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ustwo: you miss the point.
the underlying claim is that there is nothing--at all--necessary or even functional about the way the american university system operates. it could be funded in an entirely different manner and would serve all the functions it claims for itself better--for example, university education could be free of charge if some of the money the americans squander on their grotesque military expenditures were redirected toward a more rational end--there could easily be stringent requirements by ability that streamed students into this or that tier of school---and if the system is about locating the most competent or promising students and streaming them toward a given profession, that function would be far BETTER served if the class position of a student's parents were minimized as a factor. i also think that educational funding should be taken away from ties to local property tax rates and distributed on a flat basis across ALL localities--for the same reason--if you want to encourage education--and NOT the reproduction of a debilitating class structure--it makes sense to create an educational system that neutralizes the effects of the parental class position in shaping access to opportunities.
this has nothing to do with making that system internally anything--i personally think that education should be more rigorous and more open than it in the main is--what this is about is eliminating arbitrary advantages that accrue to the children of the affluent simply because the parents are affluent.
it doesn't seem to me that you would WANT a real meritocracy, even at the level of the educational system. everything you argue for works against the idea that you take the notion of meritocracy seriously--you seem to think that the economic order is a reflection of that--a position which i see as surreal, unmoored from reality.
the flip of that is the simple observation that within the current. increasingly dysfunctional educational system in the states, debt is a problem and one of the results of debt is coercion and that this coercion is a political tool--it produces consent for an order that in many ways is at cross purposes with its own political claims, with its own rationale.
unless you really believe that the affluent are and should be more politically free than everybody else. which you seem to. i suspect that were you living in a system without even the pretense of a democratic system but which enabled you to feel all woozy with nationalist sentimentality at appropriate moments, you'd be fine with that.
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a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle
spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear
it make you sick.
-kamau brathwaite
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