Posted on 08/13/2016 11:40:09 AM PDT by oblomov
From the very beginnings of American history, the concept of merit has enjoyed a certain pride of place. It found a welcoming home in a new republican nation that, from its inception, had sought to proscribe the titles of nobility and other hereditary distinctions of social and political rank, as well as practices such as primogeniture and entail that had long been characteristic of European aristocratic society. But even the most equality-affirming republic would need to generate a pool of talented and effective leaders, a leadership class recruited and empowered for public service. How to find appropriate means by which the members of such a class could be identified, trained, and elevated to that station? Who should lead, and how should the leaders be chosen?
In a republican America, these questions could no longer be answered by reliance upon bloodlines or skillful machinations. The answers would have to be grounded in the concept of merit. Those with demonstrable experience, those seen to possess the skills, knowledge, character, wisdom, and civic virtue requisite for membership in a “natural aristocracy,” would therefore be those most deserving of high standing and high responsibilities. But how were those individuals to be found and nurtured? If they were no longer thought to be available to be plucked from certain family trees, were they instead to be found randomly distributed among the members of a given society, like the souls of gold and silver drawn from the earth (or so the “noble lie” would have it) in Plato’s imaginary republic?1 Would their education, like the education of the Platonic guardians, be the key to developing their natural excellences and harnessing those talents to the furtherance of the public weal?
(Excerpt) Read more at iasc-culture.org ...
Credentialism has replaced merit as a selection tool. This is *not* A Good Thing™. They are not the same.
Now we live in "institutional mediocracy". Which is the bigger threat?
AN OATH IS FOREVER
The author reinforces your point quite well:
“We would do well to leave room for the Lincolns among us—especially if they are as raw and uncredentialed as the man who would become our sixteenth president was. Think of his great speech at the dedication of the cemetery in Gettysburg in November 1863. As many know, there were two notable speeches that day. The first, and the longest and most learned and most florid, was given by the supremely well-pedigreed Edward Everett, former president of Harvard—and the first American to receive a German PhD. But it was the self-educated frontiersman president who gave the speech whose accents ring down through the ages. Perhaps there is a pattern here to learn from.”
Excellent article. Thank you for posting.
We don’t have a meritocracy, we have a butt-kiss-ocracy.
[ We don’t have a meritocracy, we have a butt-kiss-ocracy. ]
Ne we just have a Bureaucracy plain and simple, though complex it is to live in one.
Just because someone has no experience, talent, education or skills doesn’t mean they aren’t a greedy little shirt that will say or do anything to get ahead.
And once you get one dumbass in a position of authority, he will hire other dumbasses to protect him.
This is a very good article, and has a lot to do with Trump and why the ruling class is so terrified of him. Democrats have claimed that ethnicity is the primary driver of all voting behavior, and set themselves for the changing demographic trends. But Trump asserts that economic status and being inside or out of the ruling class are the primary driver of voting. He is invalidating everything the ruling class has used to pit people against each other.
Since the 70s “multiculturalism” and “tolerance” of evil, we have radical egalitarianism-—the opposite of meritocracy. We judge by color now—not by virtues (excellence). The Cardinal virtues were removed for the elevation of petty virtues like “egalitarianism” and “tolerance” as we remove Wisdom and true Justice and Temperance and Courage—the virtues which created Western Civilization.
Without Virtue, freedom is impossible. (Socrates). We have ALWAYS known that without virtue formation habituated into little children, there is NO civil society.
The Cultural Marxists like John Dewey took out Classical Christian Curricula which instilled virtue formation in children and replaced it with moral relativism-—mediocrity and evil.
Schools always taught virtue prior to John Dewey’s secular humanist religion which was put into the schools as all traces of Christianity was removed and censored and banned so Satanism could be forced onto children (a vice religion so it is easy to kill, sodomize, and demonize others for the NWO). Now, Satanism (sodomy/baby-killing) is normalized in children—which destroys virtue formation and the idea of Good and Evil. It literally is destroying Western Civilization (White) by demeaning the “white” race so that all the ideology of the past can be erased out of the Minds of children, even concepts of mother and father.
They need to destroy the Natural Family to make children total slaves—inable to be individuals (think for self/be self-reliant/learn individualism/excellence). They embed “hate” for Western philosophy—that which created the Age of Reason and US Constitution and most just, free, excellent (virtuous) civilizations in history of mankind. Only Christian worldview rid the world of the idea that slavery and pederasty and incest and polygamy were “evil”. The satanists need those things normalized in children——so have to get children out of the family, into artificial indoctrination systems.
As Dostoevsky stated, Without God, everything is permissible. The Age of Reason was only a Christian and Classical conception-—all other ideologies are tribal (group-think) and are irrational (based on “groups” instead of individualism and Free Will (choice). There is no “thinking” in group ideologies (collectives-—One Mind cultures which the NWO needs).
Bureaucracy just cares whether or not you individually submit the relevant things, and that’s not what we’ve got.
What we actually have allows for untimed tests for some, and timed tests for others.
Group projects give every one on the team the same grade which results in grade inflation for some since there’s always one person who ensures the work gets done because they don’t want to fail. You can grade your fellow students as a part of this, but let’s face that such a proposition is a double edged thing. Generally these projects are heavily weighted in final grades and teams are assigned, not chosen.
There’s this whole victim hierarchy that has to be navigated.
All of this undermines merit as a criteria in schools.
true.
I’d say we’ve evolved, or more correctly, DEVOLVED, back to the most common form of large government: an Empire.
So, Ave, President-Imperator. . .
How can the SAT be used as a benchmark when some people are required to finish in a given time, other people get 1 1/2 times the minutes to finish, and still others are granted 2 times the time to finish?
https://www.collegeboard.org/students-with-disabilities/typical-accommodations/time
...or sometimes more than two times the standard amount of time to finish...
Ave Caesar
by Robinson Jeffers
No bitterness: our ancestors did it.
They were only ignorant and hopeful, they wanted freedom but wealth too.
Their children will learn to hope for a Caesar.
Or rather—for we are not aquiline Romans but soft mixed colonists—
Some kindly Sicilian tyrant who’ll keep
Poverty and Carthage off until the Romans arrive,
We are easy to manage, a gregarious people,
Full of sentiment, clever at mechanics, and we love our luxuries.
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