Re: When the goals, tests, and grades of a "meritocracy" are dervived in secret by those who have already decided that they are meritorious members, then it is more accuratly called a "good-ol boy's club". Merit becomes defined as the volume and conviction in which an aspirant can repeat "Yes Sir".
Agree....
Interview
Nicholas Lemann
He is a journalist and author of The Big Test-the Secret History of American Meritocracy which examines American meritocracy and how, after World War II, the SAT became the ticket for entry into America's ruling class.
How did our obsession with the SAT begin?
The story starts with the invention of IQ tests. That was 1905. Here's the brief history. Alfred Binet, a French psychologist, invents the first IQ test in 1905 in Paris. The second important thing that happens is that Lewis Terman, an American psychology professor at Stanford...took Binet's idea, used it in a slightly different way and really became a proselytizer for IQ testing and its widespread use in American education. And the reason was to pick people to become part of a new elite.
The big milestone moment was during the First World War when IQ testers persuaded the army to let them test all recruits. Before that, IQ tests were given one on one. There would be a test administrator and a test taker. For the first time during the First World War, an IQ test was given to millions of people with ...mass results, so that was the real moment of arrival for the IQ testing movement. After the war, the people who had worked on these tests spread them throughout the country, made use of them in schools and so on, and some of the people who had worked on the World War I test worked on adapting it to use in college admissions.
[...]
Can you talk a bit about Thomas Jefferson?
Thomas Jefferson, after having retired as President, struck up a correspondence with John Adams who was, of course, also a retired President. Jefferson is in Virginia, Adams is in Massachusetts. And they wrote these really remarkable long letters to each other--very scholarly. Parts of them are in Greek; parts of them are in Latin. You can't imagine ex-Presidents writing this stuff today. Anyway, there's a famous letter, written from Jefferson to Adams in 1813, and Jefferson says "I propose to you that there is a natural aristocracy among men, made up of people who have virtues and talents." And then he contrasted it to what he called a "tinsel aristocracy," based on wealth and birth. And he said America should be run by the natural aristocracy.
[...]
You said Carl Brigham wrote the SAT. Was he a racist?
Brigham was a reformed racist, basically. You have to be careful about how you use words like racist, because one of the difficult things about history is not being anachronistic. That is, not applying the standards of the present to the past. So it must be said that in 1920 virtually every respectable person in the United States was an unacceptable racist by today's standards. Just as an example, remember, you could not find a man who believed that women should occupy positions of authority in 1920.
Anyway, a very popular movement, particularly among establishment types in the teens and twenties was the eugenics movement which held that the kind of breeding stock of humans was worth looking at and that it was endangered. Eugenicists believed in the innate superiority and inferiority of races on a scale. They were very worried--remember that we had no immigration laws then--they were very worried about unimpeded immigration and how that would lead to a dilution of the superior racial stocks in America. This wasn't just a few nuts who thought this. This was Theodore Roosevelt, Oliver Wendell Holmes. All respectable people thought this stuff, or almost all, a few heroic ones did not. And by the way, when you say racist, these people didn't think in terms of whites and people of color. What we would call the white race they divided into a lot of little sub-races in order of superiority and inferiority. In particular there were three white races, according to this theory--Nordics, Alpines and Mediterraneans. So it was a cause for alarm, not just that non-whites were coming to the country, but that too many of the lower class of whites--Mediterraneans--were coming to the country.
Brigham wrote a book in 1923 called A Study of American Intelligence. This was based on his work on the Army Alpha Test. He analyzed the test results by race and found--as people who do that have always found--that people of color, Jews, Mediterraneans, anybody who wasn't a kind of what he would call a Nordic, was inherently intellectually inferior. And that the country was in big trouble because too many of these people were coming into the country. So this book is a kind of very ripe, racist book by today's standards, typical of establishment thinking of the time, although Brigham, you know, bothered to write it down. And it just stands up very well as an offensive piece of writing. Now, Brigham renounced it within about five years. To his great credit, he specifically disowned the book. He changed his mind, he broke with the eugenics movement and by the end of his life, was really one of the leading critics, of the eugenics movement. So he came around and deserves a lot of credit for that.
[snip]
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