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PELICAN BOOKS
A485
THE RISE OF THE MERITOCRACY
1870-2033
Born in 1915 of an Irish mother and an Australian father,
Michael Young states that he succeeded in learning very little
at a number ofschools in Australia and England before he was
fourteen. His education began when he arrived at Dartington
Hall, the experimental school in Devon started by Dorothy
and Leonard Elmhirst. He has been connected with Darting-
ton for thirty years, rst as a boy and later as a Trustee.
Michael Young began to study sociology in 1954. He more
or less simultaneously took a very late Ph.D. at the London
School of Economics and started his own research unit in
Bethnal Green, called the Institute of Community Studies.
The Institute s rst report was Family and Kinship in East
London, which he wrote jointly with Peter Willmott. Subse-
quently he founded the Consumers Association (publishers
of Which?) in 1957, and the Advisory Centre for Education
(publishers of Where?) in 1960. As well as being Director of the
I.O.C.S., he is chairman of the Social Science Research Coun-
cil. He is also the author of Family and Class in a London Suburb
(with Peter Willmott, 1960), Innovation and Research in Education
(1965), and Learning Begim at Home (with Patrick McGeeney,
1968). The Rise of the IVIeritocracy was awarded the Silver Casse
prize for the best satirical essay published in Italy during 1963.
*\
EX LIBRIS
Hans Rosenberg
J
MICHAEL YOUNG
THE RISE OF THE
IMERITOCRACY
1870~2033
An Essay on
Education and
Equality
UB BIELEFELD
148/41204184- 1
1lllililllllIIIIHIWIlllllllll1|l11Ill||||1lllllillllllllHllillll
PENGUIN BOOKS
Penguin Books Ltd? Harmondsworth, Mddlesex, England
Pengum Books Inc, 71 IO Ambassador Road, Baltimore, Maryland 21207, U.S.A.
Penguin Books Australia Ltd, Ringwood, Victoria, Australia
First published by Thames & Hudson 1958
Published in Penguin Books {961
Reprinted x962, 1963, 1965, 1967, 1968
Copyright © Thames & Hudson 1958
Made and printed in Great Britain
by Western Printing Services Ltd, Bristol
Set in NIonotype Baskervillc i
3 i
This book is sold subject to the condition
that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise,
be lent, re-sold, hired out, or otherwise circulated
without the publisher s prior consent in any form of
binding or cover other than that in which it is
published and without a similar condition
including this condition being imposed
on the subsequent purchaser
CONTENTS
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
INTRODUCTION
PART ONE: RISE OF THE ELITE
1 CLASH OF SOCIAL FORCES
I Civil service model
2 All things bright and beautiful
3 Family and feudalism
4 Spur of foreign competition
5 Socialist midwives
6 Summary
2 THREAT 0F COMPREHENSIVE SCHOOLS
I Third force in the schools
2 Agitation defeated
3 The Leicester hybrid
4 Summary
3 ORIGINS OF MODERN EDUCATION
1 The most fundamental reform
2 Higher salaries for teachers
3 Boarding grammar schools
4 Progress of intelligence testing
5 Summary
4 FROM SENIORITY TO MERIT
I The class of old men
2 Factories (162156 to be schools
3 Challenge to age
4 Summary
II
CONTENTS
PART TWO: DECLINE OF THE
LOWER CLASSES
5 STATUS OF THE WORKER
1 Golden age of equality
2 Gulf between the classes
3 Pioneers of dirty work
4 The new unemployment
5 Domestic servants again
6 Summary
6 FALL OF THE LABOUR MOVEMENT
1 Historic mission
2 Decline of parliament
3 The technicians
4 Adjustment in the unions
5 Summary
7 RICH AND POOR
I Merit money
2 The modem synthesis
3 Summary
8 CRISIS
I The rst women 3 campaign
2 Modern feminist movement
3 Coming of the crisis
4 New Conservatism
5 A rank and le at last
6 From here, where?
103
106
111
116
120
I23
126
134-
I39
143
149
I52
I55
161
163
170
I75
180
I85
The courage and imagination with which
the development plan is drawn, the. energy
and judgement with Which it is earned mto
eHect, will not only determine the future of
our educational system, but may largely
shape the Future course of the nation s for-
ward march.
The Nation s Schools
Ministry of Education, 1945
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
The author would like to acknowledge the
valuable help and encouragement received
from: A. L. Bacharach, Vincent Brome,
Daphne Chandler, Margaret Cole, C. A. R.
Crosland, Dorothy Elmhirst, Jean Floud,
Geo rey Gorcr, A. H. Halsey, Irving Kristol,
Peter Marris, Enid Mills, Edward Shils,]. H.
Smith, Prudence Smith, R. H. Tawnsy, Peter
Townsend, Peter Willmott, Leonard Woolf,
Joan Young.
INTRODUCTION
WHAT was the connexion between the gutting of the
Ministry of Education and the attempt on the life of the
Chairman of the T.U.C.? Between the unof cial trans-
port strike and the equally unof cial walk-out 0fdomes
tic servants? All these questions are rendered doubly
topical by the general strike which the Populists have
called for the coming May, on the rst anniversary of
the troubles. Will there be a response? Will 2034 repeat
1789 or merely 1848? I would submit that more topical,
and more important, a subject could hardly be discussed.
It touches on a clear and present danger to the state.
The Prime Minister, in his frank report to the House
of Lords, put part of the responsibility for the May
A air upon administrative failings. The wrecking 0f
Wren s store at Stevenage the Prime Minister regards as
a local disturbance; its 2,000 shop assistants were un-
doubtedly incensed by the management s unexpected
rejection ofthe four-day week. Destruction ofthe atomic
station at South Shields might never have happened
with a less provocative director. The walk-out of domes-
tic servants was precipitated by the slowness of the Price
Review, similar trouble in the other Provinces of
Europe being evidence enough for that. Feeling against
the Education Ministry was stimulated by the publica-
tion in April of the last report of the Standing Commis-
sion on the National Intelligence, and so on. All this I
readily accept, yet it is not the whole story. We also
have to explain why administrative miscalculations, that
in an ordinary year would have passed almost unnoticed,
should on this occasion have provoked such erce and
II
THE RISE OF THE MERITOCRACY
concerted protest. To understand what happened, and
so be prepared for what is going to happen, we have to
take the measure of the Populist movement, with its
strange blend of women in the lead and men in the
rank and le.
The women s circles have produced evangelists be-
fore; their eclipse has usually been as sudden as their
rising. Not so the leaders by whom we are now plagued.
They have consolidated their strength. The Convention
they organized at Leicester shortly before Christmas
2032 was their decisive moment. The women s circles
would be mustered that was well known; the women s
sections of the Technicians Party would be there that
was half allowed for. What was not expected was the
attendance of so many representatives, men as well as
women, from local branches of the Party and the
Unions. In de ance of their leaders, they came from all
over the country, and particularly from the North of
England and Scotland this hostility to London and
the South is a sinister aspect of the agitation too much
played down by government sociologists. Even the
Association of Scienti c Benefactors was represented.
From Leicester sprang the ill-assorted conglomeration
which has come to be known as the Populist Movement,
with its strange charter. For the only time within living
memory a dissident minority from the élite has struck up
an alliance with the lower orders, hitherto so isolated
and so docile. Their union fomented the local incidents
in Kirkcaldy and Stevenage, South Shields and White-
hall, into the national crisis of last May.
What does it all mean? Only the historians of the
future will know, perhaps even they will not agree.
Close as we are to the crisis, with every day bringing
fresh news, it is impossible for anyone to be more than
12
INTRODUCTION
t tative in his opinions. No consensiis has yet formed,
11: o icial view is that such an alliance across classe 1
n; is a misalliance, the background of leaders 3112320
so different, and the common interest betweend S .m-
1' ht that the movement cannot last. The Sun a)? at d
S'lgh s in a much quoted, if scurrilous, phrase likene
tzst aof the leaders to Rimsky-Korsakov in a Lyons
S((Jmifler House . Has Somerville vulgarized itself With-
oft nding any deep response? I think noltj, at leasfdlnic:
not agree about the response. The PopuA s 'Ciuached
have gathered such momentum, the May hair e 53m
such dimensions, unless there were 'more than pasentg:
resentments to feed on. My reading is that t ese re
ments have their roots deep in history.
:1:
The purpose of this essay is to discuss some-oftihehl/tiij
torical causes of the grievances that erupted 11:1 6 er:
risings. My theme is that, whethet or not t es: via-
explicitly organized by'the Popuhsts, thgy.weI: cit
tainly organized by history. One belie 1ls t111 pS10W
throughout: there are no revolutions, on y E ast
accretions of a ceaseless change that teproduces}: e p (i
while transforming it. I am not thinlung ofthe t ousan e
and one technical innovations whlch have, fronr fn
point of view, made of the last cehtury an aeon. (3::
commonplaces I will not deal Wlth but rather try a
show that, however odd our great-grandfat egs mm:
now seem, the twenty- rst century 15 woveri on t e sa
loom as neo-Elizabethan times: I shall lllustrate 7:113
essay with references to the period, between Igiénam-
1963, on which I specialized at the Manehesétleil"3 t m
mar School. I would like to acknowledge my e t 0 y
13
THE RISE OF THE MERITOCRACY
sixth-form master, Mr Woodcock, for rst pointing out
to me how revealing a study of that time could be for an
understanding of the progress man has made in the last
century. He rst introduced me to historical sociology as
it has been developed in the ancient universities.
At the beginning of my special period, 1914, the
upper classes had their fair share ofgeniuses and morons,
so did the workers; or, I should say, since a few brilliant
and fortunate working men always climbed up to the
top despite having been subordinate in society, the in-
ferior classes contained almost as high a proportion of
superior people as the upper classes themselves. Intelli-
gence was distributed more or less at random. Each
social class was, in ability, the miniature ofsociety itself;
the part the same as the whole. The fundamental
change of the last century, which was fairly begun
before 1963, is that intelligence has been redistributed
between the classes, and the nature of the classes
changed. The talented have been given the opportunity
to rise to the level which accords with their capacities,
and the lower classes consequently reserved for those
who are also lower in ability. The part is no longer the
same as the whole.
The rate of social progress depends upon the degree
to which power is matched with intelligence. The
Britain ofa century ago squandered its resources by con-
demning even talented people to manual work; and
blocked the efforts of members of the lower classes to
obtain just recognition for their abilities. But Britain
could not be a caste society ifit was to survive as a great
nation, great, that is, in comparison with others. To
withstand international competition the country had to
make better use of its human material, above all, of the
talent which was even in England, one might say always
14
INTRODUCTION
and everywhere, too scarce. Schools and indusiies 1wen:
ressively thrown open to merit, so that t e c eve
chifiren of each generationhad opportunity for afg ril;
The proportion of people w1th LQs over 130 go}? but
be raised ~ the task was rather to prevent a t d on
the proportion ofsuch people in work whiccili c211T : :Xir
their full capacities was steadily 'raise . o SUCK
Rutherford there have in modern times beenEtlen has
magnates, for every Keynes two, and evend gar1 the
had a successor. Civilization does not depen ugm ma-
Stolid mass, the homme moyen tensuel, but upon t i c can
tive minority, the innovator who with one s ro e net
save the labour of 10,000, the brilliant few w 0 can dc
look without wonder, the restless elite who ha: ma k
mutation a social, as well as a biological, fact. T e flanh:
of the scientists and technologlsts, the attistslan d to
teachers, have been swelled, their education Slap:1 in.
their high genetic destiny, their power fog goo 011d
creased. Progress is their triumph; the mo em w
onument.
lihglyet, ifwe ignore the casualties ofprogress, Wif i
victim, in the sphere ofhuman relations, to the 1n51 10Ch
complacency which in natural selence we 50h m: to
deplore. In the balanced View of soc1oiogy we aEV r
consider the failures as well as the successes. fve'y
selection of one is a rejection of many. Let us be1 rant
and admit that we have failed to assess the menta dstaste
of the rejected, and so secure their necessary. a like
ment. The danger that has settled in upon us Since h t
shock administered by the events of the last year is tda
the clamouring throng who nd the gates of higher e n;
cation barred against them may turn agalnst thegomgt
order by which they feel themselves condemned. g 11$S
the masses, for all their lack of capac1ty, some 1m
I5
behave as though they suffered from a sense of indig-
nity? Do they necessarily see themselves as we see them?
We know it is only by giving free rein to well-trained
imagination and organized intelligence that humanity
can hope to reach, in centuries to come, the ful lment
it deserves. Let us still recognize that those who com-
plain of present injustice think they are talking about
something real, and try to understand how it is that
nonsense to us makes sense to them.
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PART ONE
RISE OF THE ELITE
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CHAPTER ONE
CLASH OF SOCIAL FORCES
I. CIVIL SERVICE MODEL
THE I 8705 have been called the beginning ofthe modern
era not so much because of the Commune as because of
Mr Forster. Education was then made compulsory in
Britain, patronage at last abolished in the civil service
and competitive entry made the rule. Merit became the
arbiter, attainment the standard, for entry and advance-
ment in a splendid profession,1 which was all the more an
achievement because so many of our great-grandfathers
were positively hostile to competition wallahs in Brit-
ish government. Considering the opposition, it is re-
markable that by 194.4 the most brilliant young men
from Cambridge and Oxford were already going into
the administrative class, there to guide the destinies of
the nation; outstanding young men from the provincial
universities into the hardly less important scienti c and
technical grades; worthy young men and women from
the grammar schools into the executive grades; the less
1. The authors of the Northcote-Trevelyan report were com-
mendably aware of what was needed. It would be natural to ex-
pect that so important a profession would attract into its ranks the
ablest and the most ambitious of the youth of the country; that the
keenest emulation would prevail among those who had entered it;
and that such as were endowed with superior quali cations would
rapidly rise to distinction and public eminence. Such, however, is
by no means the case. Admission into the civil service is indeed
eagerly sought after, but it is for the unambitious, and the indolent
or incapable, that it is chie y desired. Northcote Trevelyan
Report on the Organization of the Permanent Civil Service (Feb-
ruary 1854).
I 9
THE RISE OF THE MERITOCRACY
outstanding joined the junior clerical grades; and the
ne body ofmen and women who were the backbone of
the service entered the manual and manipulative grades
straight from the elementary (later called secondary
modern) schools. Here was a model for any sensible
organizer to emulate. It was copied a thousand times in
commerce and industry, at rst mainly by the large
companies like Imperial Chemicals and Unilever, and
later by the ever-proliferating public corporations.
The aw in these otherwise admirable arrangements
was, of course, that the rest of society, and in particular
education, was not yet run on the civil-service principle.
Education was very far from proportioned to merit.
Some children ofan ability which should have quali ed
them as assistant secretaries were forced to leave school
at fteen and become postmen. Assistant secretaries
delivering letters! it is almost incredible. Other chil-
dren with poor ability but rich connexions, pressed
through Eton and Balliol, eventually found themselves
in mature years as high of cers in the Foreign Service.
Postmen delivering démarc/zesl what a tragic farce! The
civil service, wrestling with an intractable problem, did
something to make up for injustice in the larger society
by enlarging opportunities for elevation within its own
ranks. Particularly in wartime, it substituted late devel-
opers from the lower grades for early deterioraters who
managed to pass their nal examinations only to sink
exhausted into the Treasury. Clever clerks could even in
peacetime climb on to a quite different ladder; a few of
them became executives, and in their later years a few
of these broke into the lower ranks ofthe administrative
class. The limits were the de ciencies ofthe general edu-
cational system. Only when the school did its job were
the Civil Service Commissioners able to do theirs.
20
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When
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great 1 6
Completed.
The names in the Imperia
CLASH OF SOCIAL FORCES
more assistant secretaries had to leaveschool
110 and no more postmen were sent to Balliol, the
niorm begun in the 18705 could at last be
f this example is dif cult to over-estlmate.
1 Calendar a hundiéied years
' ' ' e renowned, for goo reason,
ago adornfci::li:11xAisoe:l/cl.cHow close the analogy With
as the bes et ' Today we have an élite selected accord
modem SO'Cris :nd educated according to deserts, With a
ing to;ml in philosophy and administration as well as
groun mg S s of science and sociology. The adrninistra-
1T1 theltwoin the old civil service was also plcked for
thC' C assd iven an education which was far more than
bra1n§ anl gand yet had a bearing (like the Roman and
VOC'auOIha t other great Imperial Civil Service, of China)
unhkeg atasks they were later called upon to perform.
uptan tvie frankly recognize that democracy can be no
r12r§§than aspiration, and have rule not so rnuch by t};
people as by the Cleverest people; not an ar1::::rar:1:ri
birth not a plutocracy of wealth, but a . exer-
tocrahy1 of talent. Likewise, the oldlcwll sergx; than
cised, with skill and tact, a great3:12; 31(2)::I1: and W611
'ament because 1t was s .
tifiiied. Today each membier oft(]rmi:1r11etrlil:oct;(r);c;0l:: f2:
attested minimum rating 0 125 w S retaries
holo ists, sociologists, and Permanent ec
izgefrved gsince the Crawley Jay award of 2.018 1:12;:1:
over 1605): has not Tauber s retrospective
The force 0
. .
1. The origin of this unpleasant term, like that off; Seqtieagéglgf
tunityi is still obscure. It seems'to have been r g. mals
opp(1min the sixties of the last century in small-eirculation JOU Ch
:ffached to the Labour Party, and gained Wide currency mu
later on.
2!
THE RISE OF THE MERITOCRACY
shown that a century ago the majority of the adminis-
trative class already had indices higher than 125? These
were the rudiments of the modern system. If today in
telligence reigns supreme and in three-quarters of the
world unchallenged, a modest tribute must be paid to
the far-sighted pioneers of the British civil service. It is
an exaggeration, an excusable one, to say that our
society is a memorial to them no less than to the early
socialists.
2. ALL THINGS BRIGHT AND BEAUTIFUL
Until the civil service reforms the greater part ofsociety
was governed by nepotism. In the agricultural world
which predominated until well on in the nineteenth cen-
tury, status was not achievable by merit, but ascribed
by birth. Class by class, status by status, occupation by
occupation, sons followed faithfully in the footsteps of
fathers, and fathers as faithfully behind grandfathers.
People did not ask a boy what he was going to be when he
grew up; they knew he was going to work on the land
like his ancestors before him. For the most part there
was no selection for jobs; there was only inheritance.
Rural society (and its religion) was family writ larger.
With the father at the head, the status of the other
members of the family was graded in a hierarchy, with
eldest son ranking before younger1 and sons before
I. From the time that primogeniture became generally estab~
lished, younger sons who had to leave the family threshold were the
tillers of achievement and merchants of social change. But until
the nineteenth century, population increased but slowly, and it
was comparatively rare for there to be more than one son alive to
inherit at the death of the father. In my special period the Nazis
deliberately reintroduced primogem'ture in Germany in order to
drive younger sons off the land into the army and to the short-
lived colonies in Eastern Europe.
22
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CLASH OF SOCIAL FORCES
- ' ' 'llage. The lord of
the family so 1n the V1 . _ .
daughters; Salsnthe patriarch, and below _h1m 1n tthlI
the marao Grees were the farming population, the bree-
roper Tzihking abOVC copyholders, copyholders a ove
hoggirs cottagers above farm servants.
C0 o
The rich man in his castle,
The poor man at hzs gate,
He made them high and lowly
And ordered their estate. .
All things bright and beautzful, etc.
' ' kin dom: the Royal Family,
As in hh hV lhEehihgr gg hisgcountry, stooel over the
heade ()1, estates of the realm. As in the kingdom on
orders arin the Kingdom ofHeaven. The same man was
earth s ; the head of the table. Sucha rule was hardly
Sbgzéhed to encourage youthful ambition. h. .an can
In holding a mirror to th;1East, eve?1(:33;Iisgtgice and
ima e 0 IS own _ ,
seldorrilr tciiglelyfhiinpossgible for any laymana taking for
It ls pd as he does the logic of human engmeermg, to
ihiineZtand the apparent folly ofhis aneesg rs. 13fc3225:
rann 7, waste, and rigidity 1n e .0 sy .
hhftrfhti Zs notsall. Lord Salisbury once. said he coiullc;
t think of a logical defence of the heredltary prmc £31
nod for that reason, was disinchned to glve 1t up. e
:vras able to speak with such assurancedbefi iejuts gxgy:
one whose roots were in the couhtrym e, f mil
' ' heritance when agriculture was a a y
:é Zirf /asnalmost self-evident. Agriculture demanded
I Things were di erent in the towns, graced as always, by
people of the middle sort ; where, in Defoe s words, Draymen
and Porters ll the City Chair; and Footboys Magisterial Purple
wear.
23
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THE RISE OF THE MERITOCRACY
hard and unremitting exertion, and, in the
mental climate, this was best secured when
would bene t from i
inherit. Agriculture demanded that the fertility of the
soil should be continuously nourished, not exploited for
temporary gain; and the long view was instilled in
people who had at heart the interests of posterity, as
embodied in their own family. Inheritance at once
prompted exertion, instilled responsibility, and pre-
served continuity.
The soil grows castes; the machine makes classes. The
old system was good enough as long as England de-
pended upon primitive agriculture, but as indu
grew, feudalism was more and more of a restraint upon
e iciency. It was not so much inheritance of property1
that mattered. Indeed, the more riches a father be-
queathed, the more often his children did nothing apart
from the labour of spending their money. When the
family was pensioned off, the power descended from the
fathers to paid managers selected for their ability,
1. An amusing instance of the tendency ofsocialists to live in the
past was their continued insistence, long after wealth in land had
ceased to count, on the need for equalizing holdings ofproperty). For-
tunately, as it has turned out, they were very much less concerned
with the distribution ofpowcr, which is by no means equated with
the distribution ofwealth in any but an agricultural society. Fenn s
rst maxim for the student of historical sociology - where goes
power, there go I was not rst for nothing.
24-
stry
prevailing
men knew
they were working for children and grandchildren who
mprovement as they would suffer
from neglect. Agriculture demanded that the toilers
o the soil, lest the always precarious
supply of food should fail, and this attachment was best
safeguarded when children were set to learn and love,
at an age when they were at their most impressionable,
the little peculiarities of the land they would one day
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CLASH OF SOCIAL FORCES
' ist as it should be. What mattered mczlst W8:
WhiCh was JL f children who inherlted power an pos
the number 0 wealth. It is amazing how many doctor:
tion as W611 asof doctors, how many lawyers the sohs 0
were the SOnSd likewise with professions of many kinds.
lawyers -anand commerce, many successful men pr;
In indUStIY (:1 their Children up the social ladder into t. e
ferred t0 56?! yen in business job successmn was quite
prOfessmIIthfugh to be a very serious impediment to
common h able fathers did bear
- - t rall enoug , .
prlduhilgi tzri thhgugh ess often before the spread Ofm
ab 6 C
' ' ere doubl entitled to them
telligenlc marxiiltaiZSwel/lfgg girth. But hzw sadly frequent
power, by mjsite - the son who did not match hIS father,
was the (hPiit was perhaps of a different kind, whose
wh0§6 a 1 r: to art or philosophy instead of busmess,
leanlngs wener was curdled by the nearness of hls
or Whose 6 d g2; down he sat at his father s desk arrd
pawn; - 2; wyarm for his own son. Marty sons did tlllleir
hep: tb; :raining and application, to abide by Goet e 3
es ,
inStYUCtlon- Really to own whatyou inherit .
You rst must earn it byyour merit.
B t hat was the use? There are limits to selt-decegtlgnl:
Hliiryan tragedy was also social waste.1 Unt1l the u e
I The importance of calculating this wastage w:31:15:72:$27312:
. far sighted pioneers. Professor Hog ens . 1 omit-
Ohhe mos't ti ate how far the process of occupationa re. d
W6 113212;)nwclesongspecial aptitude for a particular occupation, agi-
Eingiiiblzsrel of political arithmetic is then to Cts'ant:(:11;£61135: Of
' ial or aniza ion
ab]? wailtiagc duethu llttirffgcnzlfersgfiom . gPolitical Arithmetw, .1938:
50031 e Clcnzicglier Kenneth Lindsay had calculated, in an m 1;.
5011.16 year: 6that roved ability to the extent of atlleast forty _p
entlta10:03:; natiog s children was then being demed expressron.
cen
25
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THE RISE OF THE MERITOCRACY
Act began to take e ect in the seventies and eighties,
Britain was outstanding among industrial countries as
the home and fount 0f nepotism in a hundred subtle
forms.
Almost any intelligent observer could see how crimi.
nal this was. In the last century countless crises and
disasters were caused by the wrong father s son or
(sometimes) daughter lying in the wrong place at the
wrong time. Why then did a system ofinheritance suit.-
able to agriculture survive for so long? Britain had been
an industrial country for well over a century before it
rooted out nepotism. Why such a gap between the end
of dependence upon the soil and the end of dependence
upon caste? One of the reasons is obvious enough. This
island enjoyed a doubtful blessing: it was never invaded,
never completely defeated in war, never shaken by poli-
tical revolution. The country was, in short, never Jolted
way, today was never, after 1914, as brilliant as yester-
day. Britain lived on ancestral capital, and the more it
did so, the more it had to do so; the dimmer the present,
the greater the justi cation for escaping from it. A
strange doctrine, I know, for a modern sociologist, but I
Social Progreu and Educational Waste, 1924. It was not until much
later, however, that Professor Marlow was, on a body of cogent
assumptions, able to estimate the wastage in the U.K. as having
been equal to about thirty~eight megaunits per annum in the for-
ties, falling to about thirty-three in the sixties, to about eighteen by
the nineties and to 5-2 megas in the 20205. This is said to be the
irreducible minimum, or in technical terms the Marlow Line,
beyond which social ef ciency cannot further be improved. But
after all that has happened in the past century, who can safely
predict what further progress may still be possible? Nor is the basis
of these calculations yet altogether satisfactory.
26
a
CLASH OF SOCIAL FORCES
d too
' ' t too many people ha
6 1n saymg tha .
0t aims; of history, along With too dull a sense of
a sen
future might be persuaded to yield. It was not
m n
harp
L whatgiein the nineteenth century, but by the middle of
like t 1
the twentiet
much revere
h tradition was over-valued, continuity too
6:. For every change there had to be at:
Britain in other words, remained 'rural-mln e1
CCdem' i lity per cent of its population were co -
long after etlfei in towns - altogether as strange an
lgded 1:05)? cultural lag on a mass scale as China before
examp
thC Mao D Yna:;lfiip took the Iorm of reverence tor old
Ancesmlwwhurches the most amazing comage, the
houses and C_ hts ahd measures, Guards regiments,
St W:lgold cars, cricket, above all the hereditarg
en,d in a less obvious way the class arourid
namely the aristoctacy, whlch cour-
a more splendid past. Even po 1
' f the royal
' llors borrowed some 0
' s as Privy Counm , MG}
umarhhr civil servants coyly called themselyes :ImCth
glamStat e itself had high prestige because it 2. em
The f the status of the aristocracy who hsed to gov '
some 0 t In the United States (Without an artst
racy) it was for long assumed that all 1gove:riirr:§:-
:3; bad whereas in Britain peopl: were aNxévtayénly the
, t etter.
overnments were no . ' .
t that gt all the most important institutions of. the
a he Universities to the Royal Soc1ety,
ket Club to the T.U.C., from
quainte
public 17101.15
monarchy a
the monarchy,
trace its descent from
the governmen
nan
governmen
country, from t .
from the Marylebone Crlc
V ' 653 as in
In England piety ne er Went to quite such an exc 5
[aplan where the prevailing sentiment was expressed m a iamou
3
Poem: Precious are my parents that gave me bzrth,
So that I might serve His Majesty.
27
THE RISE OF THE MERITOCRACY
boast of a peer on its boar
father- gure in the collecti
so pervasive that brilliant p
right, were sometimes ashamed of their lowl
instead of proud that they
1975 managers of important rms were st
(often without knowing why)
tlemen of independent means . I
not men but o icers; in indust
men. They pretended, in a ritu
not have to earn their living at
their jobs two or three hours
ployees; came dressed in a suit
than the factory; occupied an 0
drawing-room, with not a si
vulgar as a digital computer; nourished themselves from
a cocktail cabinet just like the one at home; ate at the
rm s expense in a canteen laid out to look lik
n the army they were
ry not men but gentle
alistic way, that they did
all managers arrived at
after their manual ern-
cut for the club rather
ice which looked like a
gn to be seen of anything so
d. The aristocracy was th
ve unconscious; its in uenc
eople, successful in their Own
y origins)
had risen above them. Of all
feudalism and
ill behaving
as though they were gen-
CLASH OF SOCIAL FORCES
' k: the
ade hobby into WOT
_ much as they m ' icked the
O hoiziiffess of life began ghint:61yTniiliglelaborate
iouS . Of old at the F5 ' . . d b
orti g squlsrenamrally and disastrously ?:?:nagt:
fret nge wa at every level. Str1kes beset t ek n time
Ub fdl atisicd to stop the labourers iom ta 1 gof the
ho T The ong arm
ment W ' tervals, for tea.
ent 1n . . rrest.
Off! at frigihad product1v1ty securely under a
_ aIiStOCra
3 FAMILY AND FEUDALISM
' never have lasted so lohg,
Aristoeratic lll laenwfithVSEtldthe support 0f.the family:
even 111 Eng ailarhily go together. The family IS always
f inheritance. The ordinary parent (n?gduil;
the plum O we must sorrowfully adn ut) wan A
known COClaYa oney to his child rather than to outs:1 (:3
hand 011 Inst ntle' the child was part of himself anki 211
or to the' S a r)o erty to him the father assured a n
bequeathmip t5 himself: the hereditaryifather never
Oi: immorta lrits had a family business whlch 1n a semi:
dled' If EaEECmSElVCS, they were even more anx10us e
embqglgn to someone of their own1 bloodttguréigntigeh:
ass 1 ' rt , aso con r
.bytiiéifiihii522%2: ofa
Cili iltli v: an assertion of power in industrial as It a
a .
iation on birds which reached such ext::::d;fr 1:1£};
.L Tifns after the General Election of 1971 wasTali: 01d aristo-
(1:21:25: legacies of the sporting sgurlre aim: psifgga their amorous
5 ' s o
' h ch they ten er y , CC
lra ti'st bréilhbiilellcsl glaéses and themselves deveilogazd the 31332211111
MISWI 7' ' ftheEngis ace- ,
' . Oscar Wilde said o 60 16
Of thelrelriignrhered ~ it did not apply'to these str:?§:t£e E1):0-
Igveixthglogy bridged two worlds by making a pastim
m
fessional into a science for the amateur.
29
r :
,
s
i
t
THE RISE OF THE MERITOCRACY
been in agricultural Britain, Even if they had
perty, parents wanted their children to nd,
same job, then a slightly better job than themseh,e
Study upon study has shown how impelling these driv
were (and are) and how strong
parents to advance their child
where none existed was the sa
million homes.
For hundreds of
between two great
by family and the principle of selection by merit. Vic.
tory has never gone fully to one principle or the Other,
The champions of the family have argued that for
ing children there has not yet been any adequate
stitute for the device which has served mankind so
Children raised in orphanages, even the most en.
lightened, seem to lack the inner assurance needed to
convert potential into actual ability. If all went to
orphanages, all would have equal opportunity, true,
but at the cost of making everyone equally unhappy,
Steady affection from the same parents ~ this has been
generally accepted since the experiments in the late
19805 - is necessary for the full glandular development
of the infant. Love is biochemistry s chief assistant.
We have had to put up with the failings of the family.
