| Meritocracy Ascendant traces the educational ideas and actions of James Bryant Conant, president of Harvard and influential critic of American education, who lived from 1893 to 1978. Conant's career embraced half a century of active efforts to persuade schools and colleges to identify and serve talented students on the basis of their intelligence, not their social class. The national visibility afforded by his position as president of Harvard University from 1933 to 1953 provided him with a platform for speaking out on social and educational issues. Viewing higher education as a vehicle of opportunity for the talented rather than an entitlement for the wealthy, Conant devised programs to identify, recruit, and support talented youth. During and after World War II he merged his ideas of improving opportunity for talented youth with broader concerns for American democracy by suggesting that schooling was inextricably linked to the fate of American democratic institutions. Moreover, he advocated a democratic vision of the comprehensive high school as a place where all the youth of a community could be educated together. The high school's ultimate measure of success, however, lay not in the quality of education it offered to all, but in the selection and advancement of opportunity to the talented, whatever their background. In 1961, Conant sought to apply his analysis to two groups of children unaffected by meritocratic, scholastic opportunities--those young people born impoverished and black in the nation's slums, and affluent, white youth growing up in the suburbs. In Slums and Suburbs, Conant was unable to apply his meritocratic analysis to young people whose segregated realities determined their future potential. The problems of the nation's inner cities illustrated the limits of a meritocratic analysis where social change was predicated on opportunity for the talented individual rather than providing equal educational opportunity for an entire group. |
