i am glad that my posts are having the desired effect, of stirring people to sit up and think about these issues, or at least provoke some kind of response. but of the discussions that i have stumbled upon (through referral data, icq comments, and email) i have noticed a discrepancy between my concept of meritocracy and the concept that other people seem to be using, which probably accounts for large gobs of misunderstanding.

to quote darius from the spug discussion:

I may be missing something here, but I feel the ranter is talking more about the education system and the examination culture rather than meritocracy.

The author seems to think that rising in the ranks in private and public sector jobs seems solely reliant on what grades they got in school. Good academic grades may get you into middle management in private sectors, or a higher scale in the civil service, but promotion after that is no longer looking at your exam results.

The only sacred cow which has yet to be slaughtered is the ceiling of promotion for none grads in the civil service. If you are a dip holder or lower, you need to work twice as hard and long to keep up with a grad.

in retrospect, i should have discussed this right at the beginning. oh well. let’s see if i can redress this here.

so when in doubt, let’s look up an encyclopedia. Wikipedia states: “Meritocracy is a system of government based on rule by ability rather than by wealth or social position.” a trite definition accepted by most people as the ‘correct’ definition. however i believe this statement is so vague as to be useless. here’s my logic: meritocracy says that the able should rule. that’s all well and good, and painfully tautological, really.

so let’s go implement this. immediately we run into a snafu: how does one measure ability? therein lies the rub. all forms of government face the same challenge: who would make the most able ruler? if one takes the broadest possible definition of meritocracy, as rule of the best, then all forms of government (excepting anarchy, possibly) practice meritocracy. the only differences are then in their operational definitions of what constitutes merit: noble birth, in an aristocracy; representativeness, in a democracy; royal birthright, in a monarchy; force of personality, in a dictatorship; or even some ‘mandate of heaven’, in a theocracy. ludicrous as it may seem at first blush, it’s not too difficult to convince yourself that all these, in their respective contexts, do indeed form some measure of ‘merit’. whether these are the ‘correct’ ones then boils down to a matter of taste, and more specifically the tastes of those in power.

therefore, we should discard this definition as being too broad and return to the original youngian definition of meritocracy, with ability defined by some academic metric. oh and before i get dragged into the same quagmire with metric, i shall state my operational definition here: a metric is a quantity measured with the intent of predicting ability. ability here is a generic filler to be specialized later: e.g. academic metrics predict academic ability, etc. it is critical to note that a metric is not a quantity that directly measures ability, it is a predictor of ability.

mind you! this distinction is important! ability as it stands is this vague woolly thing that we all agree is something a ‘good’ person has, in the sense of saying “this guy is really good at juggling!”, for example. well now that i’ve brought up juggling as a test case, let’s consider how one predicts ‘ability to juggle’. not knowing much about the subject, i can only hypothesize that the best ‘metric’ is to see how many objects a person can sustainably juggle simultaneously. the obvious hole in the definition of this metric is what constitutes ‘jugglable objects’, which then spews forth real, measurable metrics, such as the abilities to sustainably juggle N cue balls, N balloons, N flaming batons, N satay sticks, N alligators, etc. now what? do we take
some kind of average over all such objects to arrive at a definitive metric? should we bias it more strongly toward cue balls or flaming batons? or alligators? is this metric even useful? i hope it’s obvious that it’s so impractical! (not to mention that most people won’t even get past N = 1, or even N = 0.)

the situation then gets worse if one wants to measure something more abstract like ‘musical ability’. which characteristics should go into the metric? singing ability? pitch discrimination? ability to play an instrument? ability to play many instruments? quality of? and how should these even be quantified in the first place? jack up the abstraction level even higher, and i hope this gives everyone an inkling of how incredibly difficult it is to even conceive of a metric of just plain ‘ability’. and how the rafflesian ideal of all-roundedness - an athlete, scholar and leader - is woefully inadequate and ill-defined. (’all-roundedness’ is yet another loathsome meaningless Singlish buzzword - all-roundedness should mean rotundness and corpulence!)