We have had to recognize that nearly all parents are
going to try to gain unfair advantages for their off-
spring. The function of society, whose ef ciency de~
pends upon observing the principles of selection by
merit, is to prevent such sel shness from doing any
serious harm. The family is the guardian of individual,
the state the guardian of collective ef ciency, and this
function the State is able to perform because citizens are
themselves divided in their interests. As members of a
30
ren. T0 imagine me
rear.
sub.
far.
if not the
3.
v
es
the motive possessed by:
. r t
nctioned psychosis of a i
. :- " gaI'S ago,
years socxety has been a battlegmund
principles the principle ofselection ' ts functions of
T it from haVing a
onal system.
-,zfam1] Y' The
reaction -
I _ recent evidence 0
CLASH OF SOCIAL FORCES
they want their children to have 6216?,
the same time they are oppose (i
e s children. They desu e equa
er one else s children, extra for their
3 fociirfi; {Zr the general interest, the State
tan
' e su ort to uphold it against
E erefom commsaiftliiiisgvrhlich ipprovokes. Up till a few
The bitter OPPO eral view amongst intelligent people
the gfelhad performed with admirable effect
Sta policing the family, so as to prevent
my undue in uence on. the occupla-
We underestimated the resistance of t 6}
home is still the most fertile seed-bed 0
was that the
this point is not so much to teview the
f family discontent as to outlineéts his-
' ' to stress that, espite
' round. My Intent ls . . -
toncal high? changes of the last centuries, the familybls
the maih the same kind ofinstitution,-1nsp1red rhore y
:tlll 1?;than reason, that it used to be 1n feudal times.
oya
My Purpose at
4. SPUR OF FOREIGN COMPETITION
. . . . . .1
H' torical analysis indicates the ineVItabihtyhof farrriiioy
IS osition to progress; also the necessrty oi: t e nae S 0f
013?: The aristocracy and the family ~ twm spitirsigcm1
'Crertyia have not, we know, managed to 1s itoph d to
1pl itwress The reason is simple: thatBritamld aif rahad
b . i ' ompetitive wor .
' 1th other nations in a c . . -
:11; Vhleen for the spur of international rivalry, the 1:15:31:
cro ,
' t have become more V1.0
nal somety would no. ~ ' WOUId never
' ' tion in the c1v1l serv1ce
competitive selec S a Whele.
1ar for the natlon a .
have become the exemp Of
The wars of the last century, as the apotheoms
31
L FORCES
THE RISE OF THE MERITOCRACY F SOCIA
CLASH 0
n
f the
I ut o the statute book at the end 0
, were p
. : l I 1 at
. V- - ice
1nternat10na1 competltlon, were also the g e forcmg that the cause of reform, 1n c1V11 serv
3 nor
house for merit. At the time people used to say that in
- trongly
. . .
- v10us Century SO S
war there were no Vlctors; v1ctor and vanqmshed, all ' was 111 the pl :
suffered alike. In the perspective of history we can See a ted by the Cmmea.
- he pacemaker
- - - , - ountmes was t
how untrue thlS was. Before nuclear ssmn arrlved, War - th other C
. . . GompCtlthn W1 -
bene ted everyone, espec1ally the defeated countnes \
: m
The Enghshman was made So it ieall;
111 l w . ff ' ' ' mi ht be a contra IC 0
witness ussia, er any, Chma. War Stlmulated in. . ortless superlonty g
vention, and, even more i portant, ar stimulated the
bove the cosiness of Lords, the exclusweness
better use of human resources. In the First World War
5 I t t-HO Illlllu) [661 t h -
|C 30111110161106 Of tlle I CdeI athn of
ul S I [0 . \f S(;1)1 and
hadow of the clever
ri s loomed the s t a1}
- Sh Indus t 6 5 Stem was even u y
gence tests,1 so successfully that practlcally all ar {E ggnen hls mternal class y
adopted the same practice I
' tem with which
' rnatlonal class sys _ .
. ' changed by the 111}: ise obsessed - for ever dlscussmg
Ized on later occasmns. In the 11 CW
in terms: a
mies
when they Were mobil.
m.
war many as they were, once
age became the test was an argument for educational
reform. It was no accident that the three great educa-
tion Acts of the rst half-century, in 1902, 1918, and
I. The directive setting out the objectives the U.S. Army wished
to achieve has an air of extraordinary prescience about it. The test
0 d '
opment battalions such men as
y as to be unsuited for regular military
to build up organizations of uniform
, or in accordance with de nite speci cations con-
cerning intellectual requirements; to select men for various types
ofmilitary duty or for special assignments; to eliminate men whose
intelligence was so inferior as to make it impossible to use them at
all. Quoted Eysenck, H. J. Use: and Abmes Qquyclwlogy. 1953.
_ more, of R
Englishmen were
(
. {)lllllly Was a rst Class Power, OI aftCI
C! thelr C
Wheth
ird-class, or no class at all.
some SCtbaFk) sec:?(tlh:1?::t:1:ntury the fear was of Ger-
At the bégln mfniddle years, of Amencan andz ever:
many; In t 6'an competition; at the end, of (Ehmese.
t:5:1 the threat of the other country :1 ME:-
At each S gther country s trade and, more an md ,
ments, the Of the other country s science, was use to
the threat 0 resistance to change. It was always a ques-
batter doWIll't The other countries had chosen betteg
tion Of (tuf izltlyand by better training, .had produces!-
Efxnnilta tfetter aerhnauts, better phys101sltise,db:it:;tiastts
tter a .
nis tratorgidarrl it Zzohie iéebstle waggnvit-ing tlefeleltt
It: Bnt lm r olr in trade; the recurring CI ISCS 111 t e
Clther 1T1 Flaa ments made the second seem atmost :8
balance Othfezit as the rst. For the sake of survwal, 1t e
Sg flgyahad to meet the challenge of other countnes ess
the second
' alnst makmg Chlnese
e battle 1n the 19905 ag . mum con
1 1-11th in schools was an interestmg example ?:fglutragmg it.
szlt'lgatisgm in a profession whose prlmary role 15 1
33
CLASH OF SOCIAL FORCES
- . . . . h a,
anythzng we have achzeved. Tins 13 a matter whzc nee s
dim attention O/ H M4/ WS Government . - - ifwe
__ i to keep abreast but even to maintain our proportzon-
110
£3 in 13/28 world.1
, , he reasons for the sorry state to which Sir Winston
:
A . ducatign was too hmited and
0t go 011' aferred were that hlgher e
from th lence 1f not 1n the artsJ th ._ b the wrong people. In 1945 as many as half
On t§1§g$?0nwealtlh began to dry up aftereIZZI;p1y: Cfgggmzu number of students at the universities did
man
u 0
. .
mg The dOUghty I3 th)1:310maarmngs are sull most mov not have an adequate mtelhgence at all. At present
rster, when introducing the 5 rather 1555 than tWo per cent of the population reach the
Wg 0n 17 February 1870 semi Univergltles. About ye per cent of the whole popula-
mtle not dew}. Upon t/zg speed) - - , den show, on test, an Intelhgence as great as the upper
educatzon depends our industrial J 1{77011231012 of elementary . half of the students, who amount to one per cent of the
mg i0 give tec/mz'cal teaching to 01:703pr72g); It V 0f 710 use [0; ' , opulation Ten years later many able working class
educatzon; uneducated labourer; _ a ZSam wzt/zaut elementaty 1 i Shildren were still not getting to universities at all.3 So
are um ) uneducated are for {:7}: man} 0f 02 labourer; little intelligenCe at the universities! Many able people
laboztrers, and if we leave our wor/gfjgknzg [57::; 5:21:51? _ not getting there at all! No wonder the annual pro
3 ductivity increment in the thirty years after 1945 was
duly three per cent! N0 wonder the famous Mlmstry of
Education report on Early Leaving lamented the mass of
, Lwasted academic ability which was squandered on
Ice /7 le smail- mere manual jobs instead of being cultivated in the
terminea energy
' J
2072 0f the world,
. 1. Reported in The Times, 6 December 1955. At that time Great
- mBritain was producing fewer graduates in engineering and other
L applied sciences than almost any other major country: 2,800 a
year, or 57 per million of population, in Britain; compared with
22,000, or 136 per million, in U.S.A.; and 60,000, or 280 per
h V" million, in the U.S.S.R. France was producing 70 per million,
Western Germany 86 per million, and Switzerland 82 per million.
See Technical Education, 1956. H.M.S.O. Cmd. 9703.
2. Barlow Report on Scienti c Manpower. May 1946. H.M.S.O.
Cmd. 6824.
3. Report on university education published for the Committee
of Vice Chancellors and Principals by the Association of Univer-
sities of the British Commonwealth, 1957.
35
IAL FORCES
THE RISE OF THE MERITOCRACY
grannnar schools. Fortunatel
over matched in the competition of the world Was 3
real and was stressed so vigorously in the last halfgfth
century, the need to subordinate everything else to the
claims of production so pressing, that education
LASH OF soc . '
C death duties (the dunes hawhg to
e occasion could not be) hy g1???
I f their property before they died. e
W much 0 - ' he rst
ed th1s evasmn by t
Sts eveniuligi/esStTEIin these successes pale by the
ita '
y, the danger of be' grants dodged
ided because th
' nd
. . _ was a f' 311 0a.? test achievemmt .- the progresswe a
last de01s1vely reformed and the farmly torn away fro ; bf then grea t of the educatlonal system.
the feudal embrace. m giaamental improveggiglity of opportunity was un-
T _, reater
im-
Or SO we thought.
1 ' Pif ssure £021 is a result elementary SChOOl; Zifgflum-
eeasing, anondary education made free, an
sec
5. SOCIALIST MIDWIVES 6d: - ' ' d. Although the
: 'rov _ . holarshlps multiphe _
Ber Of u'mvfhrtszltqotfcl 944 Was introduced bY ahconSERo;
Edu iogter in a Coalition Govgrnm ntagcf flililgren
tivc 1n Labour Party. A ter t a _ _
was theguzfattilg according to then age, ablhty and
1 were a . ' ' tting more edu-
, 1th reater ability g6
aptitude : those W g
cation-
A11 in a
of pro.
gress . The socialists accelerated the growth of large-
scale organizations, and, unlike small businesses, these
encouraged promotion by merit.1 The Coal Board Was
in its own way as in uential as the civil service. The
11 the British socialists of the rst three
uence and job succes- , . ~ _ on and his
( arters 0f the last century (11k: sai trftftl commend-
many qu . 200 ears ago We
of them republished in Harvard Socialist Documents) followers in 1J5iraullc mIttdZdness with which they attacked
made a practice of ridiculing the current criterion of able for the smg 6
success it s not what you kno
counts . They denounced i
Death duties were not their
they who so powerfully nouri
that the children of rich pa
advantage denied to the c
' ' ' ro ert , '0b, and education.
the eV s Of tigerxglecgggtiedpto iiiejquality it was to thle
In SO far as tiom inheritance, and the form of equa }
kinds omngred most was in the truly Vital theatre. o
ity they {98%It is all very well for our modern fermmst:
opportuiilttyin their discrimination they ('10 not eoun
ti: 55:21:13as socialists; history is alwaysclloemg Tigris:
e ' ' ' needs to e onew
but to F rhythztlflThggojiahsts were the men who lire-
L 33:55:: 1:2w mental climate within the span ofless t an
i a Thieurzeatest of their intellectual leaders (1? ntgerse
1 than elagborate a critique of inheritance. The om ,
37
w but who you know that
nheritance of property.
triumph alone but it was
shed the moral conviction
rents should never receive
hildren of poor. For many
1. Large enterprises also needed more educated people. In 1930
s Electrical Company, to take an exa
WWim
wttw
mmmm
mwwW
M
t
Certi cate, as it was then
February 1956.
36
the forms of a quite un
dedicated, disciplined, and above all educated
were chosen primarily
, Wlth a success which hist
rms, that leadership
any of its forms, is but a
the goal with characteri
This a /zazard Mobocmcy, he cried, must be replaced by
democratic aristocracy: that is, by the dictatorJ/zzp, not 0f the
whole proletariat, but of t/zat ve per cent of it capable of con-
ceiving the job and pioneering in the drive toward: its divine
goal.2
1 WCbb, 5- and B,
Longmans, 1935,
2. Fabian Essays. Postscript to 1948 Edition on Sixty Years of
Fabianism .
Soviet Communixm A New Civilization.
that went W
"I link reverencet uence was so buttressed by the feudal
' l ' m a
/ These forces on .t
Struggle to superlOI
SOCIAL FORCES
r E H What?1 Shaw
5 Palztwal What 5' .
eat} '5 2:31:10?) strikingly that 1t 13 Stlll read to
ted t 11
us students of social thought.
semo
(:LASH OF
63 SUMMARY
O I iC have shaped our
f the somal forces wh h
5 Sketch d remind-
' We should hardl 1166
' mihar enough. y
" g 15 fa
born of con ict. The
t1m_, has ever been
111g that; Frag;:isistocracy, and the gentry, all the thmgs
monarc V9 ' long held
' ultural past, were too
1th graZngesult the family, always conser-
' a
' ' fwealth, ofjob, and
hold mherltance, o .
£0 reitige, long after thelclalms 0f ef cxtehESy
above all, 0 p fully recognized 1n other coun 1n .
had been more he one side only yielded after a ohg
strength on the other. The necgssny
. . . ar
' d international competltloh 1n peace an W13-
to WlthStan home upon all the most mtelhgent 13:31:56,
wag 1tfriez oour Party, expressing theCigrlevamcg seomasses
an t e herit 0r bequeath, rew up
With ngtglgfrthellind the more far-sighted leaders of all
in goo ,
tradition as
political persuasions.
I. See, for instance: pp. 345 HT, 1944.
ENSIVE SCHOOLS
COMPREH
AT 0F
t progress (up
. , . came to represeh . _
,, behmd t?§;:,is) againSt soclahsts who obstllr:
. . c _
' '11 their increasmgly 1rrelevant attathe
: erslst§d l-anism- 1 do not mean to cashgate
, o egalltag;rty At no time did the left-wugg ch23;
' rm
Labour rehensive schools commaEdPa rt They
ions 0f Congbrity in the counsels of t e da ntgl their
gconsistent m J'al in uence all the same, an u h' h I
' had a subsist ? (1 out the educational reforms, w 1c
' n ZZ e 2
Campatg y relate in this chapter, could not be com
CHAPTER TWO
THREAT OF COM?REHENSNHESCHQOL
recently,
I. THIRD FORCE IN THE SCHOOLS
sory as this always is)
which man must abcjy.
mission. Ofnothin
i here no lesson has
lawaV . h middle 0f the century practical sociahsts
sub. '11 t e
' advancement for ment. .The
identi ed eqlfiai/lvtgerzv1:16 left wing emphasized a dlffer-
trouble starte tion of equality, and, ignormg dl ererllcefsc
ent interpregél't urged that everyone, those w1th ta eri
in human 21 1 1 3without, should attend thesame schoo3
as well a'5 tholje same basic education. The 155116 attame
and recetVC t C rominence in the political controversies
exTorggbianEl 19705. Dr Nightingale has shown 1n 15
of t e I
' l Origins of the Comprehensive Schools that the move-
Socza
' ' el b sentimental egah-
ment _WaS Hflsfhzetxinoldegnlihit,Yfaryremoved ftotn thhe
tananlsmdod realism of Bernard Shaw, and 1t ls t 15
hihictlzhhxnztitutes its signi cancle; for us tiiazéihe'f é
w at came .
treIniStS 11891: 61:71:12; :Ig lrirllgint could not be aceurately
future 36V: tIFe tender age of e1even."I'he stran} upon
aSS SS a (1 children of the compet1t1ve exanunatlon
parents an at Once children were shepherded mt:
was too gres it was too dif cult for those who tieyelope
Separate penfer from one to another. Their chlef tnterest
Lklate t0 traliwever so much educational as 3001211; the
giwliiéers claimhd that to segregate the clever from
4.1
i
. §
been done I have alread g
g
2
the power of the family. I I
hod of advance, to which 3 a
The other complementary met
turn, has been to enhance the in uence of the
I now
I have, in the previous chapter, given the Labour
Party due credit for the truly Vital part it played in
undermining the old hereditary system. I must now, in
order to redress the balance, explain that in the middle
ged its clothes. Previously
ow-caste ability, stood for
ste leadership of the Con-
anged sides, and the Con-
with the new meritocracy growing in
40
of the century the Party chan
Labour, with support from 1
progress against the high-ca
servatives. Then the two ch
servatives,
v...
were, naturally turned tru
ting responsibility for this
the comprehensive high schools.
can children attended these as a
book, The Future of Socialism, written by the young Mr C. A: R.
Crosland in 1956.
THE RISE OF THE MERITOCRAGY PREHENSIVE SCHOOLS
the stupid was to deep REAT 0F COM
en class divisions. The t'me
VP * Wmt e ft-sttisfzsay
F0 1 ' 't n. . .
that all children, irrespective of sex, race, creed P; __ Contracted indi cilsympathy for then Amen-
(that was all right but they went on), 07 ability; Sho Z left wingers ha
be 1Umped together.
Their underlying attitudes W61: 3:01:33;
others: ssed emigrants who set t e . .
The dleposse re in revolt against the patroruzmg
can somety W hbery' so were the underprlv eged
pearl 'SnOAmerihans, far from prizmg bram-
Ema?rl'desl ised it because they feared the
Splsed 1t, 1 53 most wounding of all. Se drd
cialists. The distinction of the Amemcane
he SO their beliefs into practlce. In the con
hey put on man they established common
the Cormcrrlnized no child superior to another.
hltrhhifixozfme, tongue, race, or rehgmn, and
e
, was that t
uent
Of
,, Schools w
. he
tevel _ ldr n were subject to t
won on the playing elcls of the com ?giever thelir t?1§nt;hegls::e high schools. What the
with all its habitual appeal, was th [same eduegtloithgmit themselves to recognize was the
argument by analogy.
socialists (211 no
English socialists were 510
( HI.
. . nder
ree could not be trans-
the transatlantic model: A stand the reasons why the t
that in America
. . ld not understand
not be s0c1ahst because It had no somahst movemen ,planted' Theyicc re needed: in a way they were never
But they eventually woke up to the fact that the country comm"r1 SChOO S
had no socialist movemen
d 'n Europe to wrest nationhood frem polyilerzt
9
.
e -
HCCdC 'Il he restless were respondmg-to 31;: 1nhErB11itain
6281005} their society far more compelhng t an 1
81 y
when they professed that:
L dent that all men are
[d these truths m be self em , . _
Witty? equal, that they are endowed by thezr Cr-eatog'ljmih 6:};
2:7; inalienable rights, that among thesaare 12123, 2 er),
pursuit of happiness, and a high school dzploma.
remarkable phenomenon to
I. One of the rst indicanons f 1~ 7 . S . l . l I u
0 t [8 Change Was the m uenua] auritlllg IXIBIICELI} COIIIFIS 31181 3 SC DD S? 21' tDIuC
Quoted by Richmond W. K. Education in the United States.
I. 2
956.
42 43
THE RISE OF THE MERITOCRACY
to the apostles, only con rmed the opposition of m
right-thinking people. American education was noto
ous for 10w standards. Age for age, the British Ch
was invariably better educated; grammar schools W
superior in scholarship to American colleges, and as
comparing Manchester University, say, with K3118
State College! What could be expected when SCho
were treated as institutions not for education but f
social levelling? The left-wingers did no good to th
cause by drawing so much attention to AmeriCa; the
model was of what not to do. '
The enthusiasts had a last trump to play ,
Union. Political antipathies were for many years 30/
strong, that to say that any institution existed in Rugsia:
was enough to condemn it. The mood began to Change?
in the late 1950s. When travel to the U.S.S.R. was per!
mitted, visitors reported1 that comprehensive schools
were to be spied there too; and what s more, free from:
some ofthe defects of the American ones. All Soviet chil,
dren attended the same Middle Schools from Seven
; f , until seventeen, without selection and without stream- '
I ing. But the Russians had good teachers, relatively far
l better-paid than America, the children were more dis;
3 ciplined, had to work harder, and were not given the
same absurd multiplicity ofchoice ofsubjects. Academic
standards were a good deal higher than in the other
United States. In 1957, at the time of the rst Sputnik,
I. An early instance was the report on Education in the Soviet
Union published by The Educational Interchange Council in t;
1957. See p. 4.. With the exception of a limited number of educa-
tionally sub-normal children, all go to the same school . . . within
the same school any attempt to stream children according to their
ability is strictly forbidden. The dullest child works side by side
with the ablest in the same classroom and keeps pace as best he
can.
44
the best colours to
ing aware 0
America a
well in interna
' OF COMPREHENSIVE SCHOOLS
'REAT
eport admitted that the Russtan
better grounding 1n .Inathemagcs,
nt had a. t and in the humamhes too, t an
and chemJS :yhrt. All the same, standards were
rican count: ps in the better English grammar
0t 30 hlg a gate the able from the stupld
he type
" s1xth-form work of t
t that than: ¥::nm :he pride of the better sort of
Government 1
I rewd enough to know
left wing 800131113 ngiffin at long last becem
' conhmic backwardness. They pr'alsetcil1
fltile ssia for their ef ciency and cla1me
' n1? olsuwere responsible. In fact the truth wacs1
that h1gh SC 0 round - the United States of East ?n
if rd to waste human talent, yet st111 are
1d a Otional competition, just because they
' 61 so rich in other resources ofNature. mm:
were relatlv Y 0 many ways, both countrles also com
each other 1D Sb ence of competition in the sehools by
d'foh ahug: afterwards. Russian universnres enly
' d Etheobest candidates after a stifl examilfitézrlxé
adnutte 'dentally kept standards up 1n the
Wthh 1.110;] businessmen of America dld thelr best to
80110013, tf i the de ciencies of the educatlonal systeIm
makel ug'no the most able after they becarne adults.B r:
léleiialhflccbrrglpetition was at school, in Amerlca after. u
' ither
detailed social research 1n the 1960s showed that ne
' ' 11 could
Russian universities nor Amerlcan busmessme
' ' mmon
overcome the initial handlcap 1mposed b}: the (izter for
schools Not even the virtuoso could ma te (11123 though
. ' ' (1 being trea e .
ears wasted 1n ChlldhOO . . e
hievlfere an ordinary person. Exceptlonal brams regi d
exceptional teaching: Russians and Amerlcans
45
West cou
3|
THE RISE OF THE MERITOCRACY
not see it. They forced every child to do what he Was
good at as well as what he was. By showing that all 111
are equally du ers at something what could be m0
easy? they went as far as they could to show t at 11%
man is a genius at anything what could be mo Q;
re dB.
gerous? In the name ofequality they wantonly sacri Ce
the few to the many.
talent, in productivity little Britain began t
giants behind. The 1944 Education Act be
and our country has continued to forge
since. From being rst with the Industrial
of the nineteenth century,
intellectual revolution of th
of the world became the gr
0 leave the]:
gan t0 tel
ahead evgr:
Revolution
Britain became rst in th
e twentieth. The workshop
ammar school of the world
2. AGITATION DEFEATED
To us the failure ofcomprehensive schools does not seem
to require explanation. We can hardly conceive of a
society built upon consideration for the individual 2
regardless of his merit, regardless of the needs of society
as a whole. But as students of historical sociology, we '
must always try to understand the events of the past, 3
not as we see them, but as the people of the time used to
see them. We have to try to think ourselves into their r
minds in the social situations which confronted them. If 2
we do this, we are bound to recognize that the left-
46
wing
, ieadgrs actu
judgemen
0F COMPREHENSIVE SCHOOLS
REAT
e I 603 and 19703 were
id have a C?agrla: Egredlatary class system of
. m n hrumbling fast. People were un-
en doubting whether there was
. n5 progress, and as always whenhpeopl:
T Ch thmg a ere gullible. They were told t at m
unsure they V1: would feel safe agaln, the compre-
S SOCIBW t Chi that would sail them home. Tiad
01 th ? S 30 the movement except WIShy-
nothmg ofcourse it would have evaporated
. hirtlired summer schools. As 1t was, thg
n a h:d followers. The ideahsts were backe
. algnted, people who had sufferetl front: 3111:
by the dlsco? ducational selection, anelwere Just 1n e
to e be able to focus that resentment on
h t0'evance the streaming of infant schools,
dIEIslexam, 7the smaller classes 1n gramiai
{heeleven phatever it might happen to be. T ey.w 11
SChOOlS 0T Warents whose children were allotted, 1n 2:;
backed l OY P er one s eyes except thelr own, to seconh
fairness H! W yhools and by frustrated adults w o
I mOdem SC 3 ' 1 ter disappomtments,
MY d their own schoolmg for a thh
blame d to deprive others too of the chances w til
agdy lgrtlttahey themselves had missed. It was a mo ey
t 6
L n
L their values: 6"
gent enOEJg
game limlte
' tellectual idealism chimes
, et as always wheh 1n . there-
Evi lllgmpen frustration, 1t was formidable. We
f d to turn the question around, and ask ~ whgp,
0E; 1166 ts did the movement not after all succee .
Wlth this: aliethb last chapter of the evils of the arlsto-
hralttisfgnfhrace of all the cheap imitations ofc iheggt :
of nobility enshrined in the popular mm .
1 7
I ' suffered sorely from a caste snobbery planted too deep 3
' revo
the national character for anythlng but a soccialate 1f
lution on the American or Russmn scale to era 1c .
47
THE RISE OF THE MERITOCRACY
this was our curse, and curse it was, it was also our bless-
ing. This great paradox is the clue to Britain s social
history. In our island we never discarded the values of
the aristocracy, because we never discarded the aristo-
cracy. It displayed an amazing resilience which allowed
it, as so often in previous centuries, to disappoint the
many critics waiting to attend its funeral. Its institu
tions, the monarchy, the peerage, the ancient universi-
ties, and the public schools, adapted slowly but all the
more surely to the changing needs ofa changing society,
which therefore remained in a fundamental sense hier-
archical. Englishmen of the solid centre never believed
in equality. They assumed that some men were better
than others, and only waited to be told in what respect.
Equality? Why, there would be no one to look up to any
more. Most Englishmen believed, however dimly, in a
vision of excellence which was part and parcel of their
own time-honoured aristocratic tradition. It was be-
cause of this that the campaign for comprehensive
schools failed. It was because of this that we have
our modern society: by imperceptible degrees an
aristocracy of birth has turned into an aristocracy of
talent.
All depended upon timely educational reform. In the
nineteenth century this was delayed too long. If the
Education Act of 1871 had come fty years earlier
there would perhaps have been no Chartism; had the
1902 Act coincided with the Great Exhibition, no
Labour Party. Sir Keir Hardie would have gone from a
secondary school to the Board of Education, and Bishop
Arthur Henderson would have watched over the
nances of the Ecclesiastical Commission. Wise rulers
know that the best way to defeat opposition is to win
over its leaders; England was slow to learn that, in an
48
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THREAT OF COMPREHENSIVE SCHOOLS
industrial society, this means appropriating and educa-
ting the able children of the lower classes while they are
still young. But eventually the rulers did learn; in a
competitive world they had to. To such effect that by
the last quarter of the century the Labour extremists
were fatally weakened. Since the ablest children were
already in the grammar schools, their parents had the
stoutest of stakes both in the existing educational sys
tem and in the existing social order. Their proxy place
in the hierarchy made them deaf to the heralds of the
common school.
Opposition from parents, teachers, and children
from the whole grammar stream in society - was the
main reason for the failure of the comprehensive
schools. These were not conceived as an entirely new
kind of school when it came to detailed planning the
American model was fortunately forgotten. Their advo-
cates realized well enough that some children were
brighter than others. Yet at the same time they wanted
children of grammar-school ability to walk beside their
inferiors in a deceit of equality. For the full success of
their plans, they needed to combine grammar schools
with secondary modern. About the latter there was no
problem; their status could only be raised by uni ca-
tion. Grammar schools were in a quite different state:
they had nothing to gain, and almost everything to lose,
by the change. This hard fact daunted the most resolute
of Labour Education Committees, and some of them
were certainly determined. But they were up against
grammar-school masters who knew that Labour aspira-
tions were simply impractical, and, to the country s
undying credit, this has usually been suf cient to con-
demn anything. One of the great High Masters of Man-
chester Grammar School, writing as early as 1951, put
49
THE RISE OF THE MERITOCRACY
the issue as succinctly as it could be put today. The
Professor Conant of whom he speaks was an American
Professor apparently well known at the time he illus-
trates again the intrusion of the United States into our
domestic forum.
When Professor Conant demands a common core of general
education which will unite in one cultural pattern thefuture ear-
penter, factory worker, bishop, lawyer, doctor, salex manager,
pro zssor, and garage meehanic , he is simply asking for the
impossible. The demandfor such a common culture rests either
on an altogether over optimistie belizj in the edueability of the
majority that is certainly not justi ed by experience or on a
willingness to surrender the highest standards qftaste andjudge-
ment to the incessant demands qf mediocrity.1
There might have been a different outcome had the
country s population been growing fast, as it was in the
United States when their high schools were established;
then the authorities could have issued a at that new
schools should be comprehensive, instead of grammar.
But with relative stability of population, not many new
grammar schools were built. What was the purpose of
having many more when even the existing grammar
schools could not get as many able children as they
could accommodate? As it was, comprehensive schools
were largely con ned to Labour strongholds whose
population was expanding fast, to a few rural areas
which could not afford a complete range of schools, and
to places where a badly housed second-rate grammar
school was ready to amalgamate in return for favours
from the authorities.
Though such comprehensive schools as were started
1. James, E. Educatianfar Leadership. 1951.
50
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THREAT OF COMPREHENSIVE SCHOOLS
there was a small wave of them in the 19605 must by
the verdict of history be judged retrogressive, they were
not nearly so dangerous as some of the socialist threats
portended. In a hierarchical system like ours every insti-
tution has always modelled itself on the one immedi-
ately superior, which has usually meant the older . the
new professions on the old, the modern universrties
on the ancient, and the comprehensive schools on the
grammar. The planners were (happily for posterity)
terri ed by the kind of criticism red at them by the
grammar schools, and did their best to show it baseless.
They imported old principles into new framework and
made the core ofthecomprehensive notso much acommon
curriculum as a miniature grammar school. They made
a grammar school rst and added on the other bits later.
To justify having a sixth-form of grammar size they
were even prepared to make the whole school much
larger than it otherwise need be - some of the early
comprehensives actually had more than 2,000 in a veri-
table city of children. The interests of the clever chil-
dren came rst, or at least were not ignored. Obviously
it would have been wrong to place the bright children
in the same class as the dull, for then the former would
have been held back to the pace of the slowestt In prac-
tice, the comprehensive schools, by dividing the goats
from the sheep, continued to abide by the segregation of
ability which was the saving grace of the whole educa-
tional system. More intelligent children continued in
the main to get higher standard teaching not so much
inferior to that which they would have obtained in a
grammar school proper. This much is clear from some
eye-witness accounts of the early comprehensive schools
in action. One survey in the 19505 (by a Mr Pedley)
said that:
51
THE RISE OF THE MERITOCRACY
witlz the apening in September 1953 (Ur a new /2001 5 Llan
' l 53 com leted its provision ofcomprehensive sewed-
fiZZX/Zgzsy the gland, and was able to abandon m selectzzm
examination. But one of the rst steps 1y the heads of the two
comprehensive school: visited was to arrange internal tests for
the newa am'ved pupils; and on the basis of what these
revealed, together wiz/zjunior school records, to grade the pupils
in order of ability. Nor were Anglesqy and the Isle qf Man
unusual in adopting this attitude. The ve interim-compre-
lzem'z've schools which I saw in London, and other schools in
Middlesex and Walsall, all used the external examination test
to assist them in classtfying incoming pupils}
Even though comprehensive schools had grammar
streams they were unable to persuade parents with
clever children to regard them with favour. Given a
choice, parents naturally plumped for the grammar
school proper, rather than for its less venerable imita~
tion. In the long run ambitious parents always brought
to grief the best-laid schemes of egalitarian reformers.
