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Gavus_canarchiste t1_itda5rs wrote

Reply to comment by pacmanpill in [OC] Chances to attend a "Grande Ecole (Top university) in France. If you want to attend "ENA", the best university in France, you have 330x chances if your father graduated from there. by pacmanpill

Merit is a mere fiction used to sparkle guilt in the poor and confidence in the dominant classes of society.
As a kid with good grades, I didn't choose to have a stable, loving, caring family with a strong cultural capital, to be interested in reading, counting, learning, solving problems. I didn't choose to be a white kid in a privileged school.
A kid who has bad grades didn't choose that. Didn't choose their social and economical conditions, that their body resists staying silent on a chair 8h/day, to be plagued by dyslexia, to have hobbies that have nothing in common with what school teaches...
Now, as a teacher who reads a few studies, I've never been so sure that there is no such thing as "merit".

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camilo16 t1_itduf6p wrote

There's 2 different concepts you are merging. Merit and access to opportunity.

If I am hiring people based on intelligence and I hire the truly smartest person. That was a meritocratic selection.

If the person is the smartest because they were born to smart parents, got lots of academic support and an environment conductive to learning, that was unequal access to opportunity relative to other people.

A system can both be meritocratic and have a large disparity in access to opportunity, the concepts are totally orthogonal.

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