Schooling the Meritocracy: How Schools Came to Democratize Merit, Formalize Achievement, and Naturalize Privilege

This is an essay about the historical construction of the American meritocracy, which is to say the new American aristocracy based on academic credentials.  Here's a link to the original, which was published 2020 in Bildungsgeschichte: International Journal of the Historiography of Education.  It is republished in my new book, The Emergent Genius of American … Continue reading Schooling the Meritocracy: How Schools Came to Democratize Merit, Formalize Achievement, and Naturalize Privilege