3. THE LEICESTER HYBRID
When it became apparent that the new schools were not
satisfying the hopes of their champions, a sect within the
socialist movement changed its tactics, and put forward
another demand. The primary schools were at that time
common schools for children of all grades of ability. So
why not extend a kind of primary school to include all
children up to fourteen or fteen, as well as below
eleven? The American high schools had originally been
a kind of projection of the elementary; let Britain fol-
low. All children would then go at eleven to a high
school, and only later to a grammar school.
I. Pedley, R. Comprehensive Schools Today). 1954..
52
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THREAT OF COMPREHENSIVE SCHOOLS
The proposal had several advantages.1 Politically, it
was far more acceptable because it did not seem to sug-
gest a radical Change, and, as I have said, the best way
to do anything new in England was to pretend that it
was not. The common school was merely to be pro-
jected forward instead of built afresh, the grainmar
schools preserved. This reform would also have either
abolished or postponed selection for the grammar
school and so avoided the undesirable strains of the
existing eleven plus examination upon parents and chil-
dren (including those who would not anyhow stay at
school beyond the minimum age).
An experiment of this kind was in fact tried out by
the Leicestershire County Council,2 and many varia-
tions ofit were later adopted by other education authori
ties. Why did not this movement carry all before it?
The reasons are again illuminating. The educational
reforms of the last century, being superimposed upon a
hierarchical society, stood or fell by the success with
which they enabled the clever child to leave the lower
class into Which he was born and to enter the higher
class into which he was tted to climb. English schools
too had a vital social function, though a different one
from the American. The educational ladder was also a
social ladder the scruffy, ill mannered boy who started
at ve years old at the bottom had to be metamor-
phosed, rung by rung, into a more presentable, more
polished, and more con dent as well as a more know-
ledgeable lad at the top. He had to acquire a new
accent the most indelible mark of class in England
I. An early version was put forward by the Ct oydon Education
Committee, and ably ampli ed by Pedley, R., in Comprehensive
Education, 1956.
2. See The Leicextershire Experiment. Stewart C. Mason. 1957.
53
"
'
1
.
THE RISE OF THE MERITOCRACY
and to any but the most determined man, that was well-
nigh impossible unless he started young. When he fin-
ished his climb, he could then stand comparlson w1th
others who had begun their ascent from a much higher
level. The social ladder was so long the'gap between
the styles of life of upper and lower classes so wide that
promising Children had to begin their climb through the
schools at the earliest age possible. Postponing social
assimilation until eleven was bad enough. If clever low-
class children had not been able to move in the more
stimulating atmosphere of the grammar schools, along-
side many of the same age from higher classes, until
they were sixteen, some of them would then have been
too old ever to shake off their origins and so overcome
their handicap. The schools would then have failed to
. ful l one of their essential purposes in a progressive Class
system; they would not have been society s escalators
for the gifted.
The second reason for rejection of selection at fteen
was that, as educators realized full well, clever children
had to be caught young if they were to achieve, as
adults, the highest standards ofwhich they were capable
and with the growth in complexity of science and tech-
nology only the highest standards were high enough.
Scientists, whose best work is often done before they are
thirty, need from the earliest possible years to get an
intensive education of the sort that few Americans1 have
been able to get since high schools came into vogue, and
1. One absurdity of the American university system in particu-
lar, until 1986, was that so many good students, instead of getting
adequate scholarships, had to work not at acquiring knowledge,
but at washing dishes. They had to work their way through
college by not working at the purpose for which the institution
ostens1bly existed. Per ardua ad infernal
54
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THREAT OF COMPREHENSIVE SCHOOLS
Benjamin Franklin out. If the start of serious work were
delayed till sixteen, and meanwhile they were being
taught in a high school which could never attract staff
as good as the grammar schools, they mlght not nish
their education in time to take advantage of the few
really fruitful years allowed by Nature. The grammar
schools were responsible for Britain s fame in pure
science even before Queen Elizabeth II came to the
throne. Lord Cholmondeley has shown that, taking the
last century as a whole, the number offundamental CllS-
coveries was in relation to its population 23 times
larger than Germany, 4-3 times larger than the U.S.A..,
and 5-1 times larger than the U.S.S.R. Would cosmic
radiation have been understood without Simon? Distant
stellar exploration possible without Bird himself? The
south-western counties concreted over and reserved for
cars without Piper? Babies ever carried safely at a speed
of Mach 102 without Percy? But for the grammar
school might not all these great men have been shop-
keepers and mechanics? Pity was that until the end of
the century Britain s science was nowhere near matched
by its achievement in technology. Stlll, 1t 1s_a proud
record, and would have been forfeit to the lncessant
demands of mediocrity had common uneducation per-
sisted into adolescence.
4. SUMMARY
Before the schools could evolve into the modern system
described in the next chapter, the threat from the left
had to be warded off. Socialists who wanted all chil-
dren, regardless of their ability, educated as in America
and Russia, commanded enough popular support for
a time to convert what should have been a purely
55
Q
i
l
i
THE RISE OF THE MERITOCRACY
educational question into a major political issue. Yet
they were bound to fail. To succeed with education they
needed a social revolution which would overthrow the
established hierarchy, values and all. But with the
masses dormant and their potential leaders diverted in
to self-advancement, what hope was there? Grammar
schools remained. Comprehensive schools withered.
Even the Leicester hybrid never bloomed. The vandals
were vanquished and the city stood.
g
E
CHAPTER THREE
ORIGINS OF MODERN EDUCATION
I.> THE MOST FUNDAMENTAL REFORM
ONCE general opinion, even in the Labour Party,
turned against comprehensive schools, it became pos-
sible to concentrate upon the most fundamental of
reforms, that is, upon the all-round improvement of
grammar schools. Above all they needed more money,
more money to retain their best scholars, and more
money for the teachers.
The Hitler war transformed the social composition
ofthese schools. Full employment and larger wages, fost-
ering higher aspirations, made lower-class parents able
and anxious to get better education for their children,
and the 1944 Act1 helped by making secondary schools
free. The consequences were dramatic. In the 19303
only a minority ofable low-class children had more than
the most primitive education; twenty years later prac-
tically all clever children were installed in the seats of
learning. A sociological study of the 19505 was able to
report that in very many, if not in most, parts of the
country the chances of children at a given level of
ability entering grammar schools are no longer depend-
ent on their social origins .2
However, it was one thing for able children from the
x. The date has perhaps been given an importance beyond its
deserts by the tendency of schoolmasters to teach history by its
important dates - 1870, 1902, 1918, 1944, 1972, and so forth.
2. Floud, J. E., Halsey, A. H., and Martin, F. M. Social Class
and Educational Opportuniy. 1956.
57
THE RISE OF THE MERITOCRACY
lower classes to enter grammar schools, another for them
to stay there. Here prosperity was a handicap. Even
against the wishes of their parents, many scholars were
tempted by high wages to leave school early and
ocks of them did so at the minimum age.1 Prosperity
did not create the problem, but it accentuated one of
long standing. In every decade children matured physi-
cally earlier than before. Constant shortening of child-
hood in the biological and social sense and constant
lengthening of childhood in the educational sense posed
a dilemma which was only resolved in the long run by
treating grammar-school children as adults.
The superior classes took for granted that their chil-
dren should enjoy higher education; the dif culty was
not to get the able to stay at school, but to get the stupid
to leave and put up with the manual jobs for which their
intelligence tted them. In the lower Classes the situa-
tion was reversed. The higher the wages that could be
earned at a machine by the children ofmanual workers,
the more dreary seemed the school-desk. N0 age is more
acquisitive than adolescence. The remedy was clear: the
State had to prevent children from suffering for their
cleverness by giving them and their parents a privileged
status within the lower classes. The rst step was to pay
very much larger maintenance allowances later sealed
in ratio to intelligence for grammar-school children
staying the full course. But this was not enough. Inquiry
showed that some irresponsible parents were spending
the allowances on themselves, not on the children for
whom they were intended. The obvious thing to do
I. In the early 19505 very many of the grammar-school boys
capable of nishing the course left before doing so, and most of
these were the children of manual workers. See Early Leaving, pub-
lished by the Ministry of Education in 1954.
58
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ORIGINS OF MODERN EDUCATION
eventually even to Ministers of Education - was to pay
a learning wage direct to grammar schooi puprls. At
rst it was equal to the average earnings ofjuvemles 1n
ordinary industry; then the newly formed B.U.G.S.A.
(the British Union of Grammar School Attenders)
I attacked the injustice of equality, rightly too, since the
ability of the earner was usually so much lower than
that of the pupil. In 1972 the government approved
a learning wage on a sliding scale sixty per cent above
industrial earnings. After that very few children left
grammar schools prematurely for economic reasons. In
modern times we could hardly imagine a grammar
school without its weekly pay-day.
The universities paid wages to students (in the form
ofscholarships) long before grammar schools, but other-
wise preserved some Curious anaehronisms of their own.
Poorer parents were at a disadvantage in grammar
schools, richer parents in universities. In the 19505
clever children of the middle rich were deprived of
grants because their parents were quite wrongly shp-
posed to have enough money to pay, With the shocklng
result that some of them never got to university at all
surely a supreme example of the excesses of egalitarianism
in its heyday! Closed scholarships also gave pupals
from certain public schools privileged entry to otherw1se
reputable colleges at Oxford and Cambridge; and 1n the
middle of the century it was still not unknown for ng s
or Balliol to detect some special merit in sons whose
fathers had been there before. Such barbaric practices
were even excused in public from time to time by old-
fashioned dons who declared it was better, educationally
mind you, for the bright students to be mixed up with
the dull. The dons had once again lost touch: the
modern world no longer required the clever to mingle
59
THE RISE OF THE MERITOCRACY
' . - ce t when assi ned to social intelli
Wlth the 5::1:30:11; tlhe lower claises. When the die~
gen? 322d universities came into line with national
hag: and selected all their entrants on merit properly
{:2th in the examination-room. By 1972 public school-
boys had either to compete openly with the Bradford
Grammar School or seek gringo admission to South
American universities. Few willingly incurred that
stigma.
2. HIGHER SALARIES FOR TEACHERS
The learning wage and the universalization of univer-
sity scholarships followed upon a change in the attitude
of the State to spending on education, which itself re-
ected growing recognition that investment in brains is
much more rewarding than investment in property. But
politicians always wanted the impossible the quick
results education can never give. They kept tinkering
with the top of the educational system instead of build-
ing securely from the bottom. They were as willing to
spend on the universities as they were unwilling to
spend on the primary schools. Politicians would not
realize that the milk monitors were the future leaders of
the nation. Faced with a shortage of engineers, the
government said very well, spend more upon the en-
gineering colleges. Of scientists, spend more upon the
science faculties. Of technologists generally, then build
more schools of technology. This was futile. For if the
government attracted more promising youngsters into
engineering, fewer were left behind for science. More
for the civil service meant less for industry, more for
laboratories less for teaching. The egalitarian doctrine
that any man can be trained to substitute for any other
was so deeply rooted that our ancestors only slowly came
60
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ORIGINS OF MODERN EDUCATION
to appreciate the full signi cance ef one simple fact:
that all the professions were competmg w1th eachother
for a limited supply of intelligence. It was not untll well
on into the last half of the Century that the national
Scarcity ofintellect became obv1ous to all those who had
it. The government learned that the 'only way Slmul
taneously to get more and better engrneers, more and
better physicists, more and better c1V1l servants up to
the limits set by Nature was to start Wlth the three-
year-olds, to ensure that from that age on no ab111ty
escaped through the net, and, most 1mportant, to make
certain that the future physicists, psycholog1sts,land the
rest of the elite continuously had the best teaching they
ld et.
Omit digd not matter so much about the defective, mal-
adjusted, and delinquent lupon whom up to 1972
England (as a sign of the tlmes) spent more per head
than upon the brilliant. It did not matter so much about
the secondary modern schools. In an ideal world, not
hampered by shortage of resources, the urifortunate
could have large sums spent on them too. But 1t was not,
has not been, nor ever will be, an ideal world. The
choice was between priorities, and there was no doubt
how the decision had to go. What mattered most were
primary schools, where the pupils were being div1ded
into the gifted and the ungifted; and, above all, the
grammar schools where the gifted received their due.
They had to have more generous endowments. And
they got them.
From the moment that Sir Anthony Crosland was
persuaded that the battle for national survival would be
won or lost in the A streams all the way from nursery
to grammar school, the money began to ow. Spending
on education was still only 2-7 per cent of the gross
61
THE RISE OF THE MERITOCRACY
national product in 1953;1 by 1963, 3-9 per cent; by
1982, after the marvellous decade , it was 6-1 per cent.
Most of the extra went on teachers. For more of them -
it was still common in those grim middle years of the
last century for one single teacher to have a mob offorty
children in a class and who could she then be but a
joseph Lancaster!2 And for better ones. So far were
teachers salaries behind industry that in the early 19605
some grammar schools did not have a solitary physics
teacher. At a time when the Atomic Energy Authority
was clamouring for physicists! Many of the leading
of cials at the Ministry of Education and the Treasury,
though they had read their Plato, had seemingly for
gotten that none but the guardians themselves could be
trusted to teach future guardians. Second-rate teachers,
a second-rate elite: the meritocracy can never be better
than its teachers. Things improved until at last the
teachers attained their ideal of superiority of esteem.
One of the wisest strokes of the marvellous decade was
to put the salaries of science teachers on the same level
as scientists in industry and all grammar-school
teachers on the same level as their scienti c colleagues.
The schools could then attract good scientists; they got
the very pick of other teachers.
1. This earlier gure was found in Wiles, P. J. D., The Nation s
Intellectual Investment. (Bull. 0. U. Inst. of Stats. August 1956, p.
279); the latter are from the popular paperback editions of Educa-
tion Statistics.
2. We want ten, and by jingo we want to know when was as
effective a slogan, used in the campaign for raising the pupil-
teacher ratio in grammar schools to 1/10, as the earlier slogan
We want eight, and we won t wait , used in the campaign for
more dreadnoughts. We want scholarships, not battleships ,
another. The Small Class was merely substituted for the Big
Navy.
62
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ORIGINS OF MODERN EDUCATION
The logic of the system can be portrayed in a simple
table.
Distribution qf Intelligence between types of Secondary School (1989),
LQ. level of N0. quupils LQ. level qf
Type #3611001 pupil: per teacher teachers
E.S.N. (Educationally 50 80 25 1 00 1 05
Subnormal) School
Secondary modern 81 1 15 20 105 1 10
Secondary grammar 1 16-180 1 0 1 35 1 80
Boarding grammar 125~ 1 8o 8 1 35 1 80
3. BOARDING GRAMMAR SCHOOLS
The movement for comprehensive schools did more
than threaten standards in the grammar schools. If suc-
cessful, it would have led to inde nite postponement of
the quite Vital reform of the public schools. Knowing
that their children would get no better than a second
rate training in State schools, parents With the means to
pay would never have been restrained from purchasing
the advantages of private education; and equality of
opportunity would have remained a dream.
The demise of the public school was freely prophesied
between 1939 and 1945. It was feared that impoverish
ment of the middle Classes would remove their capacity
to pay fees, and some of the strongest supporters of the
public schools looked to the State to prevent catas-
trophe. They were not only ready to accept a propor-
tion of poor pupils, they pleaded with the State to pay
for their places.1 The future was not as expected - it
1. See the Fleming Report: The Public Schools and the General
Educational System. 1944.
63
THE RISE OF THE MERITOCRAC-Y
seldom is. The middle class proved as tough as ever;
they survived high taxation and high prices and went
on sending their children to the same old venerable
schools. In the middle 19503, of people with more than
,5: 1,000 p.a. a miserable enough sum by modern
standards nineteen out of every twenty sent their chil-
dren to private schools.1 Incidentally, this included
many socialists . As Sir Hartley Shawcross said in
1956 I do not know a single member of the Labour
Party, who can afford to do so, who does not send his
children to a public school, often at great sacri ce not
for snobbish reasons or to perpetuate class distinction,
but to ensure his children get the best.
Public-school pupils made up about a quarter of the
sixth forms in all kinds of schools, State and private to-
gether. Since they paid more, on the whole they enjoyed
a better education than their fellows in State schools.
To judge from autobiographies and novels, there may
have been some truth in the saying that at a public
school the pupil was taught how to grow up into a boy,
but, if so, at least he was an educated boy and therefore
better tted to take his place in a complex society than
an uneducated man. There was no harm in the public
schools imparting a superior education it was all to
the good; what was wrong was that the privileged were
chosen by other criteria than merit. They were selected
by their parents bank accounts. They unashamedly in-
herited their education, and with it their future status in
the society they should have been intent to serve.
How was such nepotism to be abolished? It was a
long and bitter business, perhaps only paralleled by the
1. Savings and Finances of the Upper Income Classes . Klein,
L. R., Straw, K. H., Vandome, P. Bulletin (yr Oxford Institution qf
Statistics. November 1956.
64
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ORIGINS OF MODERN EDUCATION
crusade for the abolition of slavery in the previous cen-
tury, and only successful because the energy which had
been previously directed into comprehensive schools
was diverted and harnessed to this more constructive
task. Year by year, but especially in 1958, Labour Party
statements said that Labour must no longer hesitate to
tackle the greatest source of social inequality and class
division in our society the private schools. But they
did hesitate, even though the leaders of Labour were
guilty public-school men themselves. The schools could
not be effectively closed down or nationalized by decree;
unless the parents had been forbidden to spend money
on their children itself too grave an interference with
the family to be politically practical they would have
started up their own black-market establishments else-
where. One Eton closed would have been another Eton
opened. Parents had to be appeased as well as bullied.
The 1958 declaration, Learning to Live, was most sensible
and far-sighted when it said that:
Labour concludes that at present no scheme for taking over
or democmtizing the public schools shows su cient merit: to
justify the large diversion of public money that would be in-
volved. In time to come, when maintained schools are improved,
when the prestige of the public schools is consequently dimin-
ished, and when suhxtantial changes in the distribution of
wealth and in public opinion have occurred, the question, in a
changedform, will once more arise.
Final triumph was the result of an ingenious pincer
movement. Research showed that most of the fees for
public schools were paid out of capital. The upper
classes, for fear of the duties, very largely stopped pass-
ing money from one generation to another upon death.
The established practice was for grandparents, while
65
THE RISE OF THE MERITOCRACY
still alive, to. transfer property not so much to their Chilm
dren as to their grandchildren for the purchase of a
privileged education. Death _duties were powerless to
stop this kind of three-generation abuse, acted indeed as
an incentive to it, and had to be supplemented by a
series of capital levies. The sixth Labour Government,
with Crosland and Hughes working as a team in the
two key Ministries, initiated a great capital levy, and
thenceforward the capital gains tax prevented the acqui~
sition ofnew fortunes. The public schools feltthe squeeze
right away. The effect of the levy was somewhat offset
by the growing inequality of earned incomes, but not so
much as totally to defeat its object. Conditions were
certainly harsher for the public schools in 1970 than
they had been twenty years earlier. '
Of greater importance than capital levy was the
steady improvement in the standards of grammar
schools themselves. It all came down, as I have said, to
pounds, shillings, and pence. Why was Rugby superior
to the Walsall Grammar School? It was quite simple,
Rugby spent so much more per boy, therefore Rugby
got better teachers and more teachers. When the money
spent on Walsall was multiplied a portion of the capi-
tal levy was earmarked for new grammar-school labora-
tories and other buildings the quality of the school was
improved out of all recognition. As long as the State
could keep down total expenditure on public schools,
and step up expenditure on its own schools, victory was
in the long run assured. Parents besieged Walsall in-
stead of Rugby, and found their children had to com-
pete on level terms with all other children, none but the
best being chosen. Only iftheir children were too stupid
to gain entry to Walsall did they fall back on Rugby,
Which could hardly remain a rst rate school if its
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ORIGINS OF MODERN EDUCATION
pupils were second-rate. The prestige balance between
ublic and grammar was gradually, but decisively,
tilted in the latter s favour.
Private schools did not have to be abolished; the best
of them abolished themselves. Wide-awake public-
school headmasters worried about the stupidity of the
children they were attracting, and as the drift of events
became clear, and as the Treasury became more open~
handed, solved their problems by negotiating with the
State for inclusion on the roll of grant-aided boarding
grammar schools , as they were ponderously called in
official language. For this enviable status to be secured
they had to agree to take a majority of children chosen
in the ordinary way by the local authorities from the
primary schools. Eton in 1972 reduced its entrance age
to eleven and undertook to accept eighty per cent of
Queen s scholars, pushed home to one hundred per cent
in 1991. Where Eton led, others followed.
Unless Her Majesty s Inspectors granted the school a
certi cate of ef ciency, only done if academic standards
were at least as high as in day grammar schools, it could
not be admitted to the roll. All the better-known public
schools in fact nearly all associated with what was
called the Headmasters Conference - were in time ad-
mitted and thrown open to talented children who
needed a boarding-school education for one good
reason or another say because they had no parents, or
came from homes moved frequently, or because they
lived in the countryside too far for daily attendance at
an ordinary grammar school. Other private schools, the
majority, were allowed to go their Own way. Since they
nurtured n0 rst-rate brains, the State was not particu-
larly concerned what went on behind their class-room
doors - as long, that is, as they reached the minimum
67
THE RISE OF THE MERITOCRACY
standards of hygiene and ef ciency in practical crafts
laid down for the modern schools to which ordinary
run-of the mill children were sent. Naturally enough,
once the private schools were reserved for the mediocre,
they no longer conferred any social cachet and the num
ber of parents willing to waste their money on them
diminished year by year. This was, ofcourse, apart from
the anthroposophists, diet reformers, and latter-day
anarchists who clung obsessively to their own educa-
tional foundations.
The integration of the two types of grammar school
led to many bene cial changes in the content of educa-
tion. The day schools were famed for their healthy con-
centration on science; the best of them not only en-
couraged specialization in order to bestow intensive
knowledge of at least one limited branch, what is far
more important they bred that scienti c attitude, pre-
cise, curious, speculative, sceptical, that humility
towards Nature though not towards man, that passion-
ate detachment, which is the modern attitude to life.
The private schools, less at home in the world of indus-
try, technology, and science, gave too much attention to
Athens and too little to the atom. Until the 1960s the
Common Entrance Examination for public schools still
covered Latin! But no science! The classical education
received by the hereditary social classes of Britain was
part of their undoing. It led them to overvalue the past,
Rome and Athens as well as their own history. It in-
duced a fatalistic acceptance of the decline of the British
Empire which had to follow the Roman precedent. The
meritocracy replaced Gibbon by Galton, and once
teachers and ideas interchanged freely, the grammar
persuaded the former public schools to adapt them-
selves more completely to a scienti c age. So quickly did
68
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ORIGINS OF MODERN EDUCATION
some of them learn, that Eton was in fact the rst school
to install a cyclotron, and Christ s Hospital the rst to
send a parcel of boys to the moon.
The gain was not all one way. Education for leader-
ship was the professed aim of the .pubhc schoolsi and
mighty was their empire until soldiers and adniinistra
tors succumbed to scientists and technicians. With inte-
gration the grammar schools were able to share in that
part of the tradition which was still of value and s0 pur-
sue their vocation of cultivating the elite with all the
more con dence. Public schools had learnt how to re-
lease children from dependence on their families by
creating substitutes for the narrow loyalties of kinship.
The grammar schools needed all the more to do the
same since so many of their pupils came from homes be-
longing to a lower culture, and they borrowed some of
the same techniques. Eye-witness accounts vouch for
the value of the full development of the house system, of
the regular dedication meetings in the laboratory and
of the week-end and evening clubs for scienti c and
other hobbies. These have become so active that ado-
lescent children no longer need to spend any of their
spare time with their families. Their homes have be
come simply hotels, to the great bene t of the children.
4.. PROGRESS OF INTELLIGENCE TESTING
The success of these reforms depended upon continuous
growth in the ef ciency of selection methods. How
pointless it would have been to set aside superior schools
without the means of identifying the elect! Progress did
not, of course, always proceed at the same pace on each
of these complementary tasks. By and large, the seclu-
sion of grammar schools went ahead more smoothly
69
THE RISE OF THE MERITOCRACY
than selection ofpupils. But the more widely recognized
it was that better schools should be reserved for the
more able, the greater the pressure upon the educa
tional psychologists to improve their techniques. They
responded. Necessity once again played its customar
part. '
Following 1944, there was a large increase in the
demand for grammar school places without any corre-
sponding expansion ofsupply. Competition was sharper;
how were the winners to be picked? The value ofintelli-
gence tests as a guide to personnel selection in the Forces
had been fully demonstrated during the war, and it was
therefore natural to adopt the same kind of method for
the peace-time purpose, especially in a strati ed society
prepared by habit of mind to recognize a hierarchy of
intelligence as soon as it was pointed out. The results
were remarkable: by 1950, merely a few years after the
Act, most of the children in the country were taking
these tests before they left their primary schools, and,
although older methods of examination were also used,
high LQ. was established as the chief quali cation for
entry to the elite. Educational psychology assumed a
central place in pedagogy from which it was never later
entirely dislodged.
Progress in the next decades was, it is true, slowed
down by socialist obstruction. The people who cam-
paigned for the common school constantly attacked the
segregation of clever from stupid which it was the pur-
pose of intelligence tests to accomplish. From their
point of view this was quite consistent: once grant their
premise that everyone was in some unexplained way the
equal of everyone else, and it became as sensible to
decry the ef ciency of the means by which children
were classi ed one above the other as it was to condemn
70
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ORIGINS OF MODERN EDUCATION
the consequences. If one child was not in fact more able
than another, then intelligence tests must be a fraud. 'I he
critics mocked the psychologists, and seemed to think
their case was proved when they declared (qulte rightly)
that the tests did not, and could not, measure the
abstraction of all-round intelligence. All the crltics d1d
was to surround the subject with further verbal con-
fusion. The confusion was to some degree meyitable (as
with physics in the seventeenth . century) 1n a new
branch of science touching, as it dld, upon strong corh-
mitments to metaphysics. How coulel men be equal in
the eyes of God and yet unequal 1n the eyes of the
cholo ist?
PSS'l'he soiialists made the muddle worse: Very few lay-
men could at rst understand that intelligence was not
an abstraction, but an operational conoept. Psycholo-
gists were not assessing all-round intelligence, there IS
no such thing, but the qualities needed to bene t from
a higher education. If this bundle of quahties was
labelled as intelligence , that was only done as-a con
venience. The test of the tests was empirical: did they
work? And the anSWer was that on the whole they did.
Most of the children who scored high on the tests also
performed well in the grammar schools. It was really a
statistical question, a matter of establishing that high
performance in the tests (they could haye been called
the Idiocy tests for all the difference 1t would have
made) was correlated1 with high performance in the
1. One might add, it was also correlated with performance in
other tests for verbal ability, verbal uency, numerical ability,
spatial ability, perceptual ability, memoryglor drivmg abglity,
accident proneness, digital dexterity, analogmng Power, mee :31-
cal aptitude, clerical aptitude, emotional tnatunty; for tone is-
crimination, sexual attraction, taste sen51t1v1ty, colour blindness,
accuracy, persistence, neurosis, and powers of observation. Results
71
THE RISE OF THE MERITOCRACY
grammar school, highperformance at the university,
and high performance In 11er It must be admitted that
the psychologists and soc1olog1sts were somewhat slow in
devising tests for the tests; many of them were Stlll
tangled in thickets of ideology. They were not all as
clear-sighted as that High Master who urged that the
greatest encouragement must be given to those re-
searches designed to relate the subsequent success of
men and women selected for various purposes with the
diagnosis oftheir capacities given by different methods . 1
His advice was not fully taken until later.
The socialists were not alone in the wilderness. For a
time they succeeded in partially discrediting the I.Q.,
and, at the height of their in uence in the fties and
sixties, frightened a number of local education com-
mittees into abandoning the tests altogether. But their
success was bound to be short-lived. Every time they
were presented with a fresh crop of children, the autho-
rities had to nd some way ofseparating the wheat from
the chaff. How? If they discarded intelligence tests, they
were thrown back on results of ordinary written exami-
nations, and if they discarded the written examinations,
they were thrown back on teachers reports. They were
then in even greater trouble. The teachers had a hard
enough job to do in all conscience without forcing them
to bear the resentment of every parent whose child they
failed. Teachers had to be protected. Progressive
authorities were sometimes faced by demands from their
own teachers to restore the LQ. What was more, re-
search demonstrated conclusively that teachers reports
are nowadays all coded on the one National Intelligence card
which accompanies a person throughout his life, unless he has
conscientious objections.
1. James, E., op. cit.
72
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ORIGINS OF MODERN EDUCATION
and ordinary examinations were less fair to lower-class
Children. Teachers unconsciously favoured children
from their own class; old-fashioned exams were kinder
to the more cultured homes. Intelligence tests, less
biased, were the very instrument of social justice, a
nding which not even the most fanatical socialists of
that day could totally ignore.
More moderate socialists, infected with mysticism
too, though less virulently, drugged themselves with the
belief that the ef ciency of selection would remain so
low that many able children would always escape the
net. They dare not openly espouse inef cient selection
and urge that some clever children should be denied
opportunity for their faculties; but, privately, they wel-
comed it when it happened. They were the secret
Catholics in a ?rotestant town. In the transition period
from a pre-merit society, this was a happy adjustment,
a source of personal peace of mind, yet no barrier to
progress. But it was the comfort of the ostrich. These
moderate mystics should have known that you cannot
stop the march of science; or rather, since they knew,
they should have heeded. Once human behaviour be-
gan to be studied systematically, so that once gained,
knowledge was cumulative, nothing could arrest the
steady advance in techniques for testing and, with the
tests, selecting, the bearers of different combinations of
genes.
Progress was, as always, uneven, a period of stability
being succeeded by a sudden jump forward. Man had
to wait until 1989 for the leap of the century. Long
before that the cyberneticists had realized that man
would best understand his own brain when he could
imitate it. As men became more like machines, mach-
ines became more like men, and when machines were
73
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THE RISE OF THE MERITOCRACY
built to mimic p60ple, the ventriloqnist at last under.
stood himself. Modern mentalcapamty standards date
from that year, a common unit of measurement being
possible as soon as it was realized that a machine also
can have its intelligence tested and scored as much as
a human brain. Pamela , Bird s pi-computer in the
National Physiological Laboratory, with its constant
LQ. of 100, became the recognized national standard,
and all the questions in the examination papers were rst
put to her before being distributed to the schools and
other centres.
Well before 1989, psychologists had succeeded in
identifying the problems which had to be solved. They
realized that the brain was no more separable than the
sexual organs from the biochemical economy ofthe indi-
vidual, and the individual no more separable than his
lungs from the environment, social as well as physical, in
which he lived. Many people with high potential in-
telligence were prevented from making use of it by
anxiety due to psychic disturbances. Some had lower
intelligence, others higher, when the environment was
unfavourable. Hence the LQ. berserkers with an LQ.
of 140 at some times and 90 at others, and not only
when in love or before breakfast an af iction from
which some leading members of the Technicians Party
are alleged to su 'er. Psychologists tackled the task of
bringing the actual nearer to the potential. Advances in
therapy were a bene cent by-product of educational
selection.
