Books - The Aristocracy of Talent - Adrian Wooldridge, Michael Sandel, Private Schools
...It's so disturbing to learn in Adrian Wooldridge's superb new history of the subject, The Aristocracy of Talent, that we don't really live in one at all. Or if we do it is on that has been corrupted: Wooldridge prefers the term pluto-meritocracy... Wooldridge's principal criticism of the modern West's "uneasy marriage between plutocracy and meritocracy" is that it enables the rich to use their wealth to buy educational privileges for their children, virtually guaranteeing them a place at the top of society and thereby perpetuating an "intellectual aristocracy" that risks becoming every bit as entrenched as the one the 10th Earl of Wemyss belonged to. Merit Francesco Guardi (1712-1793) Photo Credit: Walker Art Gallery [ CC BY-NC] If our society was ever truly meritocratic it was during the postwar years, when grammar schools and university scholarships hauled working-class kids out of their poor backgrounds and deposited them on the doorsteps ...