Aptocracy
It’s true that much that we recognize as merit is not tested. (See the article by Walter Kirn in today’s NYTimes.) Schooling and testing right up to and on through the SATS is most of all a measure of one’s aptitude, one’s mental quickness, one’s readiness with and understanding of words and numbers, and in particular of word and number relationships.
But we know that merit is much more than aptitude. We know young people, perhaps our own children, perhaps our students if we’ve ever taught, who test poorly but who don’t run from challenges, who work hard, display real courage, and are humble enough to be corrected and thereby improve.
Yet none of these and other such qualities, that we admire so much when we encounter them, are tested in school, and never become, unlike superior aptitude (a.k.a merit), tickets to favored positions, first in college classes and then in job placements, although in the long run, of course, they will win out, as did the concentration and persistence of the tortoise over the hare.
Walter Kirn’s concludes his observations about aptocracy by stating that, “all systems that seek to rank human beings according to ‘merit’ … will inevitably fall short of fully accounting for what merit consists of in the real world.” For the time being, however, aptitude (not too different from the now out of favor IQ) seems to be the best we can do.