The Spens Committee said in I938 that it is possible
at an early age to predict with some degree of accuracy
the ultimate level of a child s intellectual powers . That
is true now; it was not true then. No wonder resentment
was aroused when the main tests were given once, at
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ORIGINS OF MODERN EDUCATION
leven! A person s performance at that one age .de-
e'ded whether he went to a grammar school. If he failed
Cl could, in theory, get a second chance later on. In
hSactice he seldom did. Late developers were too late.
The boy or girl whose capac1ty owered even as young
as fourteen was lucky indeed to get a transfer from a
modem to a grammar school: He was usually stuck
With the stupid, and classed With them Ifor'the rest of
his life. That was a cruel injustice for the individual and
a shocking waste for society so much so that in a small
way comprehensive schools actually did some good by
making it easier for people to sw1m from one stream to
another. People knew that in some people intelligence
reached its height at twelve, in others it only came to
full fruition at thirty but they did not act as if they
knew. As this truth was driven home, edUcators sought,
with increasing success, to make intelligence assessment
continuous throughout school life. I.Q.s were tested at
seven, nine, eleven, thirteen, and fteen, and at each
stage a person whose score was hlgher than it had beeg
previously was taken away from his interiors and lodged
with his equals. Yet the people whose ability develope
only when they had left school escaped the net of selec-
tion altogether. Even in the 19805, a man who suddenly
came to his senses at the age of twenty- ve had the
greatest dif culty in securing proper recognition for his
talents.
1 d
Here it is that the modern development of adu t e u-
cation has proved so vital. School came to last for life.
By the end of the century the right of every person to
be judged according to his ability was honoured 1n more
than the breach. It was at last accepted that, as a mat
ter of quite elementary justice, neither man nor Chlld
should be judged stupid until he was proved to be. The
75
THE RISE OF THE MERITOCRACY
presumption was always of cleverness. So at any age any
person became entitled, more than entitled, encouraged
to apply every ve years for re-test at a Regional Centre
for Adult Education, and if his hopes were realized,
then justice was invariably done. The copy of his Nat-
ional Intelligence card at H.Q. was destroyed, and a
new card substituted containing the re-test score, so that
no employer (or ancee) who applied in the ordinary
way for his LQ. and aptitude scores would ever know
about the lowlier status he had once had. It was also
decided in the Courts that there was no obligation on
anyone to put anything more than his current LQ. in
his Who s Who entry. A successful re-test was quite
genuinely a fresh start.
No doubt this has led to dif culties. Some children have
become excessively ambitious on behalf of their parents
and have exerted too much pressure on them to strive
for reclassi cation. Books on the care of parents have
become too avidly studied. Some workmen have dis-
played jealousy when their elderly workmates have
been sent away to university or gymnasium. But in the
long interim period while methods of selection have
been in process ofimprovement, the disadvantages have
been far outweighed by the advantages. Now, of course,
the psychologists have re ned their methods to such a
point that they can allow for most of the imponderables
which delay development and forecast not only the LQ.
but the ages at which it will fructify. Exciting as the
advance is to every scienti cally-minded person, it has
to be admitted that the discussions it has unloosed have
been grist to the critics of the established order.
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ORIGINS OF MODERN EDUCATION
5. SUMMARY
This chapter has sketched once again the great story of
educational reform. The government, when won round
to a contemporary sense of values, recognized that no
spending was more productive than spending on the
generation of brain power. Miserliness became muni-
cence, teachers and school buildings a rst charge upon
the national income. The independence of the gram-
mar schools was preserved. The better public schools
were merged and cross-fertilized with the grammar
schools. The new system was sustained by methods of
identifying ability that became steadily more effective.
By the 1980s the foundations of our modern system of
education had been laid.
Progress was possible because, as I explained in a
previous chapter, the socialists collapsed as an organ-
ized force. The same thing did not happen to the senti-
ments they expressed. All babies are creeping socialists
and some never grow out of it. But the hard core of
psychological egalitarians who never recover from the
envies of the nursery only become a danger to the State
when they are joined by large numbers of other people
whose hopes are thwarted in adult life. The 19605 were
one of those times, the present day another. People were
frustrated then because they (or their children) were
deprived of the superior education to which they ima-
gined themselves entitled; people are frustrated now for
the same reason, not so much by segregation in the
schools (most people have got used to that now) as by
the suggestion that the Regional Centres for Adult
Education have outlived their usefulness. The Centres
have become much prized by some of the more capable
technicians, the very kind of people who, though lowly,
77
THE RISE OF THE MERITOCRACY
are just intelligent enough to have been the core ofevery
revolutionary movement. Is not any hint of closing the
doors of the regional centres bound to arouse discon-
tent? If my analysis is correct, this new departure, as I
shall explain more fully later on, is one of the under-
lying reasons for the recent troubles.
.
g
a CHAPTER FOUR
FROM SENIORITY TO MERIT
I. THE CLASS OF OLD MEN
FOR a half century schools were the target for reform,
and quite rightly too, the achievement was brilliant.
But the reformers were as always (perhaps had to be)
too single-minded. They focused on schools to the ex-
clusion ofeverything else, with the distressing result that
for many years the ef ciency with which manpower was
used in industry lagged far behind the e iciency with
which it was used in education. Our grandfathers did
not fully realize that promotion of adults by merit, with
all that it implied for industrial organization, was as
necessary as promotion of children by merit. A society
which acknowledged the claims of talent in the schools,
but not in industry, was a house divided against itself.
They did not fully understand that when castes were
abolished, or rather converted into our modern kind of
classes, there was still another category of people to
circumvent the class of old men. They did not fully
appreciate that having the wrong man in a position of
power merely because he was of superior age was every
bit as wasteful as having the wrong man in a position of
power merely because his parents were of a superior
class. In an open society the few who are chosen Out of
the many who are called should be chosen on merit; age
is as much an irrelevant criterion as birth.
Within the span of human history age has been the
most enduring ruling class: once established, every
aristocracy, every plutocracy, every bureaucracy, has
79
THE RISE OF THE MERITOCRACY
also been a gerontocracy; and even under democracy,
government by the people, ofthe people, for the people,
meant government by old.people, of young people, for
Old people. In pre-industnal times the autocrat of the
farm did not share his authority with any school-
master When his sons were young, and he retained his
dominion over them when they were grown men, re-
strained only by the fear that if he irked his children
overmuch his eventual fate might be that of King Lear.
After the introduction of industry, fathers still did all
they could to secure advancement for their own over
other men s sons, but never over themselves, and to this
end the solidarity of seniority made all fathers into a
band of brothers. After the establishment of the new
élite fathers could no longer gain privilege for their own
sons, but they still continued to do all they could to
ensure that other men s sons, however able, did not gain
supremacy over themselves.
The meritocracy threatened, in short, to become yet
another gerontocracy. Had this danger not been
averted, the intellectual revolution would have been
incomplete.
With education reformed, some people imagined they
had matriculated to the millennium. The winners from
school and university were inclined to lean upon their
laurels. They entered, as if to a haven, professions still
governed by a restrictive guild mentality. They
accepted rule by the elders of their profession. They
comforted themselves that they would continue to make
the same steady progression through the age grades as
they had done at school, until in proper season they be-
came sacred elders in their turn. It was only the relent-
less facts of the modern world which roused people from
their torpor and sent competition to storm industry as
80
FROM SENIORITY TO MERIT
Well as school. In order to combine the best of England,
our regime for children, with the best of America, their
régime for adults, competition had to last for life.
2. FACTORIE S CEASE TO BE SCHOOLS
Up till the Hitler war and for some years after, educa-
tion determined prospects for promotion almost as
much as it does in modern times. The manual worker
who left school at the minimum age ordinarily re-
mained a manual worker for life, the farthest. he could
go being to charge-hand and foreman, 01 , 1f he was
lucky, by another route to general secretary of a trade
union. The progress chaser taken away early from gram-
mar school might climb to works manager, the pay-
clerk to accountant. In most work-places it was prac-
tically impossible to transfer from the ladder selected to
start with according to the age at which the boy left
school to another ladder which would take him higher;
the foreman remained a foreman instead of beginning
again on the ladder ofworks management, the account-
ant remained an accountant and was not 1n the run-
ning for director. Education decided the point of entry
to industry, and the point of entry dec1ded where one
ished u .
nThis stricture would have been well enough had the
schools been rationalized. But when neither quality nor
quantity of education were yet determined by intelh-
gence, many clever children left school too soon, many
stupid too late. A minority of more perceptive em-
ployers, following the civil service model whieh I have
already described, set out to correct the injustices of the
educational system and pro t themselves at the same
time. They gave their clever employees opportumues to
81
I
H
THE RISE OF THE MERITOCRACY
rise within the rm in place of the opportunities they
had missed at school. At its most complete (and to us
most ridiculous), this practice made it possible for the
tea-boy from the manual workers and the of ce-boy
from the Clerical to rise up to the board of directors. The
rst industries to be nationalized made some effort to do
at least as well as the civil service. On British Railways
a clerk could, for instance, if he moved oh the lowest
rungs when he was very young, transfer from the cleri-
cal laelcler to one of the lower administrative posts.1
Electr1c1ty supply was more enlightened still.
Employees. in the indumy are considered to be on a common
tadder, mutt;7 as openmgs occur, and in open competition accord-
mg to experzence and ahzlityfor the particular vacancy.2
The statement is entertaining, practice not being quite
11ke precept, because it shows how it was thought things
should work. Some employers were so proud of their
promotlon schemes and ladder plans that they preferred
to take on children straight from school and train them
on the job than recruit university graduates. This atti-
ttlde was regrettably common amongst leading execu-
t1ves who had not been to university themselves; there
were of course many such self-made men in those
d1stant days. The school s shame was the factory s pride.
The beginning of the second phase, which has lasted
until the present day, is usually put in the 1950s. The
1944 Act took ten to twenty years before its effect was
geherally felt in industry. Not many employers were as
qulck as the High Master to see its signi cance.
. I. For an account see Acton Society Trust. Training and Promo-
tzon m Natwnalz'zed Indumy. 1950.
2. Report qf a Committee qunquiry into the Electricit Su Z Indus-
tor. Para. I71. Cmd. 9672, 1956. y .1717)!
82
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FROM SENIORITY TO MERIT
0 longer, said Sir Eric, will industry or commerce be able
to recruit at fteen or sixteen boys who, as m the past, gm of
a quality to work their way up to [Josztzons of the hzghest
managerial respomibility}
In the fullness of time only the most dirIt-witted em
ployers failed to learn this lesson. The ev1dence came
through the door at the end of every term. Whatever
opportunities there might be for secondary modern ch11-
dren to climb the industrial ladder, the hard fact was
that fewer and fewer of them had the abthty to do so;
The grammar schools were retaining the hkely. lads
who in previous generations might have entered Indus-
try as fteen year olds, and the cleverest of the clever
were going on to the university. Since the only ladder a
plan that mattered was the educational one, the cap- IQ
tains of industry had to t in with that. Elther they
ammar school graduates, and
a seasoning from the university; or then" busmesses
could attract a share of gr
E
would perish. To sustain top management they had to E
recruit cadets from higher educatloh, evenaf 1t meant
incurring the hostility of the trade umons to 1htr0ducmg
outsiders, particularly well-educated outSIders. The
union leaders claimed, in the interests of then owr:
members, that a man who had come up the hard way
by working his passage upwards was lhherently superxor
to others of purely academic educatlon. But that was
before education came to be held in the hlgh respect 1t
later enjoyed. The view was obvious nonsense - there
was no harder way of coming up than the grammar
school.
.
Awareness that shortage of talent was more setlous
than any other fanned the competition between busmess
x. James, E., op. cit.
THE RISE OF THE MERITOCRACY FROM SENIORITY TO MERIT
executives. According to a contemporary report only a
' stituted priorities could be generally enforced. Effec
few years after 1944 in
ve brain-power planning is not only necessary to end
one of the kinds of competition between eleoyers that
is wasteful, but gives the government strategic power to
control the whole economy.
Oneyoung man in his secondyear at university had already been
( red a post at £750 ,5} one large companyfor when he should
graduate, and was being assiduously courted by another vast
compmzy, whose managing director entertained him to lunch.1
This was nothing to what happened later; eventually 3. CHALLENGE TO AGE
every forward-looking company had its teams of talent
scouts combing the universities and grammar schools
and most science masters and lecturers were offered re-
tainers if they would regularly supply reports on prom-
ising students. Newspapers were lled with employers
appeals to scholars; college magazines grew larger and
larger on the proceeds of advertisements. This hectic
competition was sometimes unfair, as many trade associ-
ations alleged, and sometimes led to abuse. Some clever
grammar school pupils were dissuaded from continuing
into the sixth forms by offers of generous apprentice-
ships, and others from seeking admission to the univer-
sity by glib scouts who promised them not only high
salaries immediately but university education later at
company expense. Retainers and assistance with re-
search expenses were not the best way of augmenting
science teachers salaries.
10,- The N.U.S. (National Union of Students) and
B.U.G.S.A. had to protect their members and in 1969
the Ministry of Education and the Federation ofBritish
Industries drew up the Code of Fair Practice for Utili-
zing the Products of Higher Education. Although a
worthy endeavour, this proved so ineffective in prac
tice that government control over the allocation of
intellectual resources became imperative. When it was
I. Acton Society Trust, op. cit.
84
1 Industry surrendered to teachers the function of select-
; ing recruits for management With a gootl enough gracle
when it saw that surrender was essential to survrva.
From that time on most of those who at the ages of
nineteen or twenty-three entered the hlgher reaches. of
industry, commerce, and the .professmns were the pick
' of their age groups. Managerlal eadets were chosen on
merit through competitive selectton 1n the schools. But
there, in this transition period, free compet1tion stopped.
As soon as the newcomer arrived in factory or ofhce, he
no longer had the chance to pit h1s talents agalnst all
and sundry in the promotion stakes. He was no longer
permitted, even after he had spent several years learn}-1
ing the business, to stand up in open_competition .w1t
people much older than himself. Wh e he was a Jamar
man, whether he had the capamty of Henry Ford or
Lord Nu ield it made no matter, he had to be content
E with being at best ajunior executive. Iri all the most 1m-
t, portant jobs promotion was still by semonty, so much so
that without exceptional luck even the best-edticated
could not hope to reach the top of the ladoler untll they
were fty or sixty. The story of the third and mest
recent phase is the story of the way 111 which the prin-
ciple of seniority has gradually ylelded to the prmmple
of merit, and industry been modelled on the schools.
It is once again dif cult for us to reahze how strongly
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FROM SENIORITY T0 MERIT
THE RISE OF THE MERITOCRACY
(1 n qu Y Y ' lways have
entl the regard ounger children a
f: gleder was ,converted into an awe which Often lasted
0
The old, by allowing the young to have author
entrenched the old were in those days, especially in
Britain. Status for age had once been linked with here-
. . . . 'fe.
ditary status, but it was far less easy to discredit. By the - .for lvlvhen it was not a threat to themselves, helped to
middle of last century it was extremely rare to hear any- 1W . unchal-
. . . . nsure that their own power would later g? t t
one openly defending a hereditary system. Kinship con- 6 ed The abolition of prefects was an impor an
nexions were no longer thought to confer merit on a leIgrrn-which started in the progressiVC C0-educat10nal
man. But age was. The rights of the old did not have to re
1d People dld 6 7 h
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the gerontocracy. I will deal brie y with each of them
and on the other acted in favour of promotion by age.
They resolved the dilemma before it was properly posed
in turn.
by enormously over-estimating the value of experi-
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1. Pressure from the young. No solid progress could be
ence which was imagined to be the product purely of
years. There was a mystique about it: people said Ah,
yes, but he s got more experience , as though that was
the last word. Respect for age was as much the rule of
society as respect for the aristocracy from which it had
grown.
Seniores primes there is no stronger testament to its
in uence than the schools. They weakened their own
progressive role by upholding the very principle with
which they were fundamentally at loggerheads. Prefects
were one of the most distinctive features of the old
public schools. These prefects were older boys who exer-
cised day to day government over their younger fellows,
some of whom were selected as fags to perform the
' the oun had generated more confidence
$a§1Zn112§iles. A: long as they accepted the (lornglatnc:
of the old there was no hope of a shift in the dlstr;1 u 10 f
of power, any more than there had been anly ope oa i
change while the superiority of the higher f asses tithe é
hereditary system was recogmzed by the ower.
' d as
t ower had rst to be questione
ght Of the 01d 0 P ' acy of inheritance, and for the
strenuously as the legium .
same reason. Inheritance was denounced for the Simple
reason that a developing industrial country in 0032::
tion with others could no longer afford seson let I
leaders; the needs of the econonay reshape 5:: Vi:
This campaign was not called o Just because 0
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tory had been won, but was turned againstthe Elcl.
Members ofevery fresh generation revolted against t e1r .
elders; youth of mettle to oppose the pretens1ons of age
instead of siding with it for the sake of favours to come.
Some cried destruction on the established order, some
87
duties of servants. The maintenance of discipline was in
large part the responsibility of the prefeets, who had the
power to secure obedience by beating any little boy who
incurred their displeasure. The prefect system was un-
fortunately taken over by the grammar schools too.
86
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THE RISE OF THE MERITOCRAGY
trieda more constructively, to remove the blocks to their
own advancement. The most rebellious knew instinc-
tively that the fastest progress occurs anywhere when
the old have to surrender their power before their span
oflife is complete the essence of every social revolution
is the earlier transfer of authority from one generation
to another; the wisest knew that the surest progress is
made by the mouse, by nibbling at the establishment
instead of by taking arms against it. The best policy
was to criticize the worth of individual old people
in an empirical manner rather than the class as a
whole.
The young succeeded as much as they did in oppos-
ing private practice because they had the resources of
the public culture to support them. They declared that
youth was generally entitled, on the grounds of merit,
to more preferment than it received. They were quite
right. In any rapidly changing society the young are
more at home than the old: it is easier for them to learn
for the rst time than for the old to unlearn, and learn
again, for a second or third time, especially when nos-
talgia for their own youth makes the old disinclined
even to try. This is more than ever true when the
schools are progressing even more rapidly than their
host society. Then children not only learn different
things, attuned to the needs of their own day (particu-
larly when the teachers are also young); they also learn
more because standards are higher and methods of
pedagogy better. Compare the boy who learns physics
today with an elderly man who was at the same univer-
sity in the eighties before Shag was even born. The
change is so dramatic, it is not really the same subject at
all. Given the same native ability, there is no doubt
which of them should obtain an important post in the
88
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FROM SENIORITY TO MERIT
laboratories, say at H.Q. in Eugenics Heuse. I .say
given the same native ability ~ but of course thlS ls
implausible. The content of higher education has not
only advanced; methods of selectlng those to bene t
from it have improved at least as fast. Each ten-year
age cohort of the elite has up till recently had rnore in-
nate capacity than the prev10us one; the unlverlsny
alumnus of 2000 more talent, as well as better training,
than the alumnus of I990; of 2010 more than of 2000.
The revelation that the graduate of 2020 was only very
slightly superior to the graduate of 2010 is one of.the
disturbing facts which has led to the present turmo .
2. Supportfrom the old. There was never any hard-and-
fast division between young and old: elass lines were
always blurred. Some easy-goingyoung people welcomed
age-strati cation for the sake of a quiet life, Without spur
to compete with their peers. Some old people were, on
the other hand, traitors to their age-group . Observance
of promotion by seniority, though it was in the interests
of most older people, was never in the interests of all of
them. .
Nearly every non-manual occupation was age
graded. A bank clerk, for instance, started at the bottorn
and then every few years added an rncrement to 1118
salary and a notch to his status, until eventually he
became chief cashier or even branch manager. But 1f he
lost his job, say at the age of forty, it might be through
no fault of his own, perhaps as a result of of ce:auto-
mation,1 what was he to do then? After Labour 5 rst
I. The large rm, with a wide spread of interests, could o er
greater security, which was one of its attractions for many young
people, and one of the causes of the relative growth of the large-
scale units in the economy.
89
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THE RISE OF THE MERITOCRACY
National Superannuation Act he could at least take his
pension with him. But not his status. If he tried to enter
another bank, or another employment altogether, on to
what rung of the promotion ladder was he to step? If he
started at the beginning again, he would suffer the loss
of all the increments he had received in twenty years. If
at the same level as other men of forty, he would be
lling a position coveted by an existing employee of
thirty- ve. This was usually ruled out by the opposition
of all the younger people in the line ofpromotion. Since
the old insisted on preferment for seniority, to protect
themselves, they could not turn about when the same
principle was invoked by the young, on behalf of their
own prospects of slow but steady ascent. Consequently
the old were only secure as long as they remained in one
employment middle-aged fear of dismissal was a main
cause of the caution which led to stagnation in many
companies. They were terri ed by the cry of too old at
forty , 21 maxim feared by all except the outstandingly
brilliant whom no age-barrier could halt.
The middle-aged, who had to accept demotion to get
any job at all after they had once lost their place on the
ladder, were sometimes as keen on promotion by merit
as the younger colleagues whose inferior status they
shared. That was a useful alliance for youth. Another,
stronger one was struck up with the retired. Early and
xed retirement from work was the consequence of pro-
motion by seniority. The usual retirement age was at
one time sixty- ve. However able the manager, and
however anxious he was to continue, he was under great
pressure not to. If he postponed his retirement by a
couple of years, the Whole shuf ing progress below him
came to a stop. The assistant manager of sixty had to
wait two extra years for his promotion, so did the
90
FROM SENIORITY TO MERIT
deputy assistant manager of fty- ve, so did the assist-
ant deputy assistant manager of fty, all the way down
to the lad of thirty just recently post-graduated from the
university. They were all waiting for the old man to
start pottering in his garden instead of With the bu51-
ness, hoping that they would not become too exhausted
waiting for his desk. Every age-grade therefore un1ted
against the top to ensure that the rules of the game were
kept. Before the meritocracy was fully established, age-
strati cation as a substitute for the heredltary order may
have been necessary for the sake of social stability. But
the cost was very high. Every year hundreds of thous-
ands of elderly men, some of whom would have been
much more assets than liabilities to their employers,
were forced to retreat into idleness, and deprived. of
their own self-esteem, by the rigidity of the promotion
system. Those who thought they would have held on to
their posts on grounds of ability alone naturally sided
with the youngsters who expected they would achieve
more rapid promotion if the rules werethanged.
The consequences of disregarding merit became more
and more serious with the increasing number of old
people who lasted out their span of life, and the
lengthening of that span. The elderly were not merely
the only large reserve of labour and intelligence, they
were also a growing one. Eventually Britain was con-
strained to follow the example of other industrial
societies with less out of date retirement rules. But when
the retiring age was raised to seventy, the politlcal con-
sequences were so grave that we had to wait twenty
years for the age to be raised further to elghtyi and
another twelve years before the xed age was abolished
altogether. Raising the age quickened the spread of the
new principles, for seniority lost its appeal when all the
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THE RISE OF THE MERITOCRACY
people waiting in the promotion queue suddenly had
their prospects darkened; they became more willing to
put their trust in merit. The elderly whose retirement
had been postponed did not usually stay as leaders; few
people over fty- ve are today in full membership of
the meritocracy. They had (like manual workers before
them) to reconcile themselves to demotion as their capa-
city fell off, measured either absolutely or relatively to
new arrivals from the schools. The managing director
had to become an of ce mechanic in someone else s rm
ifnot in his own; the professor an assistant in the library.
There have been judges who have become taxi drivers,
bishops curates, and publishers writers the 01d shine
in jobs where reliability is important. The re-employ-
ment of retired people performed one great service by
dissociating authority from age. Youngsters used to feel
uncomfortable when giving orders to old people other-
wise in the same social class as themselves. The re
employed showed so little resentment towards their
youthful superiors, they were so thankful to have work
at all, that the di idence of their youthful superiors was
dispelled, and their con dence in command more
nearly equated to their abilities.
3. Improvement ofmerit mting. Perhaps the greatest rea
son for the change in mental climate is that merit has
become progressively more measurable. In the old days
seniority had the splendid advantage of being an objec-
tive standard, even if it was irrelevant, whereas merit
was still subjective even though relevant. Indeed, for a
long time, merit was little more than a respectable
disguise for nepotism. Fathers secured promotion for
their relatives and friends, and pretended to themselves
and to others they were doing nothing except give merit
92
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FROM SENIORITY TO MERIT
'ts due. But if they concealed their fault from them-
1 Ives others were not so easily deceived. The trade
sfnionas, in particular, Were .only too well awlare of til;
pitfalls of selecting by ment , when the _fat .gr tyyas S-
own judge and psychologist, and were JuStl a. y 531
icious that when outsmlers were introducedhinéob :1
line of promotion something less than Jusuce a . e:
done. They therefore stood by promotion by semorII I317,
which was at least one better than Vile nepotism: 1 e
world could see whether, according to this partielli Zr
idea of fairness, right preva1led or not. If on any a -f
der, a man of thirty was given superiority oyer a niian od
forty (or rather a man With ten years serv1ce p: erre
to a man with twenty), then all could see t e mls-
' f 'ustice. . ..
calT hzigi/iiziius circle the vagueness of merit leadm to
its rejection was only broken when the means ofse tel:-
tion employed in the schools were aclapted for use 1n be
economy. Intelligence tests and aptitude tests leierele1 -
jective, and a good deal more rellable than t e oT r
forms of examination which they supplemented. e
rst stage, as we have seen, was for the level of perfortnl l
ance achieved in the tests (when taken together w1t
the level of education with which the test resnlts were
correlated) to determine the level of entry into industry.
Once people were ready, 1t was then but a step tog):
tend the sway of the tests until the markings contro e
promotion as well as selection. To begin w1th, employers
had to submit candidates to thelr own honse-tests, yet
such was the suspicion in industrial telations at tilat
time, their impartiality was distrnsted Just because :1 ey
were the employer s responsrbihty. The atmosp :1 :
was much sweetened when the government establls ed
its chain of Regional Adult Education Centres an
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community centres as a common service to industry,
and, after a very long and acrimonious debate, gaVe
employers access to the results of intelligence tests from
the Centres as well as the schools. Employers now have
as close an interest as employees in the quinquennial re
valuations at the regional centres, and many of them
show their appreciation on the Prize Days of their
factories.
One thing the regional centres could not do. They
could not measure the qualities of character expressed
in effort expended by an employee in the course of his
work. Intelligence and effort together make up merit
(I +E 2M). The lazy genius is not one. Here employers
have made their own contribution to the cause of pro-
gress. Scienti c management pioneered by Taylor,
the Galbraiths, and Bedaux has led to modern time and
motion study, and this in its turn to the measurement of
effort. The art of work measurement has become more
of a science, with the consequence that wages can be
assessed, and related to effort, in a more and more pre-
cise manner. I shall return to this subject in allater chap-
ter. Dr Roskill s great contribution was to show how the
principle of work study could be applied to mental pro-
cesses. After that the employer had by him a Roskill
chart as well as the scores from the education centres,
and if he chose wrongly withal, it was high time he had
a re-test himself. The trade unions right of access to
management scores is one of the guarantees that, if new
tests are necessary, they will be administered willy-nilly.
4.. SUMMARY
These, then, are some of the steps by which the old
rigidities have been removed from industry. When
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intelligent public opinioh as a whole tecognicze?1:11:
f cieney must be raised, in the general interes o 1 d
12nd as well as of the part of it inhabiting these is an s,
th claims ofyouth could not be demeti. Emergencyvyla:
youth s opportunity. This was; shown In. every wgr cause
ng denounced brass-hats and poht1c1ans e . 1
ZS; were out of date, and made headway preclllse y
because bad brass-hats and bad politicians wouldtitagrc;
let the enemy in at the gates. International compe.n in-
was also effective in peace. Natiye ability frolzen 1 had
ferior age groups or ilnferiofr soc1alrclasses a ways
all the c ever oreigne . .
onéhtziiirglf hag: as always too, created its ownfresmt mlge.
The protests of the past were the protests-o yolin 656$
rebelling against conventions and restrictions 1 vgqu
on them by their elders, they at last matie adnewt all old
Where youth is the leader, ageis the led, ah 'I:0 Ever
people have submitted to them new inferiori y. r anyl
now and then an old man, overtaken by a youngec,h his
disappointed in work, turns to blame not so thigh the
successor as the social order which makes p0551 d1 as
indignity he feels. He may not play rebellias gri ngish
the young man a humiged years :gge;rtisewti:Ch some
trousers dra e coa s, an
:fclriijibvn sport aie a tEi e pathetic but he has thessa$t2
kind of discontent, springing from the same sougce. . the
do not need to look further for one of the strafn 3 :210
support given to the reforrhers. In the hght o socuCh gal};
the old men at their meetings do not seem so m
odds with the vivid young girls on the platform.
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THE RISE OF THE MERITOCRACY
I have now nished the rst part of my essay, and with
it my sketch of the means by which opportunities were
equalized. Since I have had to compress more than a
century s progress into a few pages, I am aware that I
have done less than justice to the part of individuals in
the intellectual renaissance. Too severe a sociological
analysis may suggest that history has slid to its present
conclusion as inevitably as the morning rocket arrives
on the moon. That would be quite wrong. There is
nothing mechanical about history. Stupidity has not
been routed by sociology, but by the heroes who have
combined high conscience with high intelligence. Think
of Sidney and Beatrice Webb, and Bernard Shaw the
modern Conservative Party is carrying on their battle;
think of Forster, Fisher, Ramsay MacDonald, Butler,
Wyatt, Crosland, Stewart, Hailsham, Taylor, Dobson,
and Clauson their cause was our cause. What the
Populists have done by their recent apostasy is to forfeit
any right to claim descent from these great men and
women. The Technicians have surrendered the mantle
of greatness to the Conservatives.
The great political theorists of the past century
changed the mental climate of their time by reinter-
preting old values in terms of new situations for in-
stance, by hailing the post-1944 educational system in
the name of equality. They appealed in a characteris-
tically empirical manner to the common-sense predica-
ment of our island in a common-sense, competitive
world. Supporting the theorists were the great adminis-
trators. They called out the psychologists and protected
them from public assault. They made the grammar
schools the élite s training ground. They battered the
Treasury into accepting the new view ofeconomy that
to spend money on education was in the long run the
96
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only way of raising the national product, and with it,
the taxable capacity of the country. They overcame by
a hundred expedients the unsavoury obscurahtism of
th6 public schools, and eventually promoted their amal-
gamation with the other kind of grammar schoolzThey
dethroned the old and made youth the prince of indus-
try. Let us praise them all.
:1:
But I have written this essay less to honour famous men
than to warn my fellow intelligences._1 said so at the
beginning of this book, and I say againathat we shall
show ourselves unworthy of our scholarships if we scorn
our opponents. As individuals, I agree, few are excep-
tional. But as a mass they are formidable, the more so
because by its forward motion the somety we have
created renews their strength daily. I shall be more ex-
plicit. Who are the lower classes of modern England?
We can distinguish two main groups:
(1) The majority who are second-generation lower class.
These comprise all the offspring of lower-class parents
except for clever children who have rlsen higher by
means of the educational ladder. .
(2) The minority who are rst-generation lower class.
These are the stupid offspring of upper-class Parents,
found out in the schools and demoted to the soc1al class
appropriate to their inferior capacity.
I shall return to the rst group, numerically over-
whelming, in Part Two of this bookafor I want to
attempt there the dif cult task of shOWIng, against the
background of their general status 1n somety', why we
can expect even some of these native proletarians to be
97
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THE RISE OF THE MERITOCRACY
discontented. For the moment, in order to make my
point as forcefully as I can, I shall do no more than dis-
charge the easier task ofdrawing attention to the resent-
ment in the second group, the stupid born of the clever.
