Last week I was privileged to be invited to give a talk to the Foundation Year students of the newly established TMC Institute in Tashkent, a higher education college in Uzbekistan. I am the non-executive Chairman of TMC Academy, Singapore and I went to Tashkent to attend the official opening ceremony - https://fb.watch/ahqm6bI8LG/- of this new offshoot of the Academy in Uzbekistan (which happened to coincide with the Republic's presidential election)
Despite the problems of the Covid pandemic, the Institute has recruited 400 students in its first year, which is remarkable and evidence of the hunger for higher education in a country of around 33 million where 34.1% of its people are younger than 14.
I entitled my talk to the students, The Potential of Higher Education, stressing the importance of higher education as countries face up to the challenge of the 'knowledge economy' and the traditional elements of wealth creation, capital and energy, are being replaced by information and knowledge. I argued that higher education was the key to creating not only a fairer society but also wealth through innovation and knowledge transfer, as well as enabling services to the community to be more effective through developing skills and enterprise. I strongly insisted that in our competitive global economy higher education empowers citizens by helping them understand and engage with an increasingly complex world.
It is crucial that talented students be given the opportunity to enter higher education where they can demonstrate their ability and reach their potential on the basis of merit - the quality of being particularly good or worthy. I believe that at the heart of any fair and successful society is the concept of merit. It was Plato, the Ancient Greek philosopher, who first in Western Society promulgated the idea of merit as the fundamental basis of an enlightened state. He argued there were three classes of men: gold, silver and bronze. Gold men (and gold women - in the patriarchial culture of Ancient Greece it was most unusual to identify the same qualities in women as in men) were those with 'natural' ability and good character, as opposed to those who had power and status through birth, connection and sale. In Plato's thinking, there were 'people of power' and there were 'people who ought to have power'. In his ideal world, social mobility should ensure that people of merit would have power and determine the governance of the state. These talented people would be identified through education - where ability should be matched by opportunity.
At one level you might think that structuring society and political systems on merit is as obvious as the delicious qualities of apple pie or the obvious value of motherhood but in 1958 the British sociologist Michael Young, who invented the term 'meritocracy', published a harsh criticism of the concept in his book The Rise of the Meritocracy. He described a society where a previous division based on social class was replaced by a society stratified between a merited power-holding elite and a disenfranchised underclass of the less merited. His premise was that a meritocracy is anti-equality and therefore undemocratic which ends up with a new hierarchy, fracturing society between 'the haves and the have nots'. This view can be perceived as extending to both the political left and the right where any selection based on a competition of merit that, on the one hand. undermines equality ('all should be equal regardless of merit') and. on the other. is also at odds with a populist view: as Trump would put it, you have a cognitive but incompetent governing elite that looks down on the proletariat with arrogance and disdain - the 'swamp', which he vowed to clean up!
I accept that there is always the danger that meritocracy can turn into plutocracy (the rule of the rich) when the talented and financially successful dominate the power structures and there is a failure to re-distribute their wealth. However, I would still argue that society needs the most talented people in the right places regardless of gender, class and race. My message to students, not just to those at TMC Institute in Tashkent but everywhere, is that the opportunity of higher education can help achieve an individual's potential on the basis of their merit. Meritocracy, I believe, is a progressive principle that provides justice in life and offers success in every sphere but the successful should always remember to give back to society.
Just a couple of days after I posted my blog I read the below. I have not watched Squid Game but I would comment that competition is an evolutionary trait that exists in most species and competitive behaviour cannot simply be eliminated by social engineering. I would also argue that advancement through merit is preferable to preferment based upon birth, identity, who you know, or what you can buy - selection on this basis results in incompetence and tokenism. Meritocracy, to paraphrase a famous quote, is imperfect but it is the best system of selection available.
"Why Squid Game is actually a critique of meritocracy"
— https://theconversation.com/why-squid-game-is-actually-a-critique-of-meritocracy-170311
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