Letter to the Editor:

After reading David Brooks' article "The Merits of Meritocracy" in the May issue of The Atlantic Monthly, I decided to use it in the Introduction to Ethics class I teach at Metropolitan Community College (Omaha, NE). My students found it hard to relate to Brooks' description of middle class upbringing as a "world of almost crystalline meritocracy." Most of my students were not born into a society that surrounded them "with a web of instruction, encouragement, and recognition;" most had difficulty sympathizing with kids who grew up, as they put it, with a silver spoon in their mouths.

I decided to use Brooks' article for this class because it's a special class, one I look forward to teaching. My students are members of the Nebraska Correctional Youth Facility and have been incarcerated for various crimes ranging from murder and rape to molestation and theft. What caught my eye was Brooks' claim that "society's rebels had it all wrong when they tried to find self-fulfillment by breaking loose from tradition." My students certainly seemed to fit into that category, especially when Brooks says that "Their rebellions created selves without roots or moral reference points." I myself had reservations about the article, some of which I could not put my finger on, so I asked my students to help me explore and analyze Brooks' argument.

 After spending more than a full hour identifying his argument in terms of conclusion and reasons, we then evaluated the argument. Most of my students now made a grudging acknowledgement that the argument had some merit (in terms of truth), and they had some understanding (sympathy) for it.

At the beginning of the class, I had re-introduced Plato's simile of the cave, and now asked them to compare Brooks' argument with Plato's image of prisoners moving out of the cave into the light. We went back over the process of this movement as one that is embedded in the activity of questioning. I asked my students what role the activity of questioning played in Brooks' article. They were silent for a moment. I re-phrased the question: is thinking (questioning) necessary to 44get out of the box"? Then they immediately caught on!

"All growth involves questioning," they replied, and Brooks leaves no room for growth. The only way to grow, according to Brooks, is to learn how to manipulate what's in the box. I agreed and said that Brooks equates "breaking out of the box" with "breaking loose from tradition." I then asked them if this was a false either/or: either you stay within the box and manipulate the system or you break out of the box and become rootless and without moral reference points? They agreed that this was a false either/or.

My next question was the following: are there different ways of breaking loose from the tradition? For example, are there constructive ways of breaking loose as opposed to destructive ways of doing so? Before they answered this question, I asked them to think of the American Revolution and whether it was an example of destructive or constructive breaking loose? They agreed it was constructive. "Why?" I asked. "Because they wanted to put something better in its place," one of my students said. (That student the gold star of the day.) "And when does it become destructive?" I asked. "When it doesn't connect back to the box," they responded. I guess you could say that we jumped out of Brooks' "meritocracy box."

What I haven't told my students (as of this writing) is that Brooks' argument is a bunch of crap. His argument takes place in a vacuum. He says that "Social contributions -giving back - flow easily and naturally from the meritocrat's life mission." Sure, meritocrats help out other striving meritocrats, but once outside the middle class meritocratic system, a whole different ethic takes hold. The meritocrat on his or her way to little league practice looks at the barbed wire of the prison - and looks away. 'Why? Because meritocrats will "freeze-frame" people who do not or have not participated in the system as pariahs. Those outside the system, whether they be criminals, bag-people, skid-row bums, mentally incompetents, or addicts are the "other," those outside the meritocratic system, the untouchables of our society.

I'll believe in our meritocratic system when the middle class decides to spend more time in soup kitchens, mental hospitals, abuse shelters, runaway homes, and prisons. I am reminded of Ursula LeGuin's "The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas." As far as I can tell, our meritocrats would take one look at the suffering child and go right back to their meritocratic activities. When meritocrats stop "freeze-framing" those "others," then I'll feel a whole lot better about what I do: teaching my students about the possibility of change.

Frank Edler, Ph. D.

This letter is dedicated to my students: Zachery Bulinsky, Michael Clark, Robert Ironbear, Josh Jones, Shawn Lebrato, Tylan Lucas, Luis Marmolejo, Josh Medley, Jesse Moody, Aaron Necas, Josh Pearson, Jeremy Riser, Josh Rosenberg, Brent Sanders, Robert Trosper, and Michael Tyree.