Painstaking retrospective study (for which the Uni-
versity of York has earned a well deserved reputation)
has made it seem at least reasonably probable that
before the 19805 downward mobility was uncommon.
Upper-class parents with dull children did everything
possible to hide their handicap. They usually made up
by their own frantic determination for any lack of will
on the part of their children. For instance, they bought
places at private schools which would never have been
awarded on merit. They spent, for the sake of stimulus,
even more on books and travel than other rich people.
And, when the combined pressure of home and school
had produced, as it often did, a person super cially not
too dull, the parents eased the loved one into a cosy
corner ofone of the less exacting professions, such as law
or stockbroking. These anti-social parents were able to
keep a hold on the old professions and also on family
rms which for one reason or another enjoyed some
small but effective monopoly. The old upper class found
jobs for nearly all its children, while most of the addi-
tional jobs in the new professions, especially in science
and technology, went to cadets drawn from the lower
classes. The old upper class in absolute terms suffered
but little diminution, merely lost its relative pre-
dominance at a time when the proportion ofwhite-collar
jobs in the economy was increasing fast.
After the 19803 the scene began to change very
rapidly. I suppose the decisive innovation was the recog-
nition of merit in industry, and at'last even in the pro-
fessions. The stupid found it harder and harder to pass
98
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as clever. They found it harder and harder to get
through the selection boards, and if they managed to
squeeze through, their incapacity for work becoming
more and more demanding was as often as not spotted
by increasingly ef cient personnel departments. After
the reform of the public schools they were also deprived
ofthe chance of a rst-class education, unless it was pro
cured at truly colossal expense by hiring private tutors.
Nitwits could still go to second-rate public schools can
even do so today if their parents are wealthy enough
but what was the use, if the education was second-rate?
The closing of the bolt-holes has been made less irk-
some by the ne work of the Regional Centres in one of
their less well-known manifestations. The Commis-
sioners have persuaded many parents that, if they love
their stupid children, they will not cloud their lives with
a lie by pretending to them and everyone else that an
LQ. of 90 is really one of I 10. I do not for one moment
contend that modern notions ofparental duty are every-
where accepted, but I would still maintain that we need
not be too anxious about the older generation. There
are so few clever parents with nothing but stupid pro
geny, with a whole brood of ugly ducklings. The
younger generation have reacted less well, I mean the
children who can fool themselves no longer after they
have suffered dismal results in successive examinations.
They are brought up in our most honoured homes, and,
as infants, share the esteem which the community
accords to their fathers and mothers. They may, too, get
used to a standard of life which they will never again
enjoy once they have entered a manual occupation at
the appropriate level. Reared in a house with an enter
tainment centre at its core, bespoke cooking and open
wood res, the poor boy may nd it hard indeed to get
99
THE RISE OF THE MERITOCRACY
used to an ordinary council housewith heat pump but no
open res, with three-dimensional tape-recorders instead
ofan entertainment centre, with pre-packaged meals in-
stead of bespoke cooking. The rest of his life may be a
backward look; scienti c selection for jobs, though it has
done much, has not taken all the moodiness out of nos-
talgia. Of course it may not happen like this. To be
truthful, we cannot yet be sure just how much resent-
ment the déclasse person does feel. The very fact that he
is stupid means that he is inarticulate, and the fact that
he is inarticulate means that he cannot explain too
clearly how he does feel. Some psychologists who have
specialized on these subjects have advanced the theory,
which I myself nd perfectly plausible, that they do
suffer, but have been prevented by their intellectual
limitations from saying so. Certainly they have not
organized any concerted attack on the society of which
they might claim to be the Victims. Is it not possible
that for fty years some of them have been smouldering
for the leadership which they cannot provide for them-
selves?
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STATUS OF THE WORKER
I. GOLDEN AGE OF EQUALITY
I HAVE in the rst part ofthis book reviewed the means
by which our modern élite has been established, and
what a splendid result it is! No longer is it just the
brilliant individual who shines forth; the world beholds
for the rst time the spectacle of a brilliant class, the
ve per cent of the nation who know what ve per cent
means. Every member is a tried specialist in his own
sphere. Mounting at a faster and faster rate, our know-
ledge has been cumulative from generation to genera-
tion. In the course of a mere hundred years we have
come close to realizing at one stroke the ideal of Plato,
Erasmus, and Shaw. But, if sociology teaches anything,
it teaches that no society is completely stable; always
there are strains and con icts. In the rst part of this
essay I have mentioned some of the tensions between
family and community, between different parts of the
educational structure, between young and old, between
the déclasse and the other members of the proletariat
incident to the rise of the meritocracy. Now I turn, in
this second part, to consider from the same point of
view, the consequences of progress for the lower class,
and, as I have said, particularly for those born into it.
My method of analysis is historical; the comparison I
draw once more with a century ago. Taylor has called
that time the golden age of equality.1 A sort of egali-
1. Taylor, F. G. The Role of Egalitarianixm in Twentieth centuzy
England. 2004.
103
THE RISE OF THE MERITOCRACY
tarianism ourished then because two contradictory
principles for legitimizing power were struggling for
mastery the principle of kinship and the principle of
merit - and nearly everyone, in his heart of hearts,
believed in both. Everyone thought it proper to advance
his son and honour his father; everyone thought it
proper to seek out ability and honour achievement. In-
dividuals were riven as much as society. The conse
quence was that anyone who had reached privilege be-
hind the shield of only one of these principles could be
attacked with the sword of the other the man born
great was criticized because, by another reckoning, he
did not deserve his fortune; and the base-born achiev-
ing greatness could be charged half impostor. The
powerful were, by this Whirligig, unfailingly unseated.
Many people were catapulted forward by their
parents riches and in uence; not only did they bene t
from the culture festooning their homes, they were sent
to the best schools and colleges, dispatched on trips
abroad and given expensive training for Bar, counting-
house, or surgery all the advantages, in short, which
we in our day try to keep for the deserving. But since
such treatment was sanctioned by only half the moral
code, the bene ciaries were only half at home in their
station in life. They could not say to themselves with
complete conviction 1 am the best man for the job
because they knew that they had not won their place in
open competition and, if they were honest, had to recog-
nize that a dozen of their subordinates would have been
as good, or Berhaps better. Although they sometimes
sought to deny self douht by too brassy an assertion of
self con dence, such denial was hard to sustain when it
plainly ran against the facts. The upper-class man had
to be insensitive indeed not to have noticed, at some
104
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STATUS OF THE WORKER
time in his life, that a private in his regiment, a butler
or charlady in his home, a driver of taxi or bus, or the
humble workman with lined face and sharp eyes in. the
railway carriage or country pub not to have noticed
that amongst such people was intelligence, Wit, and
wisdom at least equal to his own, not to have noticed
that every village had its Jude the Obscure, If he had.so
observed, if he had so recognized that his soc1a1 1n-
feriors were sometimes his biological superiors, if the
great variety of people in all social classes had made
him think in some dim way that a man s a man for_ a
that , was he not likely to respond by treating them With
a kind of respect?1
Even if the superiors deceived themselves, they could
not their subordinates. These knew that many bosses
were there not so much because of what they knew, as
who they knew, and who their parents were, and went
on, with wanton exaggeration, to denounce all bosses
on like account. Some men of talent took pains (1f
contemporary novels are to be relied on) to make it
known in the factory, if not in the golf club, that they
had come up the hard way . But who could tell for
certain how far success had been accident, or lack of
scruples offset lack of brains? The workmen had their
doubts. They let y with their criticism of the .powers-
that-be, and so kept even the able under restraint. The
energy wasted on criticism and eounter-critic1sm was
colossal.
1. In an earlier age the sumptuary laws passed by Henry VII to
force lords to eat in the same great hall as their retainers were not
only for the bene t of the retainers. In modern . times there IS
nothing to be gained from social mixing, in school, in remdence, or
at work, because the upper class now have little or nothing to learn
from the lower.
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THE RISE OF THE MERITOCRACY
An even more important consequence of the con iCt _j
in values was that the workers could altogether dissociate 5
their own judgements of themselves from the judgement
of society. Subjective and objective status were often
poles apart. The worker said to himself: Here I am, a
workman. Why am I a workman? Am I t for nothing
else? Of course not. Had I had a proper chance I would
have shown the world. A doctor? A brewer? A minis-
ter? I could have done anything. I never had the chanCe.
And so I am a worker. But don t think that at bottom
I am any worse than anyone else. I m better. Educa-
tional injustice enabled people to preserve their illu-
sions, inequality of opportunity fostered the myth of
human equality. Myth we know it to be; not so our
ancestors.
2. GULF BETWEEN THE CLASSES
This evocation of the past shows how great the change
has been. In those days no class was homogeneous in
brains: clever members of the upper classes had as much
in common with clever members of the lower classes as
they did with stupid members of their own. Now that
people are classi ed by ability, the gap between the
classes has inevitably become wider. The upper classes
are, on the one hand, no longer weakened by self-doubt
and self-criticism. Today the eminent know that suc-
cess is just reward for their own capacity, for their own
efforts, and for their own undeniable achievement.
They deserve to belong to a superior class. They know,
too, that not only are they of higher calibre to start
with, but that a rst-class education has been built
upon their native gifts. As a result, they can come as
close as anyone to understanding the full and ever-
growing complexity of our technical civilization. They
106
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are trained in science, and it is scientists who have in-
herited the earth. What can they have in common Wlth
people whose education stopped at sutteen or seventeen,
leaving them with the merest smattering of dogtsuenee?
HOW can they carry on a tw0-31ded conversation With
the lower classes when they speak another, richer, and
more exact language? Today,_ the elite know that, ex-
cept for a grave error in administration, which should
at once be corrected if brought to hght, their social
inferiors are inferiors in other ways as well ~ that 1s, m
the two vital qualities, of intelligence and education,
which are given pride of place in the more consrstent
value system of the twenty- rst century. Hence one of
our characteristic modern problems: some members
of the meritocracy, as most moderate reforrners admit,
have become so impressed with their own 1mportance
as to lose sympathy with the people whorn they govern,
and so tactless that even people of low calibre have heen
quite unnecessarily offended. The schools and univer
sities are endeavouring to instil a more proper sense of
humility what does even modern man count Ibe51de
the wonders which Nature has wrought 1n the universe?
but for the moment the ef ciency of public relations
with the lower classes is not all that it might be. .
As for the lower classes, their situation is different
too. Today all persons, however humble, know they
have had every chance. They are tested again and
again. If on one occasion they are off-colour, they have
a second, a third, and fourth opportunity to demon
strate their ability. But if they have been labelled
dunce repeatedly they cannot any longer pretend;
their image of themselves is more nearly a true, tin-
attering, re ection. Are they not bound to recognize
that theyhave aninferiorstatus notas m the pastbecause
107
THE RISE OF THE MERITOGRACY
they were denied opportunity; but because they are in-
ferior? 1 For the rst time in human history the inferior
man has no ready buttress for his self-regard. This has
presented contemporary psychology with its gravest
problem. Men who have lost their self-respect are liable
to lose their inner Vitality (especially if they are inferior
to their own parents and fall correspondingly in the
social scale) and may only too easily cease to be either
good citizens or good technicians. The common man is
liable to sulk for his g-leaf.
The consequences of so depressing the status of the
inferior and elevating that of the superior have natur-
ally engaged the full attention of social science. We can-
not pretend that its path has always been smooth. Dr
Jason s tadpole argument which amounted, when
stripped of verbiage, to saying that on the whole all
tadpoles were happier because they knew that some of
them would turn into frogs, was at best a half truth.
The young might be happier; but what of the many
older tadpoles who knew they would never become
frogs? The tadpoles only confused counsel. Since Lord
Jason himself became a frog , research has proceeded
'more steadily.
The situation has been saved by ve things. First,
by the philosophy underlying teaching in secondary
modern schools. When these were started, no one quite
knew what to do about the content of education for the
lower classes. Children were taught the three R s as
well as how to use simple tools and to measure with
I. This is not entirely a new realization. My colleague, Mr
Fallon, has drawn my attention to an old cartoon in the New
Yorker, an ostensibly humorous American periodical, circa 1954.
It showed a large psychiatrist confronting a small patient, saying,
You haven t got an inferiority complex. You are inferior.
108
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STATUS OF THE WORKER
gauges and even micrometers. But this was only the
formal skeleton of a course without an ideology to guide
it. The schools had a far more important function than
to equip their pupils with a few elementary skills; they
also had to instil an attitude of mind which would be
conducive to effective performance of their future tasks
in life. The lower classes needed a Mythos, and they got
what they needed, the Mythos of Muscularity. Luckily
they already had this in a rudimentary form, which the
modern schools have been able to promote into the
modern cult of physical (as distinct from mental) prow-
ess. The English love of sport was traditional, and no
where stronger than in the lower classes. The modern
schools were not breaking with the past, they were
building on it, when they encouraged their pupils to
value physical strength, bodily discipline, and manual
dexterity. Handicrafts, gymnastics, and games have
become the core of the curriculum. This enlightened
approach has achieved a double purpose. Appreciation
of manual work has been cultivated, and leisure made
more enjoyable. Of the two, education for leisure has
been the most important. More capable pupils have
been trained to participate in active games which they
can continue to play when they leave school; and the
others who form the great majority have been given
heightened appreciation of boxing, football, and other
sports displayed before them nightly on the screens in
their own homes. They esteem physical achievement
almost as highly as we ofthe upper classes esteem mental.
Secondly, the adult education movement has, in its
maturity, not only maintained and enlarged the
regional centres but has arranged for everyone, irre-
spective of previous results, to attend there for a
periodic intelligence check at intervals of ve years.
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Tests can be even more frequent at the behest of the
individual. A few remarkable changes of LQ. both up
and down, have occurred in middle life. Widely pub»
licized in the popular newspapers, the reports have
given new heart to many an ambitious technician. Now
that psychiatric treatment is freely available in every
workplace, many people with emotional blocks to the
realization of their potential have been fully cured.
Thirdly, even when they have abandoned hope them-
selves, all parents have been solaced by the knowledge
that, however low their own I.Q., their child (or grand:
child) will have the chance to enter the meritocracy.
The solace is a real one. Psychologists have shown that
parents, whose own ambitions are thwarted, invariably
displace those ambitions on to their children. They are
satis ed if they think that their own child may achieve
what they could not achieve themselves. Do as I wish,
not as I do, they say. The relationship can even be
expressed in quantitative terms: according to the well-
known principle of compensating aspirations, the
greater the frustrations parents experience in their own
lives, the greater their aspirations for their children.
Almost from the moment when they fail their rst in:
telligence tests at school, children can comfort them=
selves that one day they will have o spring who will do
better; and even when it is dismally clear from teachers
reports that the offspring too are dull, there are still the
grandchildren.1 Personal failings are not so painful if
there is a vision ofvicarious triumph. As long as all have
opportunity to rise through the schools, people can
I. Three«generation interlocking of aspirations in the extended
family was discussed in an interesting way by lVIichael Young in
The Role of the Extended Family in Channeling Aspirations,
British journal of Sociology, March 1967. Note the earliness of the
date.
110
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STATUS OF THE WORKER
believe in immortality: they have a second chance
through the younger generation. Also, the more chil-
dren, the more second chances, Which helps to account
for the higher birth-rate in the second half of last
century, after the reforms.
The fourth saving feature has been the very stupid-
ity which has assigned the lower classes to their present
status. A common mistake of some sociologists is to
impute to the lower orders the same capacity as them-
selves ~ a way of thinking akin to anthropomorphism.
Sociologists would naturally be aggrieved were they to
be denied their proper status. But the lower classes are
the objects of study, not the students. The attitude of
mind is quite different. People of low intelligence have
sterling qualities: they go to work, they are conscien-
tious, they are dutiful to their families. But they are
unambitious, innocent, and incapable of grasping
clearly enough the grand design of modern society to
offer any effective protest. Some are sulkily discon-
tented, without being too sure what to do about it, and
nd their way to the psychologist or the priest. Most are
not, for they know not what is done to them.
3. PIONEERS OF DIRTY WORK
The fth, and most important, saving feature has been
the application of scienti c selection to industry. In the
previous chapter I showed how promotion by merit
gradually replaced promotion by seniority how the
grammar school and university streams were eventually
extended into working life. I will now deal with the
treatment of the secondary modern stream.
The modern schools have been reproduced in indus-
try just as surely as the grammar schools, and with
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consequences just as far-reaching. The starting point is
again the Hitler war. In the early years of that war the
methods of distributing recruits were almost as hap~
hazard as in industry. Only after several disasters was
a more sensible practice adopted, described as follows
in the words of a leading Command Psychiatrist in one
of the of cial histories of the war:
In allocating personnel, the basic principle should be that no
man it to be employed on work which is de nitely above, or, on
the other hand, de nitely below his ability. Arty other method of
allotment is warteful ofability, or destructive ofunit e iciency.1
What wise and far-sighted words!
By the end of the war the instruction was obeyed and
very few men entering the Forces were assigned to any
branch until their intelligence and aptitudes had been
ascertained as accurately as the crude methods of the
time allowed. Much greater ef ciency was obtained in
the utilization of manpower when the stupid were kept
together, and the lesson was not lost on some of the bet-
te; brains in civilian industry. This was long before
advertisers began to include State LQ. (soon short-
ened t0 S.I.Q.) in their copy; and longer still before
H.Q. (at Eugenics House) supplied LQ. certi cates to
authorized inquirers by teleprinter. The ower of that
experiment of the 1940s was the Pioneer Corps. When
this indispensable body of hewers and drawers was con-
ned to men with I.Q.s below the line required to get
them into the Intelligence Corps, the rise in ef ciency
was spectacular. The morale of these dull-witted men
was better. They were no longer daunted by having
superior people to compete with. They were amongst
I. F. A. E. Crew, F.R.S. The Army Illedical Servicex. H.M.S.O.,
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STATUS OF THE WORKER
, their equals they had more equal opportunities since
they had more limited ones and they were happier,
had fewer mental breakdowns, and were harder work-
ing. The Army had learnt the lesson of the schools: that
people can be taught more easily, and get on better,
when they are classed with people of more or less equal
intelligence, or lack of it. .
Not until the 1960s did this same lesson str1ke home
in civil life. Intelligent people used to ask themselves
what they thought was a profound poser: Who , they
asked, will do the dirty work in the future common-
wealth? Those who knew the right answer apparently
said: Machines, of course ; they will be the robots of the
future. It was a good answer as far as it went, but, in
view of the many jobs Which can never be taken over by
machinery, at best a partial one. Then as they becarne
aware of the new and revolutionary developments 1n
intelligence testing, aptitude testing, and vocational
selection, managements realized that a perinanent
peace-time Pioneer Corps was a practical p0351b1hty.
At rst tentatively, they suggested the correct answer to
the old question: Who will do the dirty work? The
correct answer was: Why, men who like doing it, of
course. . .
They could see the need for a kind of permanent c1v1-
lian Pioneer Corps, men with large muscles and small
brains (selected by other men with small muscles and
large brains) who were not only good at emptylng dust-
bins and heaving loads but liked doing it. They were
never to be asked to do more than they were proved to
be t for. They were never to be forced to mix with any-
one who made them feel foolish by emptying dustbins
more quickly or, What was worse at that time, by een-
signing all dustbins to the rubbish-heap a sure Sign
113
THE RISE OF THE MERITOCRACY
either of mental de ciency or genius. As I say, pro-
gressive managements were very tentative and even a
little shamefaced. They were easily put off by refer-
ences to Mr Huxley s gammas and Mr Orwell s proles.
The managers did not see that these two gentlemen had
both been attacking not equal opportunity, but the
effects of conditioning and propaganda. By these means
even intelligent people were to be brought to accept
their fate as manual workers. We know that in the long
run this is impossible, and in the short run absurdly
wasteful and frustrating. The only good manual work-
ers, we know, are those who have not the ability for
anything better. Enlightened modern methods have
nothing in common with these brave new worlds. But at
rst not all managers realized that so signally to square
ef ciency with justice, and order with humanity, was
nothing less than a new stage in the ascent of man,
brought within his reach by the early advances in the
social sciences.
The Pioneer Corps was the essential counterpart of
the administrative class in the civil service; its historical
signi cance is as great as that. The success of open com-
petition in government employment established the
principle that the most responsible posts should be lled
by the most able people; the Pioneers that the least
responsible jobs should be lled by the least able people.
In other words, a society in which power and responsi-
bility were as much proportioned to merit as education.
The civil service won acCeptance far more easily no
one wanted to be blown up by hydrogen bombs or
starved of foreign exchange because something less than
the nest brains were ensconced in Whitehall. The
Pioneers encountered far more opposition. The com-
munity of principle governing the civil service and the
1:4
STATUS OF THE WORKER
Pioneers was not 'at once recognized. The objectors,
amongst them a growing number of Socialists, com-
plained of indignity . A vague word, to conceal a vague
concept. The brute fact is that the great majority of
minds were still thinking in pre-merit terms.
In the dark England of the distant past it made the
best of sense to plead for equality. In the main way that
counts, in their brain-power, the industrial workers, or
the peasantry, or whoever it might be, were as good as
their masters. What the anti Pioneers did not realize
was that the gradual shift from inheritance to merit as
the ground of social selection was making (and has
nally made) nonsense of all their loose talk of the
equality of man. Men, after all, are notable not for the
equality, but for the inequality, of their endowment.
Once all the geniuses are amongst the elite, and all the
morons amongst the workers, what meaning can equal-
ity have? What ideal can be upheld except the principle
of equal status for equal intelligence? What is the pur-
pose Of abolishing inequalities in nurture except to
reveal and make more pronounced the inescapable
inequalities of Nature?
The decisive fact was the happiness of the Pioneers,
or hand-workers, as they were at rst called to dis-
tinguish them from brain-workers. No one wanted to
ood the chronic wards of the mental hospitals, yet that
is just what industry had for many years been doing
by setting sub-standard people to perform tasks beyond
their reach. No one wanted, least of all the socialists, to
cause unnecessary suffering. The principle From each
according to his capacity, neither more nor less was
empirically justi ed. The workers were more content,
and so, for the same reason, were the large middle-
classes with I.Q.s broadly between 100 and 125. It was
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THE RISE OF THE MERITOCRAGY
shown time and time again by the psychologists that to
put a highly intelligent man on a routine job was as
disastrous re ected as it was in sickness, absenteeism,
and neurosis1 as the obverse. Matching of intelli
gence and job in the various streams of society was
everywhere demonstrated as the highest expression of
both ef ciency and humanity; as the very engine of
productivity at the same time as the liberator of man-
kind. Without the scienti c study of human relations in
industry, resentment against the declining status of the
lower classes, and the widening gap between them and
the upper classes, would have disrupted society long
ago.
4.. THE NEW UNEMPLOYMENT
The axiom of modern thought is that people are un-
equal, and the ensuing moral injunction that they
should be accorded a station in life related to their capa-
cities. By dint of a long struggle, society has at last been
prevailed upon to conform: the mentally superior have
been raised to the top and the mentally inferior lowered
to the bottom. Both wear clothes that t them, and, as
I say, it is doubtful whether the lower classes would have
1. An investigation madejust after the Hitler war was, tojudge
from the press, given insuf cient attention at the time. The
women, who were on jobs requiring skill that did not correspond
with their intelligence, had a higher incidence of recent de nite
neurosis than those on jobs whose skill requirements did corre-
spond: the incidence of neurosis was equally high, irrespective of
whether the skill required by the job was too high or too low com-
pared with the worker s intelligence. Russell Fraser, The Incidence
of Neurosis amongst Factory Workers. Industrial Health Research
Board Report, No. 90, H.M.S.O., 1947. An earlier report of the
same Board said that severe boredom is usually found associated
with more than average intelligence . I.H.R.B., N0. 77, H.M.S.O.,
1937.
116
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STATUS OF THE WORKER
become so docile unless they had, in fact, found the
clothes comfortable. The psychologists gave the world
the means of identifying people without ability. But,
burdened in this way, what work were they to do? It
was no use having a Pioneer Corps unless there was a
job for it.
In my own special period, that is before 1963, few
contemporary observers were aware that economic pro-
gress threatened to produce a new kind of selective un-
employment. The trend was Visible enough, if they had
but looked, but this for the most part they signally failed
to do.1 Or rather they noticed one trend, that of in-
creasing mechanization, but not its inescapable human
consequences. They knew that the prime purpose of
machinery was to save labour, but did not ask - what
kind oflabour? Mass unemployment which af icted the
clever and the stupid alike was the kind that people
understood; this other kind of sub intellectual unem-
ployment was still hidden from all but the most discern-
1n .
gFollowing what was called the industrial revolution ,
when processes previously performed by hand were
gradually taken over by machines, hand work was far
from being rendered redundant: machinofacture and
manufacture proceeded side by side. Early machinery
was a godsend to the stupid. It still had to be operated
by hand, and repetitive machine-minding was well
within the compass of low-grade employees, unskilled
or semi-skilled. In a fairly typical mid-twentieth-cen-
tury factory there was a division between the skilled
men and the rest. On the one side were the trained
1. One notable exception was Sir George Thomson, F.R:S., in
his book The Foreseeable Future, 1955. See particularly the section on
The Future of the Stupid .
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THE RISE OF THE MERITOCRACY
designers and draughtsmen, the administrators and
inspectors, the maintenance men and setters who pro.
vided, supervised, and repaired the machinery. On the
other were the operators who fed the machine with
material, pressed a few simple levers in response to a
few simple signals, and extracted the material after pro-
cessing; or who added a component to an assembly
moving forward in a batch or on a belt. In the course of
time this division became sharper and sharper, repro-
ducing the division in society itself, with the technical
sta being constantly upgraded as the machinery in
their care became more complex, and the routine
operators being constantly dowugraded as the work for
which they were responsible became more simple.
More and more was demanded of the skilled men,
less and less of the unskilled, until nally there was no
need for unskilled men at all. Their work was merely
routine, and so it could by de nition be progressively
taken over and performed by mechanical means. The
more simpli ed a job became, the more easily could it
be done by a machine which would feed itself with
material, press the lever, and extract the nished article.
Semi-automatic became fully automatic. Displacement
of low-grade labour became very rapid after the Hitler
war with the development of electronics, and especially
ofservo-mecham'sms well-suited to direct industrial pro-
cesses broken down into their simplest components. So
marked was the progress that a new word automa-
tion - was coined for the old business of mechanization
in the new form it was taking.
Displacement of labour did not at rst show itself
openly. The trade unions naturally did not make any
distinction between clever and stupid; to them men
whose jobs had been forfeit to technical change were
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STATUS OF THE WORKER
members to be protected iike any other, and they in
sisted that people whose Jobs were taken away fro?
them by labour-saving machinery should not thdIS-
missed but kept on to do some qulte unnecessary work,
' ' f mmdmg the robot
perhaps merely watching instead 0 f h .
at its work. The more intelhgent members 0 t e umor s
did not recognize that it was only the low-cahbre wgr -
ers incapable of doing any.comphcated workrw ose
interests were menaced; sharing the general ega iirian
view that one man was much 11k another, they 1 en:-
ed themselves with the redundant, and supported t e
unions attempts to prevent dismlssals. The erntilloylers
often acquiesced for the sake ot good relations w1t_btl.tt:1r
staff, or because they thought it was their I CSPOHSI 1 1 31/;
rather than the State s, to care for weaker brethrenf .11
took a very long time for employers to become u y
conscious of the need to reduce labour costs to a mm-
mum, and, until then, they dld not knowlhow e wy
was the load of passengers they were carrymg on t (gr
pay-roll. As late as the 19505 a large force of iow gra e
unskilled workers were constantly drlftmg 1n to one
employment and out to another, always on the :noge
because they were not capable ofholdmg down a s e'ithy
job anywhere. Millions changed Job's every year. 6
employer was perhaps aware that 1118 labour turnfve?
was high, but since he did not as yet test the capau y o
new recruits, he had no way of knowmg that thigh-
mary reason was that most had not the minimum a 1dityf
required for the work. As people were not, in a pCI lO ot
full employment , registered as unemployed, chefpd
for the odd period now and then, no one appreieia e f
the existence of this vast oating army. 'Very ewdo
those endlessly moving were in fact making any a e-
quate return for the wages they received.
I I 9
THE RISE OF THE MERITOCRACY
Many for whom there was no place in industry came
to rest in routine clerical work, or in distribution. That
was a happy solution, though not a permanent one.
Mechanization, starting in the factory, did not end
there: of ces and shops were also invaded. In the middle
of the century book-keepers and typists were still com-
mon in o ices; by the last quarter they had almost dis-
appeared. Accounts were the responsibility of calcula-
ting machines and typists were no longer needed as
intermediaries between the spoken and the written
word. As for shops, in the middle of the century they
still employed millions of people; twenty ve years
later, although shop assistants had not by any means
disappeared, there were certainly less of them. The
large shop with its more economical use of staff had
supplanted many smaller ones, the speedy spread of
self service in something like its modern form had
reduced the number of assistants needed, and piped
distribution of milk, tea, and beer was extending
rapidly.
5. DOMESTIC SERVANTS AGAIN
The Clauson Committee, which reported in 1988, took
the view that by that date about a third of all adults
were unemployable in the ordinary economy. The com
plexity of civilization had grown beyond them; owing
to lack of intelligence, they could not nd niches in the
ordinary occupational structure and needed some form
of sheltered employment. What was to be done with
them? There was only one possible answer. The people
who had ended their school lives either in the schools
for the educationally sub-normal or in the lower streams
of secondary modern schools were only capable of
meeting one need: for personal service. For instance,
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STATUS OF THE WORKER
most of them could, if carefully prepared in Govern
ment Training Centres and carefully supervised there-
after, serve in public restaurants and places of enter-
tainment, in transport and as caretakers.
That was a start. But as Lord Clauson foresaw, the
lower classes would only be fully employed when large
numbers of them were engaged in personal service not
only outside the home, but in it. His recommendations
were hotly contested in Parliament and on the hustings.
But what other way was there? The critics had few con-
structive proposals to make. The absurdity was that
many highly intelligent people were wasting much of
their time performing purely menial tasks for them
selves. A well-endowed person was given a long educa-
tion at the expense of the State, rst at a grammar
school and then at a university, and when he came
down he was entrusted with a highly responsible post in
industry or commerce. His work should have claimed
his full energies and his leisure be used for recuperation.
But what happened? He spent many valuable hours not
at the job for which he had been so elaborately trained,
but trailing around the self service stores buying the
odd packet ofpotatoes or bucket offrozen sh, cleaning
his at, or cooking the sh, or making his bed. I say he
but of course the waste was much morewidespread
for the highly intelligent and hence highly educated
woman. After marriage she was not permitted, such
was the prevailing anarchy, to carry on the work she
could so well do for society; instead, she had to pretend
that she had never had a higher education at all, and
try to accustom herself to behaving as though house
hold drudgery was the proper reward for cum laude, in
the same way as a mere secondary modern girl. That
was the point there was no need for much of the
I21
THE RISE OF THE MERITOCRAGY
drudgery to fall to the lot of the intelligent, it was much
better left to the person who would not regard it as
drudgery at all because she was not capable of doing
anything higher. Drudgery for the one hundred and
thirty could bejoy for the eighty- ve. Had nothing been
learnt from the Pioneers?
