| Titre | Harvard et le critère du mérite. | |
|---|---|---|
| Auteur | Jérôme Karabel | |
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Revue | Actes de la recherche en sciences sociales |
| Numéro | no 135, décembre 2000 Inconscients d'école | |
| Rubrique / Thématique | Inconscients d'école |
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| Résumé anglais | Harvard and the ideology meritocracy The new president of Harvard, James Bryant Conant, wasted no time in calling for (at the time) bold changes in the university admission policy : he believed that access to higher education should be based on ability rather than inherited privilege. His program of National Scholarships was therefore designed to enable brilliant, however poor, students to obtain their education in the best institutions. Yet, his vision of both the educational system and the larger society was deeply hierarchical. While promoting the ideal of equality of opportunity, he thus claimed that less young people should attend college. At the same time, he was careful to assure Harvard's various constituencies that the vast majority of students would still be selected through traditional processes. In a 1938 Harper's Magazine article, he identified himself with the Jeffersonian tradition of universal schooling and its emphasis on the importance of the equality of opportunity, which would entail a large-scale redistribution of privilege to the advantage of a "natural aristocracy of talent and virtue" but opposed the "Jacksonian Democracy" which he deemed much too egalitarian. Again, his position prevented him from going too far and he was careful to explain why Harvard and like institutions had to admit the sons of the privileged. He believed that the emergence of a hereditary aristocracy of wealth and the hardening of class-lines would soon produce class consciousness, a danger to America which only a "more equitable distribution of opportunity" (generating increased social mobility) could turn back. In a highly contro- versial 1943 Atlantic article, which displeased Harvard's most loyal supporters, Conant advocated the confiscation of all property once a generation : the third choice, which was embodied by the indigenous American radical and his concern with social fluidity, was the antidote to the European "industrial feudalism" and would preserve the existing capitalist order and free enterprise. | |
| Article en ligne | http://www.persee.fr/web/revues/home/prescript/article/arss_0335-5322_2000_num_135_1_2702 |
