Meritocracy
Michael Young wrote a book published in 1958 called The Rise of Meritocracy. It was he who coined this word, and we can say that he is the first person to present Meritocracy in a bad light. His book is set in the future, whereby a person’s social standing and privileges were based on one’s Intelligence Quotient and ‘effort’ (off-topic: we feel an uncanny sense of déjà vu when we think of the movie Gattaca(1997), where everything is the same except your IQ and ability is tested from your blood before you could walk). The basic plot is that the masses, in the end, overthrow the elite who had become arrogant and conceited.
Despite the ugly roots of meritocracy, many think of it as a good thing for society. Proponents of this system declared it more just and more productive than other systems of government. The opposition, however, view it as a very fine line between fairness and discrimination, a line that has been crossed many a time by the societies that embrace this philosophy. The ghost of Michael Young has crept back into many of our minds; the elite see themselves as way above the ‘norm’ and the less intelligent victims are living in poor conditions and are labeled as ‘hopeless’.
Meritocracy is an easy enough theory to understand. It is a system of government based on demonstrated ability and talent rather than by wealth, nepotism, class privilege and cronyism, which is a bias of close friends. But do we really know what it stands for? Yes, compared to the way we used to divide people, meritocracy is a relief. Leaders of the land are no longer chosen based on their parents or connections. Governments are elected by a close cousin of meritocracy: democracy. Measures are taken to ensure that the right leader is chosen. Doesn’t meritocracy, who claims, ‘equal pay for equal work’ sound fair enough? In fact, paying us what our work is worth is a paradigm of fairness. But as Normal Daniels beautifully described, “Proponents of meritocracy have been so concerned with combating the lesser evil of non-meritocratic job placement that they have left unchallenged the greater evil of highly inegalitarian reward schedules. One suspects that an elitist infatuation for such reward schedules lurks behind their ardor for meritocratic job placement.”
Let us now take a look at meritocracy in Singapore. The Singaporean interpretation places an overwhelming emphasis on academic credentials as ovjective measures of merit. Meritocracy here is so ‘pure’ to the extent that in some ways we are an elitist state. Elitism, on the other hand, is, in the context of education, the practice of concentrating attention on students who rank highest in a particular field, the other students being deemed less worthy of attention.
This is evident all throughout the years of education the child receives. When he reaches nine, he has to go through the Gifted Education Programme examination. ‘Gifted’ students, the top 1% in Singapore, will be separated from the other students to be ‘nurtured to their fullest potential for the fulfillment of self and the betterment of society’. To skip a few, in Secondary 3, he will have to be yet again filtered out from the students in his level. Depending on the school he is in, his choices will be Triple Science, Double Science, and so on. These are just to name a few.
We see these people, impressionable children and teenagers, climbing up the educational ladder. In a world such as Singapore, those who get better results and are therefore in better schools and streams tend to look down on those who are less academically inclined. We do not blame them. After all, they are just doing what society has allowed them to do, what we have always been silently encouraging. ‘Go on, they are nothing. They are the worst kind of trash. Anyway, you are helping him by making him realize what a trash he is.’ Yes, subconsciously, even the nicest people are influenced. The things that run across an elite’s mind when EM3 is mentioned are probably along the lines of: ‘stupid’, ‘unintelligent’, ‘slow’ and ‘retarded’. Will this help our society? Yes, it may strive people to work harder, but ultimately there is a very big and ominous gap between those who are ‘elite’ and those who are ‘normal’, even when their education cycles are over. This gap is a divide, a divide across the society that cannot be there.
A certain daughter of a certain minister is a classic example of an elite. She is a Raffles Junior College student, her English is fantastic and she was a GEP student. She went online and saw a ‘non-elitist’ post something about Singapore that riled her up (it had nothing to do with her personally). So she went on her own website and wrote a very long entry on this man. We can imagine what the content is like and it is summarized in one sentence: “You are stupid so don’t go around irritating clever people like me with your incoherent posts. Can you actually spell?” (when she herself did not capitalize her ‘I’s and the letter after a full stop)
It didn’t matter that he was a forty-year old man, more than twice her age in years and in experience. It didn’t matter that he was perfectly coherent in his writing, it took only one sentence in his journal for her to deem him as an idiot: the one that described his education level.
Here we can see this conundrum going on. Now, Singaporean youngsters who have good results are attacking people their senior and thinking they are better than them! Where is the respect? Where is the humility? All down the drain from the attention they get for being ‘smart’.
This is another kind of discrimination, one boundary that we are crossing everyday and we don’t even know it.
When Martin Luther King said, “I have a dream that my four children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character,” he was dreaming of a world where his children could count on equal treatment, NOT equal shares of work and rewards. He was dreaming of the kind of equality that is not evident today.
posted by Niennie @ 9:55 AM
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