The critics protested that domestic service was not
just service, it was servile. They had tradition on their
side, but did not seem to realize how short-lived this
was. For thousands of years it was the accepted thing
for the upper class to have servants. They only vanished
between the demise of the old aristocracy and the birth
ofthe new; in the egalitarianage when no man was held
worthy enough to deserve service from-his fellows; in the
interim period when no one was sure ofanything except
that Jack was supposed to be as good as his master.
When the conditions fostering egalitarianism passed
away, there was no further need for this one ofits mani-
festations. DomeStic service could be restored once it
was again accepted that some men were superior to
others; and done without resentment because the in-
ferior knew their betters had a great part to play in the
world and beyond, and were glad to identify with them
and wait on them. Far better to perform a recognized
and valuable service for an important person than to
languish on the dole. Naturally, there were safeguards.
No one wanted to see a return of the abuses which used
to exist in the nineteenth century. All domestic servants
were formally enrolled in the Home Help Corps it
topped the ten million mark by the turn ofthe century
and every private employer had to pay the wages laid
down; provide sanitary living-space; release the servant
two nights a week to attend a sports club run by the
Corps; pay for a refresher course every summer; and
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STATUS OF THE WORKER
not demand more than forty-eight hours a week except
with permission from the local of ce. As far as female
servants are concerned, the new arrangement has on the
whole worked well, even ifmorons have sometimes done
very silly things to air-conditioners. The trouble has
been the men. Despite all experiments at the Corps
research centres, no really adequate modern counter-
part has been found for the butler and the footman of
old. Male unemployment has been higher than female
for forty years or more.
6. SUMMARY
Under the new dispensation the division between the
classes has been sharper than it used to be under the old,
the status of the upper classes higher, and that of the
lower classes lower. In this chapter I have discussed
some of the repercussions upon the social structure. Any
historian knows that class con ict was endemic through
out pre-merit times, and, in the light of past experience,
might perhaps expect that any rapid diminution in the
status ofone class would necessarily aggravate such con
ict. The question is: why have the changes of the last
century not led to such an issue? Why has society been
so stable in spite of the widening gulf between the bot
tom and the top?
The cardinal reason is that strati cation has been in
accord with a principle of merit, generally accepted at
all levels of society. A century ago the lower classes had
an ideology of their own in essentials the same as that
which has now become paramount and were able to
use it as much to advance themselves as to attack their
superiors. They denied the right of the upper classes to
their position. But in the new conditions the lower
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classes no longer have a distinctive ideology in con ict
with the ethos of society, any more than the lower
orders used to in the heyday of feudalism. Since bottom
agrees with top that merit should reign, they can only
cavil at the means by which the choice has been made,
not at the standard which all alike espouse. So much, so
good. Yet we would be failing in our duty as socio-
logists did we not point out that such widespread recog-
nition of merit as the arbiter may condemn to helpless
despair the many who have no merit, and do so all the
more surely because the person so condemned, having
too little wit to make his protest against society, may
turn his anger against, and so cripple, himself.
The situation has been saved by the Mythos of Mus-
cularity, adult education, displacement of ambitions on
to children, and natural stupidity. Above all by extend-
ing into adult life the main lineaments of the educa-
tional system. If, in the adult world as much as in the
school, the stupid are kept together, they are not re-
minded at every turn of their inferiority. By the stand-
ards 0f the group in which they move and have their
being they are, indeed, not stupid; here they are
amongst their equals; they can even, in a modest way,
shine in the display of their more commendable attri-
butes. When they are amongst their equals, the great
society does not press harshly upon them, nor resent-
ments linger. They have the respect of their fellows in
their own intelligence-grade. This class solidarity, pro-
vided it is not coloured with a rebellious ideology, can
be, I would say certainly has been, a most valuable aid
to the cohesion of society. For a time all was threatened
by a species of technological unemployment, but
once the Home Helps Corps was rmly established,
what looks like a permanent and most constructive
124
STATUS OF THE WORKER
outlet was provided for the graduates of our modern
schools.
It is not unfair to give some credit to Crosland, Tay-
lor, Dobson, Clauson, and all the other founders of
modern society for the solid way in which they built.
But if we take for granted the permanence of the struc-
ture, we do so at our peril. Any sociological analysis, of
the kind I have attempted in this chapter, shows full
well how much depends upon an intricate system of
checks and balances. Discontent cannot be totally re-
moved even from our rational society. Here and there
lurks the inferior paranoid man, harbouring resent-
ment against some monstrous injustice which he ima-
gines has been done to him; the romantic who hankers
after the disorder of the past; the servant who feels
isolated in her meritorium, even from the children
whom she tends.
CHAPTER SIX
FALL OF THE LABOUR MOVEMENT
I. HISTORIC MISSION
THE many followers of Professor Diver hold that politi-
cal institutions are always secondary to others; merely
products, never creators, of the primary institutions in
the economic and educational spheres. I do not deny
the plausibility of this thesis, and yet at the same time
I cannot accept it in its usual formulation. No doubt it
is true of the present. But is it of the past? Of the
twentieth century in particular? The Cambridge school
has achieved nothing if it has not demonstrated the
critical importance of the Labour Movement in the era
of transition. In a sense, of course, its role was secondary
even then. Social change stemmed from the economy,
the pressure was international competition, the instru-
ment was education. And yet the need for adaptation
had to be translated into a language which people
could make their own. The historic mission of the
Labour Movement was to win people s minds to the
new View of life.
Socialists gained the prize of equal opportunity by
preaching equality, and, until the battle was over, there
was no harm in that. But once equality of opportunity
was a fact, to go on preaching equality was obviously
not only unnecessary, it was calculated to undo the very
achievement for which Labour could take so much of
the credit. Unlike the root-and-branch egalitarians who
have continued to erupt spasmodically in the cabals of
126
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FALL OF THE LABOUR MOVEMENT
which the Populists are the heir, the main body of the
Movement has meshed smoothly with the new age. The
standing of the Movement had to fall along with the
standing of manual workers generally, for if it had not,
the lower classes would hardly have been induced to
accept their lot. We might have had not evolution, but
catastrophe. If I am right, an understanding of the last
century cannot be complete without appreciating the
peculiar function of socialists, in their rise and in their
fall.
Improvement in methods of social selection was the
condition of progress. But before the harvest could be
reaped there was another social revolution to complete,
and as profound. All would have been in vain unless
select minds had been prepared for their high vocation.
Had they been unwilling to shoulder their responsi-
bilities, the new social order would have been stillborn.
Everyone had to be imbued with eagerness to rise as
high as his abilities justi ed. Before modern society
could reach maturity, ambition had to be forced
ever upwards, and the ideology of the people brought
into conformity with the needs of the new scienti c
age.
In effecting this vital psychological change making
discipline voluntary by putting a goad inside the mind -
socialism has played an indispensable part. In the be-
ginning there was protestantism. As Weber and Taw-
ney showed long ago, the function of protestantism was
to fire the acquisitive urge. The successful adaptation of
religion to economic requirements was what made ex-
pansion possible in Western Europe and the parts of the
world which once formed part of the British Empire.
The failure of older religions elsewhere to supply the
fuel was likewise the reason for the emergence of the new
I27
THE RISE OF THE MERITOCRACY
and linked religions of communism and nationalism,1
and for the revolutions which accompanied the trans-
ition. To make the Russian, Chinese, or Arab mind
receptive to turbo generators, electrostatic wands, and
atomic piles, communism in alliance with nationalism
was as necessary as a mother to a child. In Britain
puritanism-protestantism took the country through the
early stages of the rst industrial revolution. But beyond
a certain point it could not go, until protestantism,
through the medium of the nonconformist churches,
became transmuted into anglo socialism, the new
evangelical movement, of the sort which held sway in
the rst halfof last century.
The limitation of protestantism was that while it
encouraged the acquisition ofwealth it did not stress the
necessity ofsocial mobility. It even sanctioned the accu-
mulation of wealth with the very motive of hoarding
for descendants. In its essentials it was therefore but a
compromise, though at that time a necessary one, with
the hereditary extremism of the feudal system. The
great, though temporary, contribution of socialism was
that it picked out one element in the Christian teaching
and gave it prominence to the exclusion of all else. It
emphasized equality. Christians had, if often in muted
I. Dr Straker has pointed out in his Studies of World Revolution the
very close similarity between socialism and nationalism-com-
munism. These were both creeds of the underdog, one reacting
against the pretensions of superior classes, the other against the
pretensions of superior nations. They both started by demanding
equality, while in reality striving for superiority of the classes and
nations they represented. They were both successful because,
amongst the inferior classes and nations, were many intelligent
people deprived ofrecognition for their talents. It is in the long run
impossible to keep large numbers of able (as distinct from stupid)
people in servitude; they will revolt ~ the disaster in South Africa
is a particularly telling example within living memory.
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FALL OF THE LABOUR MOVEMENT
tones, taught that as all men were the children of God,
so were all men equal in the eyes of their Father. To the
father, children; to each other, brothers.1 Socialists
developed this doctrine into a powerful weapon. They
used the weapon to destroy resistance to change.
What right , they asked, has one man to wealth
when another has none, what right has any man to rule
over his brother? Is not inequality an affront to the dig-
nity of man? These notions were the pure milk of the
gospel. So in uential were they that many early somal-
ists were only won round to accept the need for the full-
est opportunities for individual ascent by the brilliant
invention of the idea of equality of opportunity. When
opportunity was coupled with equality it was maele
more than respectable; it became the Holy Grall.
Socialists did not see that, as it was applied in practice,
equality of opportunity meant equality of opportunity
to be unequal. This structural blindness was necessary
if the socialists were to concentrate with vigour upon
opening wide the doors to talent. In practice, as I men-
tioned earlier, they attacked with most energy the
forms ofinequality clue to inheritance. Death duties, the
decay of nepotism, free secondary and university educa-
tion, the integration of the public schools, wages for
children, the abolition of the hereditary House of
Lords, these are their most momentous achievements.
I am maintaining that the hereditary principle would
never have been overthrown, a psychological change on
the vast scale that the economy required never accom-
plished, without the aid of a new religion and that
I. An interesting survival is that even the members ofA.S.S.E.T.
and other technical unions still refer to each other as brothers.
There is some justi cation because identical twins are the only
siblings with identical IrQs, initially at any rate.
129
THE RISE OF THE MERITOCRACY
religion was socialism. It undermined resistance in two
ways. It dealt, rstly, with the upper caste. After a long
struggle the wealthy were, to the greatest extent possible
without transferring newborn children straight to
residential nurseries,1 prevented from transmitting
privilege to their children. How was this to be done?
Parental sel shness had to be socialized that is, made
subordinate to the interests of society. Parents had to be
educated to understand it was a sin to seek high posi-
tions for stupid children - if they did so, the advantage
of the community would be sacri ced to the sel sh
interests of one small family amongst many. Such a
high standard of civilized behaviour has never yet been
fully attained. But what ceaseless socialist agitation did
was to convince wealthy parents of the futility of open
resistance. Why were death duties not opposed more
strongly, the integration of private schools not opposed
to the bitter end? The wealthy could not ght because
their morale was sapped by socialist teaching, all the
more so when, for the sake of their own survival, the
Conservatives quietly came to terms with their oppo-
nents: the Conservatives of that day were the supreme
example of those who live, as someone said of the Arabs,
by stealing each other s washing. Attacked as moral cul-
prits by the socialists, deserted by their own champions,
those with inherited wealth eventually succumbed,
leaving only a few crazy women to carry on the ght.
The holders of power and possessors of wealth need, in
I. Some socialists virtually wanted to go so far. There is on
record an interesting statement by a local government of cer in
194.9 at the high point of socialist success. We look forward , he
said, to the day when children of all social Classes will be found in
our state nurseries. Many over enthusiastic teachers, impatient of
parental pretensions, would have agreed with him.
130
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FALL »OF THE LABOUR MOVEMENT
all societies, to have the assurance of the best of moral
titles to their fortune. Otherwise no ruling class can rule
with the unbounded assurance which is the hidden
spring of charisma. In feudal times blood was the un-
challenged title to power. In capitalist times wealth was
its own title. But as conditions changed, the hereditary
rich could no longer hold up their heads. They lost the
con dence to rule, and step by step they relinquished
power to the self-made and even more notably to the
sehool made men who had the heavenly support of
society s deep-seated moral approval, and hence of their
own. The new rulers were those who, according to the
new values, deserved to wear the purple mantle.
The second achievement was to instil ambition into
the working class. For the socialists nothing succeeded
like success in the short run just as, in the long run,
nothing failed like success. Every advanee towards
greater equality of opportunity in education, or to
wards the widening of opportunity in industry, stimu-
lated aspiration. In the well adjusted personalitylam-
bition lies always close to the surface, ready to stir to
life at the caress of hope. Each new opportunity did
something to sharpen appetite. Demand, as always,
helped to create its own supply. .
Until well on into Elizabethan times family successmn
tojobs was much more common in the lower than in the
middle classes. In London or Liverpool the docker s son
followed his father s Occupation, despite every blandish-
ment of his mistress at school, because he had the absurd
idea that it was the nest calling in the world. So did
coal-miners sons in Durham Villages, farm-workers
sons in distant parts of Somerset, steel-men at Corby
and Scunthorpe. The improvement of commuhications
helped to root out such wickedness by advertising the
131
THE RISE OF THE MERITOCRACY
standards of the wealthy and the glittering lives of
thousands of people far beyond his own community to
every Child in the country. All subjective judgements
about the status of different jobs were assimilated t0 the
one national model. In later years, the famous argu-
ment by analogy from sport ~ a shrewd touch this
gured powerfully in the armoury of the adult educa-
tors. Would any British technician choose his local foot-
ball team from the sons of past yers, whether or not
they were the best men? Then why management? Only
recently has the argument been twisted round. The re-
formers ask what, if there is nothing to do but play
rst-class football, is to happen to all those not good
enough to get a place in the team?
The extension of opportunity and the improvement
of communication, once they had begun to gather
momentum, made psychological transformation pos-
sible; they did not make it necessary. Without the fer-
ment ofsocialist agitation, the working man would have
remained sunk in apathy, lacking suf cient drive to take
advantage of his great new chances. Every intelligent
generation, it seems, must re-discover for itself the
resignation with which the ordinary man accepts his
lot. The technician is always liable not only to feel that
he might as well put up with his job since he has little
chance of anything better, but that his son should do
likewise. From this apathy he has to be repeatedly res-
cued by those who have a truer sense of values. Social
ism was once the liberator. It fought against compla-
cency. It taught the technician that he was the equal of
the Corporation President, who therefore had no right
to his greater wealth. By preaching equality, it goaded
people with envy, and envy put the spur to competition.
When a man determines to excel his superior, he is
132
FALL OF THE LABOUR MOVEMENT
giving vent, in sublimated form, to his infantile wishes
to surpass his father. A profound energy is released and
harnessed to a constructive purpose. When coupled
with brain-power, this energy is irresistible. But it had
to be unlocked, and socialism was the key. If envy has
become a public virtue instead of a private Vice, we
know to whom credit must be given.
The great dilemma of industrial society is that am-
bition is aroused, in lesser measure but still aroused, in
the minds ofstupid children and of their parents as well
as in the minds of the intelligent. This is inevitable since
no one has been able to foresee with complete accuracy
where ability is going to sprout. Everyone has to be
ambitious so that no one with talents of a high order
shall fail to make use of them. Yet when ambition is
crossed with stupidity it may do nothing besides foster
frustration. Hence the following of intellectual egali-
tarians. Though they are superior people, they are so
much afraid of being envied that they identify them
selves with the underdog, and speak for him. They de-
mand that equality be more than opportunity: they
demand equality in power, education, and income; they
demand that equality be made the ruling principle of
the social order; they demand that the unequal be
treated as though they were equal.
Socialism ceased to be an accelerator, and became a
brake. It achieved its mission when rst education, and
then industry, had been so much reorganized that
nearly all the able people in the country were concen-
trated in the upper classes. The Labour Party could no
longer be the force it had been once the classes it repre-
sentedhadlostthe intelligentfromtheir ranks. TheParty s
standing in the country was bound to suffer. Another
blow was the decline of parliament. Redistribution of
133
THE RISE OF THE MERITOCRACY
intelligence is the cause of deterioration in the House
of Commons, as well as in the Labour Party; the one has
reinforced the other.
2. DECLINE OF PARLIAMENT
The British genius if such a word can be applied to a
nation which is in intelligence almost as much a cross-
section of mankind as any other the British genius is
pouring new beer into old bottles. We believe in evolu-
tion, and not revolution, precisely because we know that
change can be all the more rapid when, on the surface,
there is no change at all. It has happened with the
Commonwealth. It has happened with the monarchy.
It has happened with the Labour Movement. It has
happened with parliament.
Democracy, in so far as it meant that power resided
in an all-powerful elected legislature, was a typical pro-
duct of the transition from caste to class; its basic
assumption of one man, one vote, was egalitarian. The
mother of a problem family submerged in Brighouse
and Spenborough had the same vote as a Beatrice
Webb. The parliamentary system, as Mainel put it,
was listening nervously at one end of a speaking-tube
which receives at its other end the suggestions of a lower
intelligence .
In feudal times the country was governed by a ruling
caste. In modern times we have a casteless society and
the country is governed by a ruling class. In between it
was governed by neither caste nor class, rather by a
combination of both. For hundreds of years, blood
shared power with brain; long after withering of the
hereditary principle had begun to concentrate ability at
1. Popular Government, 1886.
134
FALL OF THE LABOUR MOVEMENT
the top, each class, however lowly, still possessed its
superior men and women. In these circumstances, uni
versal suffrage was only facing the facts. To give equal
weight to each class was as good a way as any other of
securing a parliament of talent. The textile workers, the
miners, the steel workers, the farmers, and other groups
elected from their own ranks men of above-average
intelligence. Their M.P.s were t to rule.
The supremacy of parliament was no sooner assured
than it began to be threatened by the ever-growing
complexity of the state. The men shall we say of Camp-
bell Bannerman s administration, or even of the rst
Labour Government under Ramsay MacDonald, were
worthy of their place. The issues were still so simple that
the intelligent amateur the proud status of the ancient
M.P.s could make a wise decisionf Under conditions
of primitive technology this was true. By the time of the
Butler Government the ordinary business of state had
become so extraordinary that the amateur, however
gifted, could do little more than go through the motions
of grappling with it. Even to go through motions was so
much a full-time job that M.P.s could not easily make
up their income from outside work. This was rendered
more and more necessary, while less and less possible,
by one of the more fortunate Victories of egalitarian
sentiment - the limiting of M.P.s salaries. The able
could less and less afford to go into parliament and the
quality of the Labour and other Parties suffered in con-
sequence. Intelligence has always followed power:
when power slipped away to the civil service, the out
standing men tiptoed after it: when the outstanding
men left politics, fewer were left behind to resist the
encroachment of Whitehall. Nowadays double- rsts
from Oxford and Cambridge do not regard a political
135
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THE RISE OF THE MERITOCRACY
career as either their interest or their duty. Interest does
not bid them wait upon a ckle electorate; duty calls
them to serve society by lling a post of the highest
responsibility, which parliament, for ninety-eight per
cent of M.P.s, can no longer offer. Modern Gladstones
are at Harwell. Another cause of the decline is that the
lower classes, although progressively denuded of ability,
have not stopped electing their own kind. They have
clung to their democratic rights, with the result that the
level of LQ. in parliament has fallen progressively. The
elected representatives of the common people no longer
have the brains; they no longer wield the power.
To cope with this problem two main alternative solu-
tions have been proposed, the rst revolutionary, the
second evolutionary. The revolutionaries have de-
manded that form should be brought into line with
reality and either parliament abolished or election made
dependent on an LQ. quali cation. They have also
sought proportional representation, whereby the num-
ber of votes 21 man has would be proportional to his
intelligence. All this was surely short-sighted. As our
forbears said, no one but the wearer knows where the
shoe is pinching. \Nhenever decisions cause suffering,
the ordinary man should be able to express his griev-
ance to his M.P.1 When this right exists, the civil ser-
vice, and even the social scientists, are kept ever alert.
Moreover, simple issues arise from time to time on
which the opinion of the ordinary man (when advised
by the competent authorities) is as valuable as the
opinion of the meritocraey, and on these rare occasions
I. In the way that Beatrice Webb, that wise woman, would have
approved: we have little faith in the average sensual man , we
do not believe that he can do much more than describe his
grievances, we do not think that he can prescribe the remedies .
Our Partnership
136
FALL OF THE LABOUR MOVEMENT
we lose nothing by giving the House of Commons the
chance to air its views.
By a typically British compromise the purpose of the
revolutionaries has been partly achieved not by abolish-
ing the Commons but by reconstituting the Lords.
Thorough-going reform was for many years opposed by
members of the Labour Party on the signi cant ground
that once the House of Lords ceased to be a hereditary
chamber its prestige would be so high as to challenge
the Commons. Better, they said, to let the Lords die. In
the prevailing mental climate, the objection (however
well-founded) could not permanently be sustained. The
hereditary principle was too indefensible. A socialist
spokesman of the fties put the more enlightened view
when he said:
It is important to remember exactly what Labour s objection to
the present House cy Lords really it. It does not stem primarily
from the weakness or mgfaimess of the system qf creating peers
so much asfrom the absurdity of the inherited element.1
The Labour Party ended up as active for reform as their
opponents. The banning of hereditary peers, the restric-
tion of membership to life peers, women as well as men,
chosen from among the most eminent people in the
Kingdom, the payment of generous honoraria these
reforms, starting in 1958 and continued over the next
twenty years, eventually made the upper chamber into
a body far more in uential than its junior partner.
Selection largely replaced election. Skipping all the
intermediate stages of democracy (as some countries
have jumped straight from railways to rockets), instru-
ment of the aristocracy was by one brilliant stroke made
1. Anthony Wedgwood Benn, M.P. T/ze Priqy Council as a Second
Chamber. Fabian Society, 1957.
137
THE RISE OF THE MERITOCRACY
instrument of the meritocracy. The hold of the Lords
ofParliament was assured when by a constitutional con-
vention the Ministry of Education was in all cabinets
reserved to the upper chamber. The House is now quite
as distinguished as the Central Committee which con-
tains the appointed, self-perpetuating rulers of Com-
munist China the House of Lords is the central com-
mittee of our elite class.
The other way of evolution was to compensate for the
inevitable weakness of parliament by strengthening the
civil service. Nourished by rst-class selection in the
schools and rst-class training in the universities, fer-
tilized by new techniques of research and administra-
tion, buttressed by the tradition and camaraderie of
more than a century s unsel sh devotion to duty, the
collective competence of the civil service has, with only
a few setbacks, continued to soar. Confronted with this
composite wisdom, nearly all amateur politicians in
Ministerial o ice have been content to take the glory
and abandon the power. The dangerous exception is
the politician so stupid or so vain that he does not even
recognize his own incompetence. He may, like Queen
Victoria, actually demand that his nominal power be
made real. Part of the lore of the civil service consists in
the accumulated knowledge of how to defeat such pre-
tension.1 I am speaking of thirty years ago. Fortunately
1. Even in the great days of the House, the civil servant was very
much the power behind the scenes. Here is one piece of advice to
those drafting answers to Parliamentary Questions. It might be
said, cynically, but with some measure of truth, that the perfect
reply to an embarrassing question in the House of Commons is one
that is brief, appears to answer the question completely, if chal-
lenged can be proved to be accurate in every word, gives no open-
ing for awkward supplementaries , and discloses really nothing.
Dale, H. E. The Higher Civil Service.
I38
i
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EE
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FALL OF THE LABOUR MOVEMENT
there have been no Prince Alberts in the parliaments of
this century. As con ict in society has been reduced, the
civil servants, now that they no longer need keep aloof,
have taken a more active part in politics to make up
for the devitalization of the two-party system. Both they
and the vital House of Lords belong to a meritocracy of
growing power. The House of Commons has not yet
followed the horse let us hope it never will let us
hope it has now, like the monarchy, found a permanent
niche in the constitution, the old merging in the new,
the new in the old, on a higher level.
3. THE TECHNICIANS
The historian s puzzle is why the Labour Party lasted
so long: what could more perfectly illustrate the prin-
ciple ofsocial inertia? Like democracy itself, the Labour
Party was a reaction against the feudal tradition. It
arose out of the old working class as it was called,
which had such solidarity because its name belied it: it
was not so much class as caste. Universal suffrage in the
nineteenth and twentieth centuries gave political power
to the workers. They held together and, advancement
of other kinds being partly denied to them, made full
use of this political power to challenge high-caste
authority. Able and ambitious leaders whose individual
ascent was barred by the hereditary system bent their
efforts to improve the lot of their class as a whole, their
class and not just themselves within it! A whole class
was to rise, quite without respect to the capacity of its
members!
They formed a mighty army, until by their very suc-
cess, the socialist achievement of Which I spoke earlier,
they stormed the citadel and opened the gates to talent.
139
THE RISE OF THE MERITOCRACY
Victory reduced the army to brigades, platoons and
then, at last, to lone snipers. By the 19605 the outstand-
ing children of manual fathers were no longer gravely
handicapped by their origin. On the strength of sheer
individual merit they could rise up the social ladder as
far as their ability would stretch. This was a boon to
them and a boon as well to their parents. But for the
working class as a whole the victory was a defeat. Sated
by conquest, the class began to crumble from within.
More and more parents began to harbour ambitions for
their children rather than for their class. The cult of the
child became the drug of the people; inspired by hope,
vitalized by ambition, the whole nation began to ad-
vance as never before from the moment that the Labour
Party came to a standstill.
The Labour Party made the inevitable compromise
with the new society it had done so much to create: it
ceased to exist. Fewer and fewer electors, however
brawny, responded instinctively to the appeal of
labour . Drawn upwards by their aspirations for their
children, all but the lumpenproletariat, to re-adopt a
term still in vogue in the rst half of the century, con-
ceived of themselves as a cut above the labourer at the
bottom of the heap. Workers became a discredited
word. The canny leaders of the mid-century Labour
Party (which still contained many highly competent
men) recognized full well the need for change. They
scrapped the appeal to working-class solidarity and
concentrated on the middle class, partly to capture new
sections of the electorate, more to keep pace with their
own supporters who had, in their outlook, moved up-
wards from their point of origin. One of the symptoms
of rampant ambition was the upgrading by name alone
of occupations which could not be upgraded in any
140
FALL OF THE LABOUR MOVEMENT
other way. We no longer have to be so hypocritical. We
can recognize inferiority and dare to label it so. But in
those days rat-catchers were called rodent of cers ,
sanitary inspectors public health inspectors , and lava-
tory cleaners amenities attendants . Employers con-
formed to the Changing more: by dismissing their
workers and hiring none but technicians, clothed in
white coats instead of dungarees. The Labour Party
nally made the same adjustment. Labour was a mill-
stone; worker was taboo; but technician , what
magic was there! And so the modern Technicians Party
was born, catering in the broadest possible manner for
technicians by hand and by brain.
The trade unions followed. The Transport and
General Workers Union became the Transport and
General Technicians Union; the National Union of
General and Municipal Workers, the National Union
of General and Municipal Technicians. This did not
altogether save them from the competition of that other
great general union, the Association of Supervisory
Staffs and Engineering Technicians, which enjoyed the
advantage of correct name and status from the start.
The Mineworkers became the Mine Technicians (still
a force in the early days Of the Technicians Party), the
Woodworkers the Wood Technicians, the Textile Work-
ers the Textile Technicians, the Clerical Workers the
Of ce Technicians, and so forth. Likewise the Tech-
nical Unions Congress and the Technicians Education
Association. Higher grades had to notch up their own
classi cation in order to maintain the vital differentials
ofstatus. Laboratory technicians could not, for instance,
retain such a designation without being confused with
charring technicians. They styled themselves labora-
tory specialists, and for the same reason certain of the
14.1
THE RISE OF THE MERITOCRACY
unions (other than A.S.S.E.T.) adopted new names
the Association of Building Technicians, for instance,
became the A.B.S. and the Association of Psychological
Technicians the A.P.S. The Association of Scienti c
Workers had, like the House of Lords which its mem-
bers adorn, tojump over a whole stage in social develop-
ment. The more so after it had amalgamated with the
Association of Local Government Sociologists, it con-
sidered A.S.S. not altogether appropriate and so boldly
adopted the title of Benefactors the A.S.B. as it is
now justly esteemed far beyond the circles whose im-
mediate work lies in the benefactories and compartment
stores.
The high-I.Q. unions have exercised in uence in the
T.U.C. disproportionate to their numbers, if not yet
quite proportionate to their intelligence. They have
helped to speed the transformation of work into play as
fast as the play of the meritocracy has (for the assess-
ment of income) been converted into work. They have
helped to concentrate the attention of the technical
unions on adult education of the modern sort. They
have exposed the I.Q.-crammers. They led the success-
ful campaign for the adoption of the metric system in
weights, measures, and money. They have taught their
technical colleagues to take a sober View of the role of
the Technicians Party in the modern state. And all the
time they have had to battle against the sentimental.
The old egalitarianism could not be wiped out over-
night, and the sentimentalists have continued to praise
the Virtues of the good old days and protest, in the
name of equality, against every advance towards social
justice.
142
FALL «OF THE LABOUR MOVEMENT
4.. ADJUSTMENT IN THE UNIONS
To appreciate how far we have come, cast your mind
back to a meeting of the tripartite National Joint
Council for Industry, say, in 1950. There sat Ministers
of the Crown with representatives of the T.U.C., the
F.B.I., and the public corporations. Did any group have
more ability than another? Were the trade unionists
outmanoeuvred in argument because they left school at
thirteen or fourteen while the leaders of private indus-
try had been to Cambridge and the chiefs of the pub-
lic corporations to Sandhurst? Were the trade union
leaders at a disadvantage because they were shoved into
a factory at an age when the others were still in short
trousers? Obviously not if anything the advantage was
the other way round. The trade unionists not only spoke
from longer experience. They included some of the
ablest men in the country. The sharing of power be-
tween the classes was the natural consequence ofsharing
the intelligence. These leaders commanded the con
dence of the followers from whose ranks they came,
and deserved to. Many of them were Ministers in the
rst, second, third, and fourth Labour Cabinets, before
the decline set in. The ability of the miners leaders was
especially high, for in colliery Villages there were no
other jobs for young men to take and little prospect of
promotion to the middle class. It was not fully appre-
ciated in the 19505 and 1960s that these folk-heroes were
not being succeeded by others equally able; the children
of top trade unionists and Labour Ministers, and of
other outstanding working men, were not becoming
manual workers themselves. They were in attendance at
grammar schools and universities, training for com-
merce and the professions, very large numbers of them
143
THE RISE OF THE MERITOGRACY
even going to public schools. The children ofthe Labour
leaders were the augurs of the future.
Contrast the present think how different was a
meeting in the 2020s of the National joint Council,
which has been retained for form s sake. On the one
side sit the I.Q.s of 140, on the other the I.Q.s of 99. On
the one side the intellectual magnates ofour day, on the
other honest, horny handed workmen more at home
with dusters than documents. On the one side the solid
con dence born of hard-won achievement; on the other
the consciousness of a just inferiority. The trade union-
ists ponderous, carefully rehearsed re ections have no
more in uence upon their colleagues, if we are frank
with ourselves, than a pea-shooter upon an astro-rocket.
Primed with their sociological surveys the civil servants
know more about the state of opinion in the factories
than the stewards who work in them. The union leaders
seldom have the insight to see that the courtesy with
which they are treated is pure formality. They do not
know that instead of the substance of power, they are
being attered by its shadow.
We do not need to ask why. The schools have begun
to do their proper job of social selection that is all.
