Sociology of Merit II Merit and Culture (original) (raw)
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Meritocracy in the Educational System
2021
A meritocratic education system, by nature, is one where students are enabled to accomplish achievements, and receive corresponding rewards, regardless of outside factors. The common norm in schools is that achievement based on merit explains school success, and that merit is the only means of the upward mobility of all students in regards to societal status, regardless of age, gender, ethnicity, current social status, etc. The primary motive of this study was to determine whether education reflected this meritocratic nature and if education is merely a scale of academic achievement by examining trends within students. The materials we used to justify our results were demographic trends, school performance (self-assessment scale), and family background. Data was collected through surveys distributed to students (n = 351) with a mean age of 16.2. Our study was run within three main regions: United States, Canada, and Nigeria, and the results indicated that even though there is eviden...
School education should provide an environment for inclusiveness. Understanding the backwardness of certain communities is as important as appreciating and nurturing intelligence and excellence. This is the surest route to render social justice and to establish an egalitarian society. When education is conceived as a form of human capital, then distribution of this human capital should be equal across society. Rather distribution of human capital should help to overcome the other social and economic backwardness of children in the depressed communities. When society is stratified by communities, so are the schools to cater to different needs of the each stratum of the society. Hence, community, type of schools, location, gender, choice of subjects are inter-related and together determine the creation of human capital as measured by marks. Hence, we attempt at analysing the determinants of marks using data of nearly 3.9 lakh students who successfully completed 10th standard in 2008 and proceeded to complete 12th standard in 2010. With this large data set, we could find a clear trend of students from relatively forward communities, study in self-financing schools and choose subjects that take them to professional courses in higher education, ultimately scoring higher grades than others. On the contrary, the students from the backward and depressed communities, study in government schools, choosing subjects that do not take them to professional education and they also score very low marks. Thus, the existing school system creates further inequality through unequal distribution of human capital.
Dimensions of Inequality and Meritocracy
isara solutions, 2021
The article deals with the dimensions of inequalities operating through caste, class, gender, rural-urban difference, and, family which influences the achievements of education and its relationship with meritocracy as a defining feature and means of mobility in formal education enjoyed by upper social strata particularly of urban background in modern times because of the role played by cultural and economic factors in perpetuating educational inequality. The article argues that the justification of the existence and perpetuation of a meritocratic system seems to be a clever strategy for social closure and elite perpetuation and legitimizes inequality and makes its acceptable as a kind of safety value. The meritocratic principle masks the mechanism of social reproduction.
The Social Construction of Academic Ability: A Review of Literature
Gyanodaya: The Journal of Progressive Education, 2016
In this paper, various approaches to studying academic ability as a socially constructed category are presented. In particular, four types of studies are examined. Firstly select studies which have approached the concept of ability as a theoretical and academic construct are presented. These examine the forms taken by theories of ability including assumptions about its origins, sources and dispersion among social groups. Secondly, studies which explore our ideas of academic ability as culturally embedded in the Indian context are reviewed. Indigenous concepts such as buddhi, pratibha, etc influenced the changing notions of academic ability in the colonial period and they continue to do so after independence. Thirdly a number of studies have explored how the modern discourses of nation and national ability have influenced the construction of academic ability including intelligence, talent and merit. Fourthly, the paper considers how academic ability and in particular, talent have been studied in policy contexts and have been shaped by programmatic imperatives.
The Transition from Primary to Secondary Education: Meritocracy and Ethnicity
The aim of this study was to better understand the influence of pupil background characteristics (e.g. gender, SES, ethnicity), various cognitive, and non-cognitive competencies (e.g. school performance, study attitude) and a number of class and school characteristics (e.g. socio-ethnic class composition, degree of urbanization) on the transition of children from primary to secondary education in the Netherlands. In the final grade of Dutch primary school, pupils are advised with regard to the type of secondary education considered most appropriate for them. Recent data from the national large-scale PRIMA cohort study, which includes more than 8,000 pupils and 500 classes, were used to examine differences in the levels of recommendation provided. The results showed the phenomenon of over-recommending or, in other words, groups of pupils receiving an educational recommendation, which is higher than justified by their school performance, to no longer exist. Pupil achievement appeared to be the most important factor for the explanation of the level of recommendation, which clearly provides support for the meritocratic principle.
The governmental ranking of class and the academic performance of Indian adolescents
PLOS ONE, 2020
Social and economic factors are commonly examined as contextual variables that predict academic achievement, apart from the educational environment. In India, a major segment of the socioeconomic status of students comprises the governmental stratification of population into three broad classes, viz., scheduled castes/tribes (SC-ST), other backward classes (OBC) and general class (GC). In this study, we examined the association of these governmental classes with the academic performance of Indian adolescents who enjoy the same school environment. Psychological measures of self-esteem and life satisfaction as well as demographic variables such as gender, age and family income were also examined as covariates. The study was conducted on a convenient sample of 858 students of X and XI grades. Based on multilevel regression models, the relationship between governmental classes and academic performance was significantly positive, wherein higher level of class predicted better academic performance. The study highlighted that students from the same school environment performed differently based on their social status and that this difference was not a function of their family income, thus pointing to potential role of non-economic aspects of the governmental stratification including caste affiliation. The findings indicate the need for further examining as well as planning to improve the aspects of students' social status that impact academic performance.
Caste and Higher Education in India
Journal of Interdisciplinary History, 2020
Subramanian’s The Caste of Merit addresses the issue of educational inequality in colonial and independent India, focusing on the Indian Institutes of Technology (iits) that have trained the engineering elites since the 1950s. The members of the high caste who initially comprised this group ascribed their personal success to merit, not to background. India’s policy of allowing disadvantaged caste groups to enter the (iits), however, challenged the high castes’ representation of their educational privilege as simply a matter of talent. Subramanian’s view of the upper-caste position as an attempt to forestall progress toward a more egalitarian Indian society opens a methodological debate about the fundamental epistemic demands that scholars must satisfy before they adopt social causes above and beyond the conveying of objective information.