Merit and Choice

Merit is best for choosing; so we ask 'What is merit?'

It used to have some cruel outcomes when merit was too closely identified with advantage - cultural or economic. Of the two, I find economic advantage alone unacceptable in education.

Cultural is another matter, as education is the transmission of culture. There may be something like raw intelligence, which has been deprived of input, as well there is lesser potential carefully nurtured by fortunate circumstance.
Neither should be ignored.

Examination success is too crude a measure to weigh and filter all these factors. It's just a first sort-out but gets mistaken for achievement, of itself, rather than being something that reinforces confidence and encourages further effort to advance.

None of this complexity can be measured by rules alone. And it's all made even more complex by social and economic opportunity and status attaching to it, at times being used to exclude, or to pretend fairness while really cloaking economic and social privilege.

Perhaps one of the most successful solutions to providing objective assessment and a measure of progress and encouragement is the
public, open-to-all, graded exam system of the Royal Schools of Music. All the A-levels and O- levels used to be similar public examinations open to all.

They are widely regarded as elitist now but there's no egalitarianism in music performance. There is no egalitarianism in anything really, but that need not be used to justify the denigration of high culture, or the denial of greater fitness for a particular task, or course of study, at hand.

On the whole it might be best if examinations were removed from the control of the schools and their internal assessments, and returned to being public examinations to be taken by whoever enters (though obviously most candidates will be school pupils).

And proper recognition returned to the capacities of commissioners, examiners, admissions tutors, to know their job and their duty to fairness as well.