Once the long-called-for reforms were made, none of
the ablest children in the country, unless by an unfor-
tunate mistake, had to take up manual work. They
were trained by something better than the Workers
Educational Association (sic). Twenty years after 1944
the brilliant children of manual workers automatically
went to the best grammar schools in their district, from
there on to Oxford and Cambridge, and, when they
came down, they were eligible for travelling scholar-
ships and grants for the Imperial College of Science, the
Inns of Court, and the Administrative Staff College.
144
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FALL OF THE LABOUR MOVEMENT
The Keir Hardies oflater generations have been the star
civil servants, physicists, psychologists, chemists, busi-
ness executives, and music critics of their day.
Amongst children who left school for manual jobs in
the 19405 one in twenty still had I.Q.s over 120; in the
19505 after the Act was working there was one in
fty, by the 19703 only one in a thousand. By the last
quarter of the century, the supply of really capable
working men to ll the top union posts had dried up
completely, and long before that, the fall in quality
amongst Union M.P.s and branch and workshop
of cials, especially amongst the younger men, had be~
come very marked indeed. I should say that the rule of
promotion by seniority, to which the unions remained
attached, was not such a brake as it was in industry
because the older of cials were on the whole more able.
Intelligence is, of course, by no means the only quality
required by a union leader; they also need belligerence,
doggedness, and capacity for hard work. But although
intelligence is not the only quality, it is a necessary one,
and the new leaders have been dreadfully handicapped
by its absence.
How, then, have the unions kept going at all? They
have been saved by three kinds of adjustment by the
strengthening of their appointed staff, simpli cation of
their functions, and enhancement of their respect-
ability. First, the weaknesses of the electoral method
have been partially offset, in the trade unions as in par-
liament, by reinforcing the appointed civil service .
Very few university graduates have been elected as
of cials of manual unions, but increasingly, if far too
slowly,1 the executive committees, conscious of the ever-
I. The Cooperative Movement was also very slow to react to
educational change. A report in the 19305 commented that the
145
THE RISE OF THE MERITOCRACY
growing complexity of the economy, impressed by the
growing prestige of the universities, and aware of the
need to make as good a show as possible with
the employers and the government, have themselves
appointed graduates to their research, production, and
public relations departments. The Labour Party led in
welcoming as M.P.s men from Winchester and other
élite schools and then from the universities to replace
the able manual workers who did not exist any more;
by 1960 hardly any of the Party s leaders had been
manual workers a great change from 1924. After a
time lag the Unions did likewise with their of cials.
The universities have responded with special courses
for suitable candidates who, despite high LQS, are tact-
ful enough to suffer fools gladly a very necessary qual-
ity this for the advisers of union executives. The notable
sandwich course at the Leeds Institute of Technology
prescribes a period in the ranks to gain practical ex-
perience; union and management cadets work happily
together on the factory oor. The unions have incor-
porated into their top echelons many graduates who
if not of the rst rank are still good second-raters in the
II5 120 range.
The unions have been preserved by men like Lord
Wiffen. To appreciate the excellence of his quali ca-
tions one need do no more than compare his career with
that of Ernest Bevin, who had no education worth the
name.
Cooperative Movement has failed to use even the trained ability
which is made available for it by the present educational system.
Even the advantages of secondary education have not been real-
ized, and recruitment from the universities is almost unknown.
Carr-Saunders, A. M., Florence, P. Sargant, and Peers, R. Con-
sumers Cooperation in Great Britain.
146
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FALL OF THE LABOUR MOVEMENT
Lord Wiffen
(Born 9 August 1957,
Bradford.
Father, spinner)
5 ! I A Stream Primary School.
LQ. 120
11 11-p1us exam. LQ. 121
13 Bradford Grammar School.
I.Q_. 119
14 Ditto.
15 Ditto.
16 Sixth form. LQ. 118
18 State scholarship, Cam
bridge University. LQ.
120. Subsequently 2nd
class B.Sc.(Sociology) and
M.Sc. (Mental Testing)
28 Lecturer on Human Rela-
tions in Industry. Acton
Technical College. LQ.
I23
29 Commonwealth
115
32 Deputy Research O icer,
United Textile Factory
Technicians Union. LQ.
1 1 5
34 Ditto.
Fellow
Harvard University. I.Q_.
7i
Mr Ernest Bevin
(Born 9 March 1881,
Winsford, Somerset.
Father, farm labourer)
5 1 1 Learnt to read and write
at village school
11 Left school to take job as
farm boy
13 Kitchen boy, Bristol
14 Grocer s errand boy
I 5 Van boy
16 Tram conductor, then van
boy again
18 Drayman
28 Secretary, Bristol Right to
Work Committee
29 Secretary, Bristol Carmen s
Branch of the Dock, Wharf,
Riverside & General
Labourers Union
32 Assistant National Organ-
izer of Union
34 National Organizer of
Union
147
THE RISE OF THE MERITOCRACY
4.1 Research Of cer of Union 41 General Secretary, Trans~
LQ. 114 port and General Workers
Union
59 K.C.T.U.C., Secretary of 59 Minister of Labour
Union. Member of
General Council. LQ. I 16
64 Raised to peerage. LQ. 64. Foreign Secretary
116
72 Chairman, Education
Committee T.U.C. LQ.
112
76 Assistant Lecturer, Acton
Technical College (where
he now is). LQ. 104.
Walter Wi 'en and his like have given the leadership
which the Bevins once gave to the manual workers.
The second adjustment is that the functions of the
trade unions have, in a more sensibly organized society,
become almost completely routine, so that there is very
little call for initiative or innovation. Shop stewards and
local of cials are no longer any match for the employers
but this matters very little now that any negotiations
there are about wages and conditions have become fully
centralized at national level, where the in uence of the
paid staff is predominant. The British Productivity
Council has continuously fed the unions with publicity
material, lms, and cartoons for their members, and the
National joint Council has also become ever more vital
since it assumed responsibility for the annual price
review. None but trained statisticians can follow the
complexities of the review, so the experts employed by
the Unions settle the details in discussion with their col-
leagues from the Central Statistical Of ce. Up till last
148
FALL OF THE LABOUR MOVEMENT
May there had been no strike since the One at
Leamington in 1991.
Third, the trade unions, have, like the monarchy,
been given an ever more honourable place in the social
order. Today there is not a national body of any conse-
quence on which they are unrepresented. Joint consul-
tation has been carried so far by the government as well
as by every employer that the unions (except for those
in which Populist cliques have, gained control) are told,
at least a day or two in advance ofthe public pronounce-
ment, of nearly every important decision. Now that the
Royal Order of the T.U.C. has been created and all
members ofthe General Council knighted automatically
on election, now that the award ofhonours to rank and-
le workmen has been multiplied, intelligence and tact
have retrieved what might admittedly have become a
very ugly situation. The Populists claim there is a basic
lack of sympathy between the paid staff and the union
rank and le. Any sociologist must recognize the dan-
ger. But the remedy is not to move backwards into a
past golden only in imagination. The remedy is, as the
universities have realized, to perfect the social surveys
and opinion polls which are the eyes and ears of the
intelligent public.
5. SUMMARY
I started this chapter by praising the socialists for the
massive attack they once mounted against the heredit-
ary principle. Without them, castes might never have
been replaced by classes, and the old aristocracy never
converted into its modern form. But when their mission
was accomplished and equality ofopportunity achieved,
they had to make a far-reaching and sometimes painful
I49
THE RISE OF THE MERITOCRACY
adjustment. The main body of the Labour Party, under
its new name, became reconciled to the fall in its stand-
ing, and to the decline ofits special vehicle, parliament.
The technical unions were compensated for loss of
power by gain in respectability. The organized tech-
nicians have become a lesser pillar of our society. But
the minority movement of break-away socialists, some-
times working inside the of cial ranks, sometimes out-
side, has never been totally destroyed. The Populists can
with some justice claim descent from the sentimental
egalitarians who have for decades past plagued respect-
able technicians leaders as much as they have the
government.
Today Lady Avocet likes to compare the meritocracy
with the Mohicans who took away the best young men
and women from a conquered tribe and reared them as
members of their own families. She and her fellows
claim that technicians need leaders who share their atti-
tudes ofmind because they have been technicians them-
selves.1 If they again had an Ernest Bevin to lead them,
their morale would again be high because they could
identify fully with him and take credit for his deeds.
They would again belong to a cohesive society because
they would possess a leader who would interpret its
I. In their quarterly journal, Commonweal, some Populist writers
have taken to sociology too, and advanced a new interpretation of
the history of the Hitler war. They are quite right that psycho-
logists in the Royal Navy deliberately left some able men as able
seamen, instead of sending them for special training, so that there
would be good men in the ranks, knowing the ratings problems,
from whom o icers could later be drawn. (See Vernon, P. E. and
Parry, J. B. Personnel Selection in the British Forces.) What these
writers overlook is that it was in those times thought positively
desirable to promote adults from the ranks; with educational
reform, such a thing is normally no longer necessary.
I50
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FALL OF THE LABOUR MOVEMENT
needs to them in terms that they could understand. The
Populists believe that, until native leadership emerges,
their vocation is to act as trustees for the technicians.
Until last year we thought such belief a pathetic
whimsicality. . . .
CHAPTER SEVEN
RICH AND POOR
I. MERIT MONEY
CASTEs or classes are universal, and the measure of
harmony that prevails within a society is everywhere
dependent upon the degree to which strati cation is
sanctioned by its code of morality. In the long period
between the break-up of the old aristocracy and the
arrival of the new, there was no agreed standard by
which the division into classes could be justi ed. Con
lct about the distribution ofprivileges and rewards was
thetefore both harsh and perpetual; and on no topic did
feeling run stronger than money. The poor were for ever
complaining that the rich had too much for their needs
and demanding more for themselves. The rich were f01i
ever denying the charge, and claiming that, as judged
by the contribution they made to the commonwealth
their rewards were too meagre. Between the opposing,
Sldes in this arena there could be no peace, at best a
compromise truce. What a change there has been! The
dlstribution of rewards has become far more unequal
and yet with less strife than before. How has such a
happy state arisen? The story must be divided into
phases, before and after 2005.
.Throughout the last century, as organizations grew
bigger and more complex, the spread of incomes neces-
sarily became wider. The industrial ladder lengthened
and the number of salary grades increased. A hundred
years ago the small rm with ten employees divided
into a mere three or four grades was still quite common.
152
RICH AND POOR
The top man did not have to be much better o than
the bottom. In the larger businesses which came to pre-
dominate there had to be hundreds of grades, all differ-
entiated from each other in salary. At the bottom was
the man who got no more than the Minimum estab-
lished as the decent level below which no one should be
allowed to fall. Here at any rate there was equality. The
Minimum was the foundation from which the whole
edi ce of incomes rose. In the European Atomic
Authority in 1992, for instance, a lift man received the
Minimum of 7 450 per annum. Above him were the
other 221 grades, and as the average differential be-
tween the grades was 76250, the President of the Author-
ity necessarily had to have an annual income of at least
7 55,700. His net salary was in fact 7 60,000 (excluding
the Presidential Superannuation Provision). The differ~
ence between top and bottom was of the same order of
magnitude in most other large organizations, and the
smaller rms also had to pay comparable rates in order
to attract their share of ability.
It took many years to evolve this order out of the
chaos which existed before. The difficult task was to t
the whole array and variety ofjobs into an interrelated
series of hierarchies, and this was only accomplished
when merit rating was developed, to cite an early f0r~
mula of the British Institute of Management, as the
systematic assessment of an employee in terms of the
performance, aptitudes, and other qualities necessary
for the successful carrying out of his job .1 There were
still arguments when a new kind ofjob, the product of
technical progress, had to be slotted into an existing
hierarchy without causing too much disturbance. There
were still arguments about the differentials between
1. .Merit rating. British Institute of Management. 1954.
153
THE RISE OF THE MERITOCRACY
different levels, and in these the unions might still join
if the industrial psychologists could not settle the issue
out of hand. But there were no longer serious disputes
once merit rating was Widely understood and recog-
nized as the proper means of comparing one job with
another.
As I have said before, the general mood of our
country was never egalitarian. Nearly everyone thought
that some people were better than others either the
professional classes were superior to the manual workers
or the manual workers were superior to the professional
classes the pity was only that everyone had a different
standard by which to judge. In a way it was a relief
when more and more people found they could agree
about merit, or rather about the meaning which in
practice they should give to it, both in education and in
industry.
The heat was removed from the old dispute, and a
more empirical spirit allowed to play on the scene, as
the result of abolishing inherited income. Although they
got muddled between the two types, the main body of
socialists were far more critical of the inequality due to
unearned than to earned income their stereotype was
of the rich man who had inherited a fortune from his
father. When death duties, capital levies, capital gains
tax, and special super-tax on unearned incomes had
done their work, the root of this criticism was cut away,
and it was found that very few members of the lower
classes had any objection to inequality as such. If a
man won a good job after having fought his way up the
educational ladder and received a large salary for doing
it, why then he probably deserved it good luck to him.
154
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RICH AND POOR
2. THE MODERN SYNTHESIS
Though this was the general View it was never univer-
sally accepted. Criticism came from the usual quarter.
The egalitarians could not object inde nitely to the
most intelligent children getting the most intensive edu-
cation. When that happened everyone gained; the
poorest technician was glad if when his wife was ill he
could call a doctor with an LQ. of at least 100. The
socialists could not inde nitely object to the best people
having the most power. Everyone gained from having
the best men as Chiefs of Staff, Astronomers Royal,
Vice-Chancellors of Universities, or Chairmen of the
Social Science Research Council. The socialists had to
put up with the elite. What a minority of them moaned
about was that it should be so well paid. Granted (some
of them would say), granted that the best astronomer
should be made Royal,why should he getalarger emolu-
ment than the bricklayer who built his observatory?
This was ever an irritating question, since it was in
these terms unanswerable. These strange people rushed
frantically around (and in England of all countries) ask
ing, in an almost metaphysical way, Is this right? Is
that right? The question could of course only be an-
swered by another question, Right according to what
principle? One could say it was wrong to pay one man
more than another because there should be distribution
according to needs. One could say it was wrong to pay
the lazy scientist more than the diligent dustman be-
cause there should be distribution according to effort.
One could say it was wrong to pay the intelligent more
than the stupid because society should compensate for
genetic injustice. One could say it was wrong to pay the
stupid more than the intelligent because society should
I55
THE RISE OF THE MERITOCRACY
compensate for the unhappiness which is the usual lot
of the intelligent. (No one can do much about the
brilliant, they will be miserable anyway.) One could
say it was wrong to pay the man who lived a long and
serene life in Upper Slaughter as much as a scientist
who wore himself out in the service of knowledge at the
Battersea Poly. One could say it was wrong to pay
people who liked their work as much as those who
didn t. One could and did say anything, and what-
ever one said it was always with the support of the par-
ticular kind ofjustice invoked by principles implicit in
the statement.
To have prised agreement from this arid debate, and
to have silenced the socialists for so many years, has
been one of the triumphs of modern statecraft. The
beauty of it all, for a country which thrives on pre-
cedent, is that there has been no sharp break with the
past. Tax-free expenses had been becoming a more and
more important part of remuneration right through the
last century, and by the 19905 a thousand new conven-
tions had struck root. Any knowledgeable historian does
not have to do any more than scan the advertisement
columns of the newspapers. Here is a fairly typical one
of those days:
COUNTY BOROUGH OF HARWELL. Applications invited for
extablixhed pensionable poxt of ENDOCRINO-PSYCHIATRIST
(Grade 24) in Infants Clinic. Salary starting at £10,850 and
rising by annual increments of )6I 35 103 to £12,205, with
lunches provided. Application forms from Town quehologixt.
The key words were well understood in local govern-
ment service. Lunches provided meant that the
Borough had, like most other progressive local authori-
ties, subscribed to the convention of the Association of
I56
RICH AND POOR
Municipal Corporations, whereby supplementary pay
ments in kind, from lunches t0 holidays, were made to
graduate staff of the Council.
But why only lunches and holidays and the other
fringe bene ts? The question was indeed a pertinent
one. Was it not the employers responsibility to ensure
that all their staff had a total environment conducive to
high performance? After they had been trained at great
expense to the public, it was ridiculous to tolerate ob-
structions, either at home or at work, to their maximum
e iciency. For professional staff the division between
work and leisure is, after all, purely arti cial. Their
entire lives are geared to their vocation.
The issue was put squarely over thirty years ago by
Mr Gulliver in his plea, famous perhaps just because it
was so forthright, for a fair deal for the upper classes.
The Elite s Work is Never Done we all remember the
title.
We are the thinkers, he said, are we not? We are paid to
think. Well, what do we need to do our work well? We need
quiet no man who is disturbed by noise can devote himself to
single mindea concentration. We need comfort no man who is
forced to consider little physical irritation; can scale the heights
of achievement. We need ample holidays hixtmy shows that
xeientists have (y ten hit upon the missing link in a chain of
thought quite unexpectedly when they were bathing in the tea,
walking in the mountains, or drowsihg by the Caribbean. A
brilliant man can do afullyear x work in eight months but not
in twelve. We need secretaries at work and domestic servants at
home - the chores of life exact energy from the talented which
should be devoted to higher things. just as a carpenter needs a
chisel or a mechanic (1 spanner, we must have books to enlighten,
pictures to stimulate, wine to soothe. It is notfor ourselveur we
I57
THE RISE OF THE MERITOCRAGY
ask. It isfor the good qfsociety, to whose service our brains are
dedicated. N0 jealousy, n0 vanity, no sel shness must stand in
the way of human achievement and social progress.
The measure of the change is the extent to which these
crude ideas have, in a more re ned form, secured
general acceptance.
Public spirited employers increasingly adopted the
new conception of the duty they owed their staff. Their
duty was to provide the best possible conditions for
mental activity, during the whole of every twenty four
hours, on thejob and ochejob. To do this took money,
for the purchase of houses, for chauffeurs, for company
cars and planes, for domestic service both at a man s
work-station andxat his home-station, and for wintering
at Montego Bay, Tashkent, Kashmir, Caracas, Palm
Beach, Llandrindod Wells, or wherever the industrial
psychologist recommended. But the money was not in
the possession of the employee. He could not do with it
just as he pleased. It was not an income but a cost, and
as such was rightly borne by the employer.
Mr Idris Roberts was the rst politician to see the
possibilities in this situation. He could nally spike the
critics by agreeing to their demands and establishing
complete equality of all incomes. Members of the elite
had always opposed equalization on grounds of ef ci-
ency: unless, they said, they had adequate incentives
they could not be expected to give of their best. But they
could readily appreciate that even large incomes, sub-
ject to heavy taxation as they were, no longer supplied
an incentive to continuous effort. The elite was ready
to accept equality because they no longer cared about
income, and ordinary people because they still did care
about it. Mr Roberts Equalization of Income Act of
158
RICH AND POOR
2005 married the interests of all classes in society in a
most singular way. Since that time every employee of
whatever rank has received the Equal (as emoluments
are of cially called) simply by virtue of being a citizen,
and the differences between grades have been recog-
nized not any longer by salaries but by the payment of
such varying expenses as could be justi ed by the needs
ofe iciency. Employers have, ofcourse, been allowed to
give bene ts to technicians too, if they wished, and
some of the most enlightened have done so by building
cinder-tracks for athletes, concrete pitches for cricketers,
and elds for footballers in the grounds of their fac-
tories. Technicians have a mere seven-hour stint and so
naturally cannot claim the same consideration as pro
fessional staff who are in effect on the job for twenty
four hours every day. But morale, although an im-
ponderable, is worth cultivating, and from this point of
view wisely administered expenditure out of company
funds on such physical amenities is often worth while. A
Equalization of income has brought to an end much
of the old, wearisome argument about differentials. The
only differences now are not between people but be-
tween years. Mr Roberts and his reform government
recognized that technicians had been accustomed to
rises in their incomes from time to time, and if their legi-
timate expectations had been disappointed, they would
have been too. An early sociologist, a Professor Hob-
house, once stated a profound truth.
Question: What is the ideal income?
Answer: Ten per cent more thanyou z/e got.
The Act provided that the Equal drawn out of the
common pool by each contributor to it should be ad
justed at an annual Price Review. If prices rose in any
I59
THE RISE OF THE MERITOCRACY
year, the Equal had to be raised in proportion, and
since prices have in fact been increasing steadily since
2005, the ordinary man s remuneration has grown as
well. There has been little dispute about the rightness
of this procedure, only about the extent to which prices
have in fact risen in any twelvemonth. Statisticians
from the unions have been known on more than one
occasion to produce price indices at the Review quite
different from the o icial ones! What should be treated
as an empirical question has been heated up into a
political issue. The universities are attending to this.
Professors of econometrics are shortly to introduce a
more uni ed curriculum.
The approach to sharing out improvements in
ef ciency has also been modernized. In the old days
technicians used to claim that their wages should go
up with productivity. Since, they said, they had pro-
duced more, so should they bene t. This was obviously
wrong: economic progress is due not to manual workers
- they do not even work harder but to the inventors
and organizers who devise new techniques. If anyone is
entitled to the increment, it is the meritocracy. Any-
way, increases in productivity must be spent on increas-
ing productivity still further and not frittered away on
ordinary people. A great country needs great invest-
ment. In the middle of last century investment was still
pitiably low in Britain, far more so than in Russia,
where economic power was securely in the control of an
élite who knew that to make their country rich the
citizens had to be kept poor. We at last learnt the lesson
that productivity and poverty are inseparable. Since
2005 the annual productivity increment has been
ploughed back, primarily in human resources, that is,
spent upon higher education and upon the maintenance
160
RICH AND POOR
at concert pitch of the people who are its products; and
secondarily, upon mechanical equipment of all kinds.
How, one might ask, could anyone object to such a
sound, businesslike approach? But they did. The Popu-
lists have again managed the seemingly impossible. Let
the technicians have a share, they say. Surely the nation
can afford it? Productivity has been so buoyant that in
2031 national expenditure they have even tried to
revive the outmoded term, national income rose by
fty-four per cent, and last year by sixty-one per cent.
But these gures are neither here nor there. The agita-
tors speak as if that old socialist myth, the Age of Plenty,
had arrived at last. Nothing could be further from the
truth. The country needs every scrap of human and
material capital it can save if it is to contend with other
great nations in the battle for survival. We are all poor,
and shall always remain so, because the demands of a
scienti c age are insatiable. The extremists are, by their
loose talk, threatening progress itself.
3. SUMMARY
The reform of the money structure has been one of the
most successful of modern times. The perennial dis-
agreements of old sprang from the inevitable con ict
between Classes when each contained a cross section of
ability. The basic injustice was that intelligent members
ofthe lower classes were not given their due, and in their
attack on social disorder, which had for the time being
to be waged without forfeiting the support of their class-
mates of all grades of intelligence, they seized on any
and every available principle to justify their protest.
When the basic injustice was remedied, and the intelli
gent from every class were given their full opportunities,
I61
THE RISE OF THE MERITOCRACY
those who would have been enemies of the established
orderbecame its strongest defenders. Agreementreplaced
disagreement, and merit was recognized as the principle
which should guide economic, as well as educational,
reform. But the élite has shown its wisdom, that is, its
moderation, by not pushing the principle too far. All
citizens even of the lowest class enjoy the same Equal as
anyone else, and it is subject to adjustment from year to
year.
But even this good order has not escaped criticism.
The Populists claim that the appearance of justice is
deceptive. They say that the real reason why the hypo-
crisy , as they call us, have got away with so much is
that the humble no longer have anyone except them
selves to speak for them. That the unions are on the
side of the establishment because the leaders do not
have the capacity to see through, and show up, the
doubIe-dealing of the rich who are richer than ever now
they are treated as business assets. That the bargaining
over the distribution of national expenditure is a battle
of wits, and that defeat was bound to go to those who
lost their clever children to the enemy. They have
therefore ridden into the lists as the self-appointed
champions of the lower classes to ght for them in the
way the unions can allegedly no longer do. We must
admit that their ludicrous demand for a general share-
out of increments in productivity has found at least
some attentive hearers.
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CHAPTER EIGHT
CRISIS
1. THE FIRST WOMEN S CAMPAIGN
I HAVE been trying to describe the growth of our
society, particularly since 1944, in such a way as to
reveal some of the deep-rooted causes of our present
discontents. I do not gainsay the achievements of social
engineering. I do not deny the fact of progress. I do
maintain, however, that society never works smoothly.
Despite all the advances of the last century, sociology
is still in its infancy, and until it has reached the emi-
nence of its fellow sciences, we shall not know with any
certainty the muster of laws which social engineering
must obey. The Nature of human beings is still the most
mysterious of all. As it is, the society we have contrived
is no more than a counterpoise of opposing forces held
in always delicate equilibrium. Every change creates its
counter. The opening of schools to talent was bound to
anger some of the old cast down from their seats. Demo-
tion for the stupid children of upper-class origin was
bound to grieve their parents, and so forth - all the
reactions I have mentioned before. My submission is
that these at present inescapable strains account in
some measure for the support upon which the ex-
tremists have been able to draw. I readily agree, how-
ever, that while this historical analysis may go some way
to explain the possibility of such a movement, it does
not explain why the movement has cohered in this par
ticular form. What is the immediate pattern of organi-
zation? And what the spark?
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THE RISE OF THE MERITOCRACY
The rst and most obvious point to make is that the
most prominent present leaders of the Populists are all
women, and have been so since the rst decade of the
century. That was the time when women rst began to
come to the fore in left-wing politics, and, as one would
expect, their rst essay was in the romantic style that
suits them best. Taking their cue from the Russian
Populists1 of the previous century after whom the
modern movement is named, shaggy young girls from
Newnham and Somerville, instead of taking the jobs as
surgeons and scientists for which their education tted
them, scattered to Salford and Newcastle to become
factory workers, ticket collectors, and air hostesses. They
used lipstick, watched football matches, and went to
Butlins for their holidays. They believed it was their
mission to live as common technicians and by so doing
to rouse them to a sense of the indignities from which
they should feel they suffered. They joined the tech-
nical unions, stood for of ce, and agitated for strike
action. They chained themselves to the seats of the
British Productivity Council. They petitioned the
T.U.C. to commit itself to Socialism . They sent pro-
paganda far and wide. Perhaps their strangest achieve-
ment was the capture of The Times and its conversion,
for a few months in 2009, into a popular newspaper.
Even so, all their efforts were in vain. For the spark
there was no tinder. The girls went home to Tunbridge
L These were composed of young intellectuals who on return
from universities abroad decided, under the in uence of Bakunin,
Kropotkin, and Stepniak, to go to the people for inspiration,
dressed themselves as peasants, lived in the villages, and tried to
promote revolution. When the peasants merely gaped at them,
they were driven to terrorism. Fortunately there were no Sophie
Perovskayas in England; it is not easy to imagine British women
with a bomb, hydrogen or any other kind.
164
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CRISIS
Wells and Bath, and the great majority of the tech-
nicians continued to go calmly about their daily occa-
sions, sharing in the general stability of employment,
intent on the interests of their children. They were
tolerantly amused by these antics; they were not moved
to action. There is ordinarily no one so stolid as
ordinary British technicians. They are the salt of the
earth. .
But before they all went home, the girls struck up a
strange alliance which has left a permanent mark on
our subsequent political affairs. In the inner councils of
the Technicians Party there were still some aged men
who after having received their early training in the
ancient Labour Party had never emerged from their
political adolescence. The old men were attracted to the
young girls, and perhaps now and then it happened the
other way round as well. They began to draft pro-
grammes and policies. Why, they asked, did the girls
fail? They failed, went the answer, because they were
not really technicians themselves. Their minds worked
differently. They thought in the idiom of Somerville,
not Salford. They had no feeling for the technicians real
problems. And therefore they were distrusted. But what
if these girls, and even boys, with high I.Q.s, never left
the technical classes? What if they refused to go to the
universities? What if they left school at the same time as
ordinary people? Then they would be trusted. They
would be technicians at heart, if elite in brain. Their
high intelligence at the service of their fellows, they
would give the leadership that men like Bevin and
Citrine once gave to the old trade unions. A new
socialist movement would be built up from the grass
roots, new meaning given to the old slogans of equality.
It was a dazzling prospect.
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But when it came to practical proposals all the plan-
ners could suggest was that a proportion of the more
able children in each generation should leave school at
the minimum age and become technicians themselves.
But how would they be chosen? By ballot? Some of
them played with this idea, even suggesting that every
tenth person among the over 1253, a tithe 0f the intelli-
gence in every generation, should be allocated to tech-
nical work. This was obvious nonsense, and was never
pressed. But if not by ballot, then how? The reformers
ended by proposing that teachers should stop bringing
pressure on parents and children who were not keen on
higher education. They wanted the Parent-Teachers
Associations abolished, so that parents would be less
in uenced by the teachers. They actually wanted
schools to close the evening and week end classes for
parents. They wanted all sorts of things that were
clearly no longer practicable. The plain fact was (and
is) that most clever people want to get on in the world.
There was little need for the schools to encourage. The
children agreed with teacher before she spoke.
In their dilemma the dissidents then turned back to
an old idea much in vogue in the century before 1944
the idea that manual work was as valuable as mental.
For a long time indeed, though never in any Commun-
ist country, the adherents of Karl Marx s labour theory
of value professed to believe that manual work was
actually more valuable than any other sort. (A strange
idea, it seems to us, yet the historian can have no doubtit
was once widely accepted.) And the theorists went on to
urge a revival of these old notions. They really had
no alternative. They had to admit that most clever
children wanted to become brain-workers. They also
thought the children wrong. Since they wanted the
166
;
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CRISIS
children to become manual workers of their own volun-
tary choice, they had to argue that the children should
be satis ed to do manual work. In other words the very
system of values had to change! They could reach
me other conclusion. They said that the carpenter
was as important as the crystallographer, ignoring
the awkward fact that none of the theorists was a
carpenter.
The agitators of twenty- ve years ago were led on to
ask more and more questions about society. From these
discussions derive the modern theories of equality with
which we are grappling today. Why, they asked, is one
man regarded as superior to another? It is, they said,
because we put up with such narrowness in the para-
mount values, or criteria, by which men judge one
another s worth. When Britain was governed by war-
riors who depended for their power on their ability to
kill, the great ghter was the great man; and thinkers,
poets, and painters were treated with scorn. When
Britain was governed by landowners, men who made
their living by trade or preaching or singing were all
lesser breeds. When Britain was governed by manufac-
turers, all other men were regarded as inferior. But,
they say, there has never been such gross over-simpli-
cation as in modern Britain. Since the country is
dedicated to the one overriding purpose of economic
expansion, people are judged according to the single
test of how much they increase production, or the
knowledge that will, directly or indirectly, lead .to that
consummation. If they do as little as the ordinary
manual worker, they are of no account. If they do as
much as the scientist whose invention does the work of
ten thousand, or the administrator who organizes whole
clutches of technicians, then they are among the great.
I67
THE RISE OF THE MERITOCRACY
The ability to raise production, directly or indirectly, is
known as intelligence : this iron measure is the judge-
ment of society upon its members.1 Intelligence is as
much quali cation for power in the modern state as
breeding was in the old. The stress on this sort of
ability was produced by a century of wars and threats
of war, in which the kind of occupational achievement
which raised the national war-potential was lauded,
above all else; but, say the theorists, now that the threat
is no longer so immediate, can we not encourage a
diversity of values?
In 2009 a local group of the Technicians Party issued
the Chelsea Manifesto . Although it attracted little
public attention at the time, it has had a considerable
in uence, especially within the movement, during the
last decade. It is a long and turgid document which
begins by claiming (in an interpretation which no his-
torian could accept) that the primary aim of the group,
as of all their socialist predecessors and of the Church
before them, is to cultivate variety. Their goal is the
classless society. They oppose inequality because it
re ects a narrowness of values. They deny that one man
is in any fundamental way the superior of another. They
seek the equality of man in the sense that they want
every man to be respected for the good that is in him.
