Review of social speculation futurology Michael Young: The Rise of the Meritocracy
Educational tokenism ... the origin of fraudulent state-funded pseudo-research, 9 July 2009This book is usually described as a 'satire'. I don't believe it is—the word 'satire' was popularised at about the time this book was issued in paperback, and the blurb-writers must have thought it was the best available word to fit this odd work. 'Satire' has the great advantage that any mistakes can be ascribed to satirical intent.
Several very striking things:
[1] Young is not very well educated, and has astonishingly little curiosity; he is agonisingly conventional within the framework of the 'Labour Party' of the time. The mid-1950s saw among other things the invention of the H bomb; concern about population growth, or 'explosion'; plans for new towns, motorways, cheap cars, airports and other oil-related novelties; television; the feeling that Europe ought to be unified. There is absolutely nothing whatever of this in Young. Young (like C P Snow) called the Second World War 'the Hitler War'. Young's belief about the 'British genius' was that is put 'new beer into old bottles'. His entire sphere is a narrow type of educational politics. He was reported as having drafted, or read, or otherwise helped with, the 1945 Labour manifesto; they thought they'd lose, but when it became clear they were popular, Young said they "thought, my God, we might have to put this into practice! So they started to worry about the manifesto."
[2] The Rise of the Meritocracy is almost entirely concerned with education. I don't think there's a single page without some mention of formal education: schools, comprehensive schools, primary schools, the young, the stupid, the 'able', the clever, the brilliant, residential nurseries, class sizes, grammar schools, science teachers, public schools, early developers, late developers, Wykehamists, Rugbeians and Carthusians, mental labour, manual labour, higher education, and, particularly, I.Q.s. It's difficult to know what Young thought of IQ; I can't believe he would have measured very highly, and therefore, on the same principle as in Liam Hudson's books, I doubt he liked them much. On the other hand, they fit in with his tokenistic outlook to education. As far as Young is concerned, anyone who went to Oxbridge must have a first-class mind; Young lacks any scientific curiosity, and the idea of checking to see whether hothouse education, where there are officially correct answers, does in fact lead to competence, is completely lacking. He does mention people like Bevin (son of a farm labourer) who he compares with a mythical Lord Wiffen; however he naturally has no way to assess Bevin—was he, in fact, any good? Young unconsciously sees Bevin: a Cabinet Minister, with money. Can't be bad, eh! His attitude to the Civil Service is the same. In fact Young himself became Lord Young of Dartington—the Dartington referring to the experimental school in Devon he'd attended.
There are a few bits of realism here and there, invariably I think taken from other people. Dates of Education Acts as a reaction to wars: after the Boer War, First and Second World Wars. The Institute of Management's selection processes and the 'Pioneer Corps' during the war get some comment, as fitting square pegs into square holes, even if the pegs are resentful. Beatrice Webb gets a footnote on the inadequacies of ordinary people. A 'Labour' Party man is quoted as saying he knows no 'Labour' party members who don't sent their children to public schools. (For US readers, these are schools where people pay). A Civil servant is quoted on replies to Parliamentary questions—ideally they reveal nothing.
Young helped found Which?—the Consumers Association. He had something to do with the Open University. 'From 1965-8 he was Chairman of the Social Science Research Council.' (Latter quoted from a Penguin blurb). It is impossible to be certain how seriously this 'essay' was put forward as satire. But the overwhelming impression is of Young as intellectually entirely 'safe', unwilling to risk an investigation into any important topic.
If Young has left a legacy, it is of countless 'Labour' quangoes, 'think tanks', pressure groups, phoney charities, university departments, professoriats arranging their own successors, institutes, 'trusts', 'research' groups, union organisations, all dishonest, all taking public money in tacit exchange for avoiding genuine statistical, economic, legal, and sociological investigation.