that has not stopped people for trying to develop metrics for ability. in fact, one of the most controversial psychometric tests ever developed was designed with intention of measuring ability, by definining it as intelligence. this test is none other than the stanford-binet iq test, and has spawned huge misgiving in the united states over its supposed utility, or even predictive ability of (correlation with) the woolly notion of ‘intelligence’. today we have competing theories, such as that of multiple intelligences by howard gardner, and that elusive psychometric g factor that no psychologist has yet to nail a good definition for.

that’s why i say, meritocracy is meaningful only when defined as rule of the most academically inclined. to generalize any further is to be too broad. look at how merit is implied to be academic merit in this sociological study, for example. that’s why it’s premise is flawed, because psychometric
studies have shown that academic metrics are useless for predicting real-world success. that’s why many commenters have missed the point entirely - those who have left comments somewhere out there agree that academic metrics such as exams and gpas are poor indicators of ‘ability’ at best, but instead of drawing the logical conclusion, they attack my premise as mixing up meritocracy and metrics, that these two issues should be discussed separately.

nay, gentle readers. while metrics can exist without meritocracy, meritocracy cannot exist without metrics. that’s where the connection between meritocracy and the education system lies, because meritocracy is defined in terms of academic metrics. the challenge to define ability is the same logical challenge that recruitment staffers face: how do you pick the most able people for the job short of trying out every single candidate in that job? (assume for the moment that they are all fresh graduates and have no work experience, i.e. track records, to go by.) since the latter is blatantly impractical at best, one therefore have to resort to metrics to predict, based on available information, who is most suited for the job. the public sector has already chosen a meritocratic definition, predicting ability based on academic achievement. that’s the entire rationale underpinning the three different tracks for civil servants: the graduates, the non-graduates, and the scholars. the civil service’s faith in meritocracy is so unshakeable that a hypothetical 4.0 scholar who screws up again and again can nonetheless be promoted on schedule because he is destined to, by design.

many times this breeds resentment because such behavior is interpreted as high-handedness and/or favoritism by those in the non-scholar tracks who get passed over for promotion time and time again. happily, those in the private sector say that grades open the door for employment, but it is current performance in the job that dictates future career prospects. it is arguable from this point of view that it is the private sector, not the public sector, that is practicing the ‘idealized’ meritocracy, of truly giving the most important posts to
the most able, who have proven their abilities by their track records. i stand corrected on that one front. but the private sector cannot avoid interaction with the monolithic government that permeates every aspect of life in singapore. therefore, it too is not immune from the ravages of meritocracy.

and check out this bbc transcript exerpt:

Andrew Marr: Moving on from the education side when people arrive in the world of business, is it again the sort of perfectly graded rat race with every kind of rat of different sizes and abilities coming in and every little rat expected to have, you know, their degree their awards etc., is that how it seems to you?

Richard Scase: Indeed, large corporations are organised very much on that basis they recruit people on the basis of their academic qualifications and, often, this leads to a disappointing performance. Recruitment selection, intelligence tests, measurements, appraisals, assessments, organisations pride themselves on being very meritocratic but of course the reality is that they’re not. And the dream of becoming the meritocratic society hasn’t been fulfilled. A recent survey just published, for example, looks at Chief Executive Officers of the fifty largest companies in the UK and more the fifty per cent come from Public Schools, private schools, which educates something like, seven per cent of all pupils and, of course, entrepreneurs demonstrate how really large organisations in trying to be meritocratic, really do miss lots and lots of talent because what happens is that people who don’t fit in, the Richard Bransons of this world, the people who don’t have the qualifications, who are not seen to be attracted by large corporations they go off and set up their own very successful businesses.