Every man is a genius at something, even every woman,
they say: it is the function of society to discover and
honour it, whether it is genius at making pots, growing
daisies, ringing bells, caring for babies, or even (to show
their tolerance) genius at inventing radio telescopes. It
I. They have, of course, no use for the orthodox view that it is
the very complication of modern society which demands the sort
of basic intelligence which can speedily relate one part of a com-
plex whole to another
168
CRISIS
is perhaps worth quoting the last paragraph ofthe Mani-
festo; this summarizes the writers odd Views on what a
classless society would be like.
The classless society would be one which both possessed and
acted upon plural values. Were we to evaluate people, not only
according to their intelligence and their education, their occupa-
tion, and their power, but according to their kindliness and their
courage, their imagination and sensitivity, their sympathy and
generosity, there could be no classes. Who would be able to say
that the scientist was superior to the porter with admirable
qualities as a father, the civil servant with unusual skill at
gaining prizes superior to the lorry drioer with unusual skill at
growing roses? The classless society would also be the tolerant
society, in which individual dWrenees were actively encouraged
a5 well as passively tolerated, in whiehfull meaning was at last
given to the dignity of man. Every human being would then
have equal opportunity, not to rite up in the world in the light
of any mathematical measure, but to develop his own special
capacitiesfor leading a rich li e.
The Manifesto reveals its archaism most quaintly in
the supporter whom it rustles forth from his grave not
one of the modern scienti c divines but, of all people,
the almost-forgotten Matthew Arnold. It actually
italicizes the absurd notion of culture in his Culture and
Anarchy which does not try to teach down to the level
of inferior classes; it does not try to win them for this or
that sect of its own, with ready made judgements and
watchwords. It seeks to do away with classes; to make
the best that has been thought and known in the world
current everywhere; to make all men live in an atmo-
sphere of sweetness and light, where they may use ideas,
as it uses them itself, freely nourished and not bound
by them. Oh God, oh Galton!
169
THE RISE OF THE MERITOCRACY
In the light of this approach the authors of the Mani-
festo sought to give a new meaning to equality of
opportunity. This, they said, should not mean equal
opportunity to rise up in the social scale, but equal op-
portunity for all people, irrespective of their intelli-
gence , to develop the Virtues and talents with which
they are endowed, all their capacities for appreciating
the beauty and depth of human experience, all their
potential for living to the full. The child, every child, is
a precious individual, not just a potential functionary
of society. The schools should not be tied to the occupa-
tional structure, bent on turning out people for the jobs
at any particular moment considered important, but
should be devoted to encouraging all human talents,
whether or not these are of the kind needed in a scien
ti c world. The arts and manual skills should be given
as much prominence as science and technology. The
Manifesto urged that the hierarchy of schools should be
abolished and common schools at last established. These
schools should have enough good teachers so that all
children should have individual care and stimulus.
They could then develop at their own pace to their own
particular ful lment. The schools would not segregate
the like but mingle the unlike; by promoting diversity
within unity, they would teach respect for the in nite
human differences which are not the least of man-
kind s virtues..The schools would not regard children
as shaped once and for all by Nature, but as a com-
bination of potentials which can be cultivated by
Nurture.
2. MODERN FEMINIST MOVEMENT
These rst phases of reformism are important to us to
day because they saw the formulation of the ideas which
170
CRISIS
have since become so notorious. In point of organiza-
tion there has been little continuity. That generation of
malcontents returned home and many of them are now
the respected wives of some of our leading scientists.
But not all; some did not marry, some kept their rebel-
lious spirit alive in the nursery. They have been joined
by further recruits from some of the best homes in the
country, culminating in the rush of the last three years.
Why so many women1 up in arms? It is not altogether
easy to explain. I would, however, be no aspirant t0
sociology were I to allow any role to accident. That
would, I believe, be a serious misinterpretation. It is
worth noting, what is sometimes forgotten, that there
were several excellent studies made of female psycho
logy towards the end of last century before the resur-
gence in politics. The gist of them was that society
seemed to many women, especially the able ones, in mind
men if at heart women, to have been constructed ex-
pressly for the convenience of the opposite sex. Are
there not, the indignant asked, as many intelligent girls
born every year as there are boys? They get much the
same education as any male cadet for the meritocracy.
But what happens then? They take the post for which
they have been trained only until they marry. From
that moment they are expected, for a few years at any
rate, to devote themselves to their children. The sheer
drudgery of their lives has been much relieved by the
revival of domestic service and the help of husbands.
But they cannot, if they take any notice of the teaching
I. Dr Puf n (of York University in an unpublished M.Sc.
thesis) has pointed out how dif cult it is to get reliable gures for
membership, and asserts that, on a count he made at the Populist
Convention at Leicester, women only numbered sixty-two per cent
of the delegates, the rest being men, with the old predominating.
171
THE RISE OF THE MERITOCRACY
of psychology, entrust the entire care of their Offspring
to a person of low intelligence. Infants need the lovc Of
a mother; they also need her intellectual stimulation
her tender introduction to a high culture, her diligen;
preparation for a dedicated life. She will neglect her
motherly duties only at the peril of her children, not to
speak of the displeasure of her husband.
What these early studies showed were that this dual
role in her chosen profession and in her biological
vocation often gave rise to mental tension in all those
women who could not feel that child-rearing is (as it is
in fact) one of the noblest occupations of them all,
especially when it is part-time. The problem has never
been an easy one to solve. Some women have taken their
own way out by limiting the size of their families so that
they can return to paid work as soon as possible with
the unfortunate result that the stock of intelligence has
been endangered. Others have denounced the tradi-
tional family as an anachronism and transferred their
motherly role entirely to servants. Others have signed
the pledge that they would send their children only to
the London School of Arts and Crafts, where science is
not taught at all! Yet others, a small but signi cant
minority, have been lured by the old mystique of
equality. The early striving for social equality was
greatly strengthened by its association with the move-
ment for emancipation of women. Equality irrespective
of sex or class ~ it was a good slogan, only it lost much
of its appeal when hereditary classes, though not here-
ditary sexes, were gradually abolished. But for some
women the appeal remained as bright as ever. As they
saw it, the sexes were treated as unequal . They wanted
sex equality, but since this is obviously unobtainable,
they displaced their antagonism from men in general
172
CRISIS
On to the ruling classes , the scapegoat whom they
imagined to be in some way responsible for the die
tatorship of biology. It was all the easier to vent their
antagonism because many of them had time on their
hands, once their children entered nursery school,
which they could devote to discussions in their women s
circles. Most of them did not react by going to the
extreme of refusing to make use ofdomestic service. The
determination of so many of the present leaders of the
movement to do all their own household work is un-
usual and in some ways welcome since it means the
married ones have little time left over for political
organization.
Through the women s circles, the activists have been
able to assert their in uence and show their menfolk,
who perhaps show too little humility about the won-
ders with which they have furnished our estate, that
they are a force to be reckoned with. In so doing they
are making a protest against the standards, those of
achievement, by which men assess each other. Women
have always been judged more by what they areythan
by what they do, more for other personal qualities than
for their intelligence; more for their warmth of heart,
their vivacity, and their charm than for their worldly
success. It is therefore understandable that they should
wish to stress their own virtues, only regrettable that in
this the quality have joined with women of no more
than ordinary ability.
Astringency has been added to the debate, rst, by
the impoverishment of women, and second, by the
eugenic campaign. The impoverishment is the result of
the reform of remuneration which I described in the
last chapter. Men are paid as business assets, and house-
wives cannot ordinarily pretend to be only that. Elite
173
THE RISE OF THE MERITOCRACY
wives bene t indirectly from the new conception of
home as just a branch o ice. Their servants are on the
employer s expenditure roll. But they do not bene t as
much as men. They do not attend so many stylish
business dinners at the employer s expense; they do not
need to travel abroad so often; they do not have two
bars, One at work as well as one at home. Naturally they
sometimes resent the privileged standard ofliving which
their husbands, as business assets, have to enjoy whether
they like it or not. This is one reason why the sex war
has embraced politics.
Then there has been the eugenic campaign. This was
founded on ordinary common sense. Professor Eagle
and his collaborators were really saying, to begin with,
that before choosing their marriage partners people
should consult the intelligence register. This was ob-
viously in the national interest; it was also in the interest
of happy marriage. No man with a high LQ. could in
the long run be as proud of a child destined for a
secondary modern school as of one destined for Oxford;
yet the chance of such an unhappy issue was obviously
greater, the lower the intelligence of the woman he
married. A high-I.Q. man who mates with a low I.Q.
woman is simply wasting his genes and it is therefore
common prudence for him to examine the records ofher
father and grandfather as well. Hence the success story
of the pretty young mother who discovers she is going
to be all right after all, the Registry has wrongly
docketed her grandfather - it has become a favourite
theme of popular ction. Altogether this was, one
would think, sensible advice. At any rate many men but
not all for what age is not an age of lust? have
thought so. It is now rare for a sober senior civil servant
to consider marriage with any girl who cannot produce
174
l _
l1.,
CRISIS
an LQ. of over 130 at some point in her intelligence
genealogy. For one thing, if he married beneath him
there would be too great a danger of the news spreading
through his department, and nothing would more
surely give him the reputation of unreliability.
But women and for once I am bound to confess I
do not understand why have not taken so kindly to
this advice. Where, they ask, is the romance in an in~
telligenic marriage? And to underline their question they
have echoed the lower classes who esteem bodily prow-
ess and give a heightened value, a sort of symbolic
value, to a super cial quality not at all related to in-
telligence, that is, to appearance. Beauty has become
their ag. The more energetically Professor Eagle cam
paigns against men who choose women for their
appearance - he has been most ably assisted by his wife
the more do the Populists decry his efforts, and the
more often do the chic cadres attend their own meetings
clad in the most extravagant clothes, with Salpanas on
their shoulders, and sandals on their feet, their faces
decorated in the most beguiling way and their hair
styled according to the latest decrees from the fashion
committee. One of their favourite slogans is the ridi
culous Beauty is achievable by all . The remarkable
appearance of the women members of the ying
seminar. cannot be denied. They are not the sort of
people who wear wool next to their skin.
3. COMING OF THE CRISIS
Without the events to which I will now turn, this
women s movement would have been no more than a
high-spirited Charade. It has been rendered a threat to
the State by the sudden crystallization of an issue which
I75
THE RISE OF THE MERITOCRACY
has long remained submerged. I refer, of course, to the
enunciation of the new revolutionary doctrine on the
right wing of the Conservative Party. Lord Cecil and
his followers have done what no one has dared to do
within living memory: they have actually urged not
in so many words but that is their regrettable tenor
that the hereditary principle should be openly restored
to its former pride of place. The shock has been pro-
found. Extremism on the right has always led to eX-
tremism on the left.
Their plea cannot be ignored, for they claim that
they are only seeking the stamp of public approval for a
trend which has been evident for at least twenty- ve
years. The fact is that every advance towards equality
of opportunity creates resistance to going any further.
A century ago educational reform was vital to reduce
the waste of ability in the lower classes. But every time
intelligence was skimmed off and transferred to the
upper classes, the reasons for continuing the process
were correspondingly weakened. By 1990 or there-
abouts all adults with I.Q.s of more than 125 belonged
to the meritocracy. A high proportion of the children
with I.Q.s over 125 were the children of these same
adults. The top of today are breeding the top of to-
morrow to a greater extent than at any time in the
past. The elite is on the way to becoming hereditary;
the principles of heredity and merit are coming to
gether. The Vital transformation which has taken
more than two centuries to accomplish is almost com-
plete.
The meritocracy is undoubtedly more brilliant as a
result. Fifty years ago many members of the elite were
rst-generation, and for that very reason suHered in
comparison with their fellows. They came from homes
176
CRISIS
in which there was no tradition of culture.1 Their
parents, without a good education themselves; were not
able to augment the in uence exercised by the teacher.
These clever people were in a sense only half educated,
in school but not home. When they graduated they had
not the same self-assurance as those who had the sup-
port and stimulus of their families from the beginning.
They were often driven by this lack of self-con dence to
compulsive conformity, thus weakening the power of
innovation which it is one of the chief functions of the
elite to wield. They were often intolerant, even more
competitive in their striving for ascent than was neces-
sary, and yet too cautious to succeed. NOW that so many
of the e lite are second-generation or better, these faults
are no longer so evident, and society is no longer court
ing the risk of degenerating into a strati ed mob. No
longer is it so necessary to debase standards by attempt-
ing to extend a higher civilization to the children of the
lower classes. This is what the new Conservatives allege.
They claim that the advantages of the new disposition
should be frankly recognized even to the extent of
allowing to the elite not only the privileges which are
their accepted right but also, and this is the moot point,
the guarantee of a privileged education for their
children.
The shock administered by this demand has in a way
I. One of the signs of the times is that T. S. Eliot is much read
again - that is, his Notes towards the Definition qf Culture. Particularly
his words An élite, if it is a governing élite, so far as the natural
impulse to pass on to one s offspring both power and prestige is
not arti cially checked, will tend to establish itself as a class. Less
often quoted are the words that follow t But an élite which thus
transforms itself tends to lose its function as an elite, for the quali-
ties by which the original members won their position will not all
be transmitted equally to their descendants.
I77
THE RISE OF THE MERITOCRACY
been aggravated by some of the recent advances in the
social sciences, whose consequences seem, quite inde-
pendently, to threaten some of our most cherished
beliefs. The fact is that the accumulation of knowledge
in psychology has made it possible to identify the intelli-
gence and aptitudes 0f the individual at ever earlier
ages. Up to the turn of the century, there was still such
a margin of error about the tests as they were applied,
even at fourteen, that if people had had their last
chance at that age much ability would have been lost
to the nation. The late developers could not be neglected
if full meaning was to be given to equality of oppor-
tunity. Hence modern adult education. Hence the
regional centres. Hence the opportunity for anyone to
have himself re-tested at any stage of life. But step by
step the rapid advances in their discipline have given
the educational psychologists the means to identify in-
telligence during childhood, even though it is so far
latent that the untrained observer cannot detect it, and
to forecast the age in adult life at which it will develop.
These discoveries weakened the rationale of the adult
education movement. If on the basis of tests at the age
of fteen, the experts could predict the future, what
purpose was any longer served by the Regional
Centres? The experts merely had to tag the late
developer and, at the appropriate age, con rm that
their prediction was correct. Provided they made
generous allowance for border-line cases, they could not
go wrong. The organizers of adult education have
fought against this iconoclasm (as it seems to them) and,
quite apart from disputing the validity of the new nd-
ings, have argued that their movement should continue
if only to maintain the morale of low-I.Q. subjects who
would otherwise be without hope.
I78
CRISIS
The test-ages at which highly reliable predictions
could be made have become steadily lower. In 2000,
the reliable age was nine; in 2015, the reliable age was
four; in 2020 it was three. This was as severe a blow to
many teachers as the earlier discoveries had been to the
adult educators. The real justi cation for a common
education in primary schools for everyone up to eleven
was that no one could be quite sure ofthe ultimate value
of any young boy or girl. It was only fair that they
should not be segregated until their I.Q.s were nally
known. But when ability could once be tested and
identi ed at the age of three, there was really no point
at all in the brighter children going to the same (:0
intellectual school as others who would almost in-
evitably retard their development. It was much more
sensible to segregate outstanding Children from the ruck
in separate kindergartens and primary schools, just in
the same way as at the top the outstanding young
people sent to Oxford and Cambridge were divided off
from the others who could not rank any higher than the
provincial universities. The late developers could re-
main with the [101' polloi until their time came, or be sent
to experimental schools where the processes of nature
would be hurried forward.
Faced with these facts, some teachers reacted in the
same way as the adult educators and said, granted that
the RA. is three, it is still necessary to pretend that it is
not. Children cannot be condemned so early: they will
cease to strive when they know that no effort will prove
the psychologist wrong, except within a small margin of
error. They must be given the stimulus of hope; so must
the teachers, and so also, above all, must their parents.
Any sociologist must admit the strength \of the argu-
ment. Equality of opportunity has for so long been the
,179
THE RISE OF THE MERITOCRACY
ethos of education that it will not do to abandon it
overnight. So important is social cohesion that we shall
have to make haste slowly.
But science does not move slowly. Three was not the
limit. The RA. was in effect pushed back into the
womb. Dr Charles, the Nobel Prizewinner who has
taught us so much about the mode of transmission of
intellectual ability, has recently shown that the intelli-
gence of children could at last be safely predicted from
the intelligence of their forbears. His early and remark-
able experiments on progeny testing were with rats. His
X-hypothesis was later con rmed by the wide-scale
census tests of all three-year-old babies in 2016. In
Britain, at any rate, Eugenics House already has records
for four generations, from the 19505 onwards, as well as
a large number of retrospective estimates compiled as
the result of the most painstaking research, particularly
since the study of obituaries became a recognized
branch ofsociology. By using these records, and making
all necessary allowances, the ability of the offspring of
any couple can be forecast with remarkable accuracy;
and indeed, on various assumptions about marriage
habits, and inward and outward migration, intelligence
trends and distributions have actually been calculated
for the next 1,000 years.
4. NEW CONSERVATISM
Dr Charles s work has undoubtedly helped to alter the
attitudes of intelligent parents. They no longer need to
send their children to an ordinary primary school, and
ifthe State will not provide special ones, they are already
in a few districts establishing private schools, where
their children will mix only with their own special class.
180
4,
-HmnTme
W
M
.
CRISIS
They no longer need to look questioningly into their
cots, not knowing what kind of education the occupants
will eventually deserve. Their children are, in their eyes,
not just children but rulers born to a high destiny. All
this has led to hardening of class sentiment. Once the
need for common treatment of all children up to a
minimum age was questioned, once the foundations of
society were shaken in this way, some intelligent parents
were stimulated to go further and ask whether equality
of opportunity is not a wholly outdated idea.
If the argument ended there, we defenders of the
existing social order would not rest too uneasy. The
aw in the reasoning thus far is obvious, and all but the
most bigoted and family-loving 0f the Conservatives,
who have not even read Charles, heard of Galton, or
paid attention to the most elementary genetics, are
aware of it. The aw is that intelligent people tend, on
the whole, to have less intelligent children than them
selves; the tendency is for there to be a continuous
regression1 towards the mean stupid people bearing
slightly more clever children as surely as clever people
have slightly less. If it were not so, a ruling élite, once
established, would rightly be hereditary. As it is, this
brute fact makes some degree of social mobility essen-
tial, even though it need not be as great as a century ago.
As I say, most of the Conservative leaders are fully
1. The phenomenon of regression was well understood even in
my special period of history - that just as children of tall parents
tended to be tall, though not so tall as their parents, so with in-
telligence. As Professor Eysenek said, The average LQ. of mem
bers of the higher professional and administrative classes is in the
neighbourhood of I 50; that of their children is slightly in excess of
120. The lower professional and technical executive groups have
I.Q.s in the neighbourhood of 130; their children tend to be in the
1 I 5 region on the average. Uses and Abuses of Psychology5 1953.
181
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F
THE RISE OF THE MERITOCRACY
apprised of the tendency towards regression and have
tried to take account of it in their schemes. Their pro-
posals differ, in emphasis if not in kind. The most ex-
treme right wing asks, what does it matter? A few stupid
children of clever parents may receive higher educa-
tion and most of them will not be all that less intelli-
gent than their parents; but the polish given them in
their homes will t them to succeed to the élite, which
they will man with no disgrace, if not adorn. Any loss of
effectiveness in the meritocracy will be more than out-
weighed by the bene ts of making it hereditary. Parents
will be easier in their minds and their children will not
have to go through all the psychological stresses of
having to prove themselves in competition with chil-
dren from the lower classes. Nor will ambitions have to
be aroused in the minds of all parents, however stupid,
lest their children escape the attentions of education;
and if their ardours can be left cool, the body politic
will gain in stability. A further wave of social mobility
may be necessary later on, they say, if the distribution
of intelligence gets too much out of line with the dis-
tribution of power; but let it wait; give us a half-eentury
of peace from the pandemonium of social mobility.
Such professions have no chance of acceptance, they
represent too sharp a break with our ethos. A more
subtle school urges that the distribution of intelligence
should be adjusted to the existing distribution of power;
although the approach is the opposite of what the edu-
cational system aims at doing, the goal is the same.
Some encouragement has been given to this group by
the experiments carried out by Academician Donikin
at Ulan-Bator, which cap a long sequence in many
other countries, including our own. If the reports are to
be believed, the biophysicists there have shown how,
182
CRISIS
in the lower animals at any rate, controlled mutations
in the genetic constitutions of the unborn can be in-
duced by means of radiation so as to raise the level of
intelligence above that which would otherwise be
yielded. Were anything really practical to come of this,
the crucial question would be, whose children are to
have their intelligence arti cially raised in this man-
ner? The Conservative leaders claim that those who
already have should have more, as the surrounding
environment which the parents could provide would
then be as favourable as possible to the nurturing of
capacity; and that it would be absurd to tinker with
ordinary have nots since they already have quite as
much ability as they need for their allotted functions.
Obviously the decision must rest with the meritocracy,
not the democracy who have no means of weighing the
gravity of the issue. I recognize that any increase in
knowledge must be welcomed for its own sake, but all
the same I am bound to say that, speaking from the
standpoint of sociology, the application of such know
ledge, rather than its acquisition, cannot proceed too
slowly. The rumours that have circulated about the
tampering with the wives of leading civil servants at the
Volunteer Maternity Centre on South Uist have already
caused much alarm.
Meanwhile, it has been proposed that the Ministry
of Education should at once make its Adoption of Chil-
dren scheme mandatory upon all local authorities.
Adoption of Children is as old as man. Always, in all
societies, would-be parents, unfortunate enough to have
had no Children themselves, or not as many as they
would have liked, have sought out the kind of infants
most approved bonny looking and chubby, fair with
blue eyes, dark with grey eyes, boys or girls, small or
183
THE RISE OF THE MERITOCRACY
big. The difference between us and other people in
other times and other places is that we value intelligence
more, and that the psychologists and biologists have
given us the means of estimation even in the cradle. A
genius without parents automatically becomes a ward
of state. An intelligent orphan is now a prize for any
family, especially for wives who are not prepared to
seduce leading professors or seek arti cial insemination
from the few highly intelligent men attested by the
Ministry as I.Q.-donors. The normal demand upon the
Adoption Societies has been multiplied in recent years
by members of the élite who wish to ll their quiver.
The supply is grossly de cient; hence the disturbing
growth in the black-market baby traf c, stupid babies
from elite homes being sent, sometimes with princely
dowries,1 in exchange for clever ones from the lower
classes. Desperate parents have even descended to baby-
snatching after keeping a watch on pregnant mothers
of the lower classes whose intelligence genealogies are
promising. Private detectives and geneticists have
worked together in a scandalous compact. Better, plead
the culprits, to adopt the elite into their future class
when they are tiny than to do it much later and in
a much more cumbersome way through the foster
parents ofgrammar school and university. After a very
full government inquiry the Welfare of Children Act
was passed in 2030. It provided that private adoptions
should henceforth be void unless the local authority in
the area where the adopting parents lived had intro-
1. In Rook v. Stork (4 QB, 2028) it was alleged that Mr and
Mrs Rook had promised £150,000 in exchange for an LQ. of
I40, and a sum of ,650,000 to Dr Finch who arranged the deal. Mr
Justice Gosling s animadversions in his summing up led to the set-
ting up of the Salmon Committee on the Adoption of Children.
184
CRISIS
duced the model scheme, and conformed to the safe-
guards, laid down by the Ministry of Education. The
Cheltenham, Bournemouth, Harrogate, and Bognor
Education Committees immediately took advantage of
this permissive Act, but their lead has so far been fol-
lowed by very few other L.E.A.s. The demand of many
Conservatives is that all local authorities should now be
obliged to comply, and it is this, on top of everything
else, which precipitated the crisis of last May.
5. A RANK AND FILE AT LAST
The sociologist, with his trained insight, can perhaps
understand even more clearly than others why these
events, and the discussions surrounding them, have
caused such a profound revulsion. Any hint, let alone
the assertion in in uential quarters, that the hereditary
principle should be restored, after the struggles of two
centuries to destroy it, is tantamount to an attack on the
core and centre of our value system, and one all the
more disquieting because events have moved so swiftly.
Even the upholders of the lower classes, the Owenites,
the Chartists, and the Socialists, were not as shocking ,
as this to their social superiors two centuries ago. Those
rebels could at least profess their af nity with the
Christian religion. These other rebels, Of the right as
they are, cannot claim any such respectable descent:
the doctrine of equal opportunity has won a complete
ascendancy in the realm of practical ethics. The Con-
servatives want two luxuries at once the luxury of
inheritance and the luxury of ef ciency. But they can-
not have them both. They have to choose, and they have
chosen wrongly. Could we tolerate men as Directors of
Eugenics House, of the Centre at South Uist, even as
185
THE RISE OF THE MERITOCRACY
Prime Ministers, although that admittedly does not
matter so much, who enjoyed power merely because
they had clever fathers? Could we tolerate the clever
sons of stupid fathers wasting their lives in some dingy
Union of ce in Manchester? We could not. The sanc-
tion for such folly would be sharp. China and Africa
would draw ahead in productivity. British and Euro-
pean in uence would fade as our science became
clumbered up by the second-rate. We should once again
be over-matched in the competition of the world .
Does one need to say more? So obvious is it, that the
Populists can now parade as protectors of what is best
in our established society. A phantasmagoria indeed!
Public opinion surveys have shown that the distur-
bances have been red more by a sentiment of opposi-
tion to the Conservatives than by a sentiment of loyalty
to the Populists. Whatever the combination of motives,
there is no doubt about what happened. Every little
dispute, which would ordinarily have been quietly
smoothed out in the course of conciliation, has instead
been charged with a bitterness without parallel in
modern times. The events at Stevenage, Kirkcaldy, and
South Shields, the action of the domestic servants, the
deputations sent to the Ministry of Education and the
T.U.C. all over owed their nominal purpose in a
very ood of rebellion. A thousand petty grievances
became one.
Many of those who demonstrated were, of course,
quite inarticulate about their aims, being reduced to in-
coherent murmuring when asked, in Court, to express
themselves. They looked for upper-class leadership, and
found it in the only one bizarre quarter where it existed.
The women s circles, and their leaders, Urania O Con-
nor, Lady Avocet, and the Countess of Perth, did not
186
CRISIS
create the movement, the movement created them, and
if the study of social history had not (until the last few
years) been so neglected, it would have been obvious
to all that such is the custom of politics. The women
merely had to seize their historic opportunity, which
they have done to the best of their considerable ability.
They sailed when the wind blew. Bonds have been
formed between the women s circles and dissident tech-
nicians of very different levels of intelligence, indeed
with the dissidents from every walk of life whom I
have described in previous chapters. Long moribund
branches of the Technicians Party have been suddenly
visited with hundreds of applicants for membership. The
commotion came to a head in the Leicester Convention,
where the Populists issued their now celebrated charter.
What a strange document this is! With its echoes
from the past in the quotations from the now long-
f'orgotten Tawney and Cole, William Morris and john
Ball, the authors dress out their claim to be the heirs
(this word was surely a mistake?) of one of the great
streams in British history. But they dare not vouchsafe
more than a few trite words about domestic service lest
their intelligent ladies desert them. They dare not
espouse equality too openly, lest their upper-class sup-
porters take fright, though they came perilously close to
it in the section of the peroration which starts Oh,
sisters . When stripped ofits decoration the charter con-
tains few concrete demands apart from the banning of
adoptions; the preservation ofprimary schools and adult
education centres; more allowance for age and experi-
ence in industrial promotion; giving the technicians a
share in increasing productivity; and, most revolution-
ary and perhaps most meaningful, even a tri e nostal-
gic, to a historian, the raising of the school-leaving age
187
?
THE RISE OF THE MERITOCRACY
to eighteen, and the creation of common secondary
schools for all . On their face-value these demands do
not constitute a political programme of more than the
crudest sort, but the authors could not go further to
concentrate the loyalties of their very diverse follow-
ers without antagonizing some of those upon whose sup
port they lean.
6. FROM HERE, WHERE?
It was not my purpose in this essay to predict the course
of events next May, but rather to show that the move-
ment of protest had deep roots in our history. If my
view be accepted, opposition even to the greatest insti-
tutions of modem society is inevitable. The hostility
now manifest has long been latent. For more than half
a century, the lower classes have been harbouring
resentments which they could not make articulate,
until the present day.
If I have succeeded in adding at all to understanding
of this complex story and persuaded any of my fellows
not to take present discontents too lightly, my purpose
has been well achieved. But I am mindful that I may
be expected to say a word about what is likely to hap-
pen. It can, of course, be no more than a personal
opinion on which any reader of these pages is as well-
tutored as myself. Nevertheless, I hold rmly to the
belief that May 2034 will be at best an 184.8, on the
English model at that. There will be stir enough. The
universities may shake. There will be other disturb-
ances later on as long as the Populists survive. But on
this occasion anything more serious than a few days
strike and a week s disturbance, which it will be well
within the capacity of the police (with their new
weapons) to quell, I do not for one moment envisage.
I88
CRISIS
The reason I have already referred to. The charter is
too vague. The demands are, with one exception, not
in any way a fundamental challenge to the government.
This is no revolutionary movement but a caucus of dis-
parate groups held together only by a few charismatic
personalities and an atmosphere of crisis. There is no
tradition of political organization on which to draw.
There are, indeed, already signs of dissension within the
camp, as the result of the wise concessions which have
been made. Since I began to write this essay a fortnight
ago, the Chairman of the Social Science Research
Council has proffered his weighty recommendations to
the government. The Prime Minister quickly acted on
these counsels of moderation, instructed Weather Con-
trol to bring on autumn a month early and announced,
in his speech on 25 September at Kirkcaldy itself, that
his party was going to expel half a dozen of its right-
wing members, that the adoption scheme would not be
made mandatory for the present, that equality ofoppor-
tunity would be maintained as of cial policy, and that
there was no intention at present of tampering with the
primary schools or with adult education. His speech has,
as The Times put it, stolen the girls thunder .
Behind the shift and turn of current politics is the
underlying fact with which I opened my essay. The last
century has witnessed a far-reaching redistribution of
ability between the classes in society, and the conse-
quence is that the lower classes no longer have the
power to make revolt effective. For a short moment they
may prosper through an alliance with the odd and
passing disillusion of a section of the upper classes. But
such de dassé people can never be more than an eccen-
tric minority the Populists have never been more than
that as a serious political force because the elite is
189
THE RISE OF THE MERITOCRAGY
treated with all the wise distinction that any heart can
desire. Without intelligence in their heads, the lower
classes are never more menacing than a rabble, even if
they are sometimes sullen, sometimes mercurial, not
yet completely predictable. If the hopes of some earlier
dissidents had been realized and the brilliant children
from the lower classes remained there, to teach, to
inspire, and to organize the masses, then I should have
had a different story to tell. The few who now propose
such a radical step are a hundred years too late. This
is the prediction I shall expect to verify when I stand
next May listening to the speeches from the great
rostrum at Peterloo.1
I. Since the author of this essay was himselfkilled at Peterloo, the
publishers regret they were not able to submit to him the proofs of
his manuscript, for the corrections he might have wished to make
before publication. The text, even this last section, has been left
exactly as he wrote it. The failings of sociology are as illuminating
as its successes.
E;
l
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