people tend to both overestimate modern inter-generational mobility (note that wealth/income only partially correlates with social class), and underestimate past intergenerational mobility. Clark argues that, except for the uniquely low social mobility in India thanks to the caste system, intergenerational class mobility has been pretty uniform across periods and societies (where societies are large and complex enough to have stratification, that is), and the present is no exception.
Counterpoint: Toby Young's "The Fall of the Meritocracy." If anything breeds "I deserve this" attitudes among elites — and the belief that the people beneath them deserve their station too — it's the view that they earned their position via "merit" (and those lower are so because they lack merit), and not mostly due to being born to the right parents (a better description of the reality). Whereas, when you openly acknowledge that the people on top are only really there thanks to mere accident of birth, "there but for the grace of God go I." It looks to me like you can't really have noblesse oblige without the noblesse part.
There is a pretty large difference between overestimating modern/underestimating historic mobility, and saying it's exactly the same. Clark uses a pretty unusual measure, and notably one that inherently smoothes out variation in the "short term" (here meaning small numbers of generations) by his own admission. So, if my grandparents were low class, my parents lower middle class, I'm upper middle class, but my kids fall back to lower middle class and so on, then for him that's approximately zero/minimal social mobility. I concur with him that there is probably some general "genetic competence" that will drive the social class of one's offspring measured over multiple generations and that even comparatively rigid social systems have some means of advancing so that people can move to whichever class they "belong". Btw, Clark primarily claims consistently low social mobility everywhere.
Nevertheless, I actually consider it a feature, not a bug, of Meritocracy that people can both rise and fall very fast, and especially that a single high-competence outlier can jump quite far for just a single generation. Especially, what Clark does not look at (and doesn't even claim to look at; It's beyond the scope of what he's investigating), is the competitiveness of different systems. Imo it's obvious that meritocratic systems outcompeted non-meritocratic systems historically, and it was acknowledged as such even by contemporaries. You can find some alternative explanations, but all of them are in my view far more convoluted than the straightforward conclusion that Meritocracy is more competitive - which is also very unsurprising, as the entire point of Meritocracy is to advance the most merit-ful to the highest power.
In more practical terms: How could more rigid social systems possibly have done anything but be in the way of me advancing my social position? The moment I dare turn up at high school, at least some teachers and classmates would consider me beneath them, as my parents didn't even go to high school. Going to university would have been worse, and getting my PhD worse yet. At any point, people would - rightfully, in a rigid class system - point out that I do not belong. I already struggle to navigate the obvious cultural differences between my conservative christian upbringing (despite being atheist myself!) and the secular woke left academic world. Most likely I'd fail, and would have taken up some blue collar work just like my parents.
I won't claim the current system is perfect - but insofar as the current world is bad, it is by being not perfectly meritocratic. But I don't expect anything to be perfect anyway, and more Meritocracy is a pretty straightforward positive.
You should read it again (and imo Clark as well, for that matter). Both argue primarily in favor of the view that long-run social status is substantially due to genetics (a view that I agree with), it is no mere accident of birth whatsoever! Neither of them argue in favor of Monarchy in any way - Young in particular argues in favour of embryo screening and other approaches to fix biological inequalities (again, something I agree with).
In Meritocracy, even if you might have "good genes" in some theoretic sense, you're nevertheless asked to prove your worth. As a result, impostor syndrome is very common, both by studies and in my personal experience interacting with the elite; It's hard to find even a single person who isn't constantly worried about "being good enough" for his social status, with the exception of some non-strivers and petty tyrants that are common in administrative positions.
On the other hand, in for example a traditional Monarchy, it was generally accepted that being born into a higher class literally makes you inherently superior. And as both Clark and Young point out this would be in some average sense correct! Noblemen have historically loved to point out this, and would actively sneer about those among them that felt the need to prove themselves - after all, why would a lion feel the need to prove himself not a sheep?
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This is the sort of thing you really ought to get on tape.
This was the mid 1990s, so it would have had to have been literal cassette tape. And usually the type of thing teachers would confiscate if you brought to school.
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