Chapter 3: Merit, Democracy, Governing

I will be discussing here two visions of the role of schooling in the United States, and I will argue that these two visions, opposite in motive and political effects, present to us (more or less intentional) dystopian visions of governing. The two visions of schooling I will discuss here are those presented to us by two texts: Michael Young’s The Rise of the Meritocracy: 1870-2033 (1961) and John Dewey’s Experience & Education (1938/1997). These might seem like odd choices because I imagine that readers of this chapter would be imagining as “dystopian” something literary along the lines of texts by Bradbury, Burgess, Huxley, and most definitely, Orwell. My choice of these two texts, particularly Dewey’s, is especially odd because I also imagine that readers of this volume would assume a dystopia to be one that was intentionally meant to be a dystopia. By traditional definitions of dystopia, I suppose neither of these qualify. Yet, I hope to stretch those traditional definitions to capture a more contemporary idea of texts that attends to their narrative functions, and that when read for the stories they are espousing begin to look very much like those texts we generally imagine as literary. With this caveat, I chose Young’s and Dewey’s texts for three specific reasons.