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Indian society needs to seriously debate the relationship between exams, merit and equality. Debates over exams embody not just technical pedagogical questions, but a vast array of social anxieties and aspirations. A few months ago Singapore’s education minister provoked a spirited discussion by suggesting that Singapore is a “meritocracy of exams”, while America is a “meritocracy of talent”. Exams don’t pick out a vast array of unquantifiable forms of talent necessary for a vibrant and creative society. And the minister was suggesting that Singapore would do well to incorporate other elements as well. The relationship between talent and exams is a deeply vexed one. In an exams dominated society there is the worry: what exactly are we trying to pick out through the system?
But there is another disquieting question about the relationship between exams and merit. America fits oddly in the category of ‘meritocracy’. At an intuitive level we understand that America is extraordinarily open to talent, from wherever it comes. But it is not a meritocracy in the classic sense. Its powerful institutions of education and other forms of power never have and still do not, rely exclusively on what we would classically define as criteria of merit. Its institutions have vast discretion to use a range of considerations, including a candidate’s wealth, in deter-mining admission.
Indeed what’s striking about the American system is how much discretion is built into it at all levels. In fact, the more radical question the American experiment poses is this: Why do we assume that for a society to be able to nurture a vast array of talent it has to be a meritocracy all the way down? There is one sense in which it has to be meritocratic, namely that people are not excluded from participating because of characteristics like race, ethnicity or gender. But beyond that it’s an open question what principles nurture talent.
It is no accident that societies that are closer to being meritocracies, like Singapore and possibly China, are hung up on exams. Pure meritocracies require objective measures of selection. Although this is not a necessary consequence, meritocracies are usually suspicious of what we might call judgement and discretion. In India, we signal meritocracy by largely removing all criteria of judging talent that might be open to judgement and discretion. Pure meritocratic societies are more likely to be exams fixated.
But meritocracies suffer other paradoxical effects. Union HRD minister Kapil Sibal’s efforts to reduce the stress levels of students are salutary. But here’s the bad news. It is very likely that stress levels related to seeking your place in a meritocratic society will increase, not decrease. The sheer pressure of numbers suggests this outcome. We often forget that so far our education system has had limited reach. Once millions more students start competing to find their place in the objective distribution curve of talent, pressures will intensify. If you think pressures in India are great, just read accounts of what China’s national exam system which determines entry into universities entails.
In theory, one could argue that stress will not rise with numbers if we have adequate institutions to enable supply to keep up with demand. But this will not be sufficient. For the stress associated with exams depends upon the consequences attached to not coming out on top. This in turn will depend upon the structure of economic opportunities on offer. The more egalitarian a society, the less severe are perceived penalties for not coming out on top. Europe has in part escaped the neuroses of meritocratic competition because there is greater background equality. In short, stress is not primarily about education. It’s about the economy.
Moreover the relationship between meritocracy and equality also turns out to be more complicated. As was apparent in the debate over IIT exams, the character of admissions criteria determines who will do well. Some think a single exam favours the privileged, because they can invest in coaching; others think a board plus exam criteria will favour the privileged doubly. But all agree that a meritocracy must act as a counterweight to privileges of wealth. However the instruments we use to assess talent — exams and so forth — seem to vastly give advantage to those with access to a wide range of goods and privileges. How to design principles of meritocracy which genuinely aid social mobility is not as easy a question to answer as we suppose.
Meritocracy also has two peculiar psychic consequences. One of its unintended consequences is that it inculcates the idea that those who are left behind are somehow less worthy, and it creates a new form of inequality in turn. As some social observers have noted, people who rise through the system based on an idea of merit have a greater sense of entitlement to all the fruits of their effort. People at the top in particular, and society generally, also seem to think that those at the top deserve what they have. They deserve it in part because they rose by dint of their own talent.
There is a frustrating simple-mindedness to our debates over education which are narrow and short-sighted because we are not placing them in the right frame. These debates are fundamentally about the character of the modernity we are about to create.
(Pratap Bhanu Mehta is president and chief executive of Centre for Policy Research, Delhi)