Education: Looking Backward, Sourly

At its most caustic, social satire is brewed from sweet reasonableness, and nothing could be more reasonable than the modest educational proposal that is the basis of a spoofing report from the 21st century by British Sociologist Michael Young. First premise of The Rise of the Meritocracy, 1870-2033, published in London, is merely this: every bright child, regardless of his parents’ wealth or lack of it, should get the best education he is capable of absorbing. The proposition is hardly alarming, but by the book’s end it has left a trail like a runaway milkwagon horse. Among the casualties: the British Labor Party (which Young served as research secretary from 1945-51); the commissar’s cast of mind that sees education solely as a means for national advancement; the sociologist’s view of the individual as a cell that lives for the benefit of the organism, society; and the psychologist’s notion that intelligence and aspiration can be measured like prize trout.

I + E = M. With roundabout humor, Young reminds his readers of the events, starting in the 1940s, that led to a blossoming Utopia. By mid-20th century, he assumes, Britain’s best minds had realized that their country’s economy could no longer compete with those of the U.S., Russia and China under a haphazard system that prevented some bright children of the poor from reaching responsible jobs rightfully theirs, and fortified doltish sons of the rich and well-born in positions of power. The answer: meritocracy, which is rule by the most talented, determined according to the formula I+E = M (Intelligence plus Effort equals Merit).

Britain’s socialists, dedicated opponents of wealth and high birth, helped to get things going, Young reports, but they nearly ruined everything by insisting that equality of opportunity meant educating all children, bright and dull, in the same comprehensive schools (this, very roughly, is what the Labor Party currently proposes). Clearly, this plan was too American, writes Young: “Americans, far from prizing brainpower, despised it . . . In the continent of the common man, they established common schools which recognized no child superior to another.” Another kind of education was necessary for Britain; “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.”

By 2020 intelligence tests had been developed that could spot a child’s ability and bent at three. Children with IQs of 116 and up were sent to state-supported grammar schools; dullards were taught to read, write and play games at common schools. Uplifting leisure activities were planned for bright students, who “no longer need to spend any of their spare time with their families. Their homes have become simply hotels, to the great benefit of the children.” Students, of course, received a “learning wage,” were members of the B.U.G.S.A. (British Union of Grammar School Attenders).

Shifting IQs. Periodic intelligence testing gave parents of dull children the hope that their dimwitted offspring would blossom late; and tests taken throughout life ensured that when IQ went up—or down —jobs changed accordingly. Mere age, of course, commands no respect in a meritocracy; as IQ dips in the fifth or sixth decade of life, Young writes, “the managing director had to become an office mechanic . . . the professor an assistant in the library. There have been judges who have become taxi drivers, bishops curates, and publishers writers.”

Of course there are malcontents: “Every now and then an old man, overtaken by a younger . . . turns to blame . . . the social order which makes possible the indignity he feels.” And until testing methods were made foolproof, parents high in the meritocracy tried to give their occasional stupid children the appearance of wit, then ease them “into a cosy corner of one of the less exacting professions, such as law or stockbroking.”

For the most part, meritocracy works; the upper class knows for the first time in history that it is superior in all ways to the lower; and the intellectual proletariat is encouraged to accept a “just inferiority” and develop a liking for sports. Modern wonders abound in Young’s Utopia; the morning rocket leaves regularly for the moon, and England’s southwestern counties have been covered with concrete for the convenience of motorists. But even as the author writes, the end is in sight. A general strike is called by a fusion party of disgruntled old men, trade unionists dimly aware that their class has been milked of all intelligence capable of leadership, and upper-class women amorously alive to the proletarian athletes’ big muscles. Blindly the author discounts the unrest; his publisher ends the book with a note that the writer was unable to correct proofs because he was killed in the uprising.

Tweedily alive, and working at the Ford Foundation-financed Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences near Palo Alto, Calif., Young said last week to a TIME correspondent: “I tried to extrapolate the tendency in Britain to pick out the best and make them the elite. All our students should have at least been to the same schools at the same time. I want English schools more like yours, and your educators seem to want yours more like ours.”