a singaporean must have contributed to that Wikipedia article, by the way. note how it goes on and on about how singapore is the world’s closest thing to a meritocracy. i completely agree with that premise, because it shows up unintentionally in many aspects of singaporean culture. a social dimension of meritocracy which i have omitted from my previous
rant entirely (due to lack of data) is the agony felt by new parents, when deciding to subject their precious children to the pressure-cooker education system. witness the dilemma of this poor soul who tried valiantly to resist the social pressure to pack in ‘enrichment’ classes and homework for her then kindergarten-attending daughter. from kelvintan73, who archived this letter to the ST Forum:

Don’t kill love for learning<.p>

I REFER to the article, ‘Through-train option may pile on the pressure’ (ST, Jan 30), concerning the growing amount of stress that children face in Singapore’s education system.

I am particularly saddened by the case of the mentally fatigued Primary 3 boy from a top school who attends nine enrichment classes.

I have a daughter in Primary 3 this year. From the outset, I was determined that she should be allowed to develop at her own pace and have fun learning through daily experiences and play. Friends were surprised that she was not even attending a single enrichment class in her preschool days.

I had a hard time explaining to them why I would not be thrilled to have her read at two and count to a thousand by three. Of what use is the mastery of these skills at such tender ages except to inflate our egos when we compare our children’s achievements, as parents are wont to do? We should examine our motives before sending our kids to yet another enrichment class. Are we doing it for their benefit or ours?

We parents are sometimes guilty of trying to live vicariously through our children, hoping to bask in the reflected glory of their achievements. I was made to feel as if I was somewhat lacking as a parent for not preparing my child for academic life. Sometimes, the pressure to conform is so great that it takes superhuman effort just to resist the plethora of enrichment classes on offer.

Not surprisingly, my daughter was woefully unprepared for Primary 1. She was put in the Learning Support Programme (LSP) for English. According to the Ministry of Education (MOE) website, this programme caters to ‘pupils who lack the necessary language and literacy skills to cope with the English curriculum’.

My husband and I are both university graduates and ours is an English-speaking home. I am sure we are a statistical anomaly in MOE’s records for having a child in the LSP

.

We had wanted to spare her the drudgery of doing endless assessment papers during her kindergarten days in preparation for Primary 1. But we finally had to face reality and bought her assessment papers to practise.

In three months, she was out of the LSP programme and has been scoring mainly Band 1s in English since.

I have a nagging suspicion that she got into the programme because she was unfamiliar with doing assessment papers, rather than a lack of grasp of the language.

Do I regret not having forced her to rote-learn the language earlier? Absolutely not. She had a relatively carefree childhood, free from any extraneous structured lessons. She is still nowhere near the top in class, but I would rather have a happy and well-adjusted kid than a miserable one who scores high marks only by dint of sheer hard work.

Friends who are overseas say that their children love school now. Schools in Belgium do not even have formal exams for the first two or three years of primary school. My friend’s son spent one term studying and researching dinosaurs and mushrooms and he enjoyed it thoroughly. How many Singapore kids can say the same?

Children are now being taught concepts that were previously introduced only in secondary school. Is it really necessary to cram them with
facts and drill them endlessly, without any regard for their natural ability and inclinations? We may be causing them irreparable harm.

We advocate a passion for lifelong learning. Our children have a whole lifetime to acquire knowledge. Please don’t kill their love for learning by subjecting them to interminable rounds of mind-numbing tuition and enrichment classes.

MARIA LOH MUN FOONG (MS)

admittedly the last paragraph is ambiguous, but it is deliciously oxymoronic to think of “mind-numbing enrichment”.

the other thing i must stress is that i’m targeting the system, not its products. felumpfus has said it all. please don’t sink to the level of ad hominem arguments. (i have already been implicated in more than one argumentatum ad hominem tu quoque.) far too many rabid scholar-bashing singaporeans are already guilty of that; must you add your name to the ledger of the illogical?

no doubt the system exerts its pressure on indoctrinates, but it is each inductee’s choice whether to yield one way or another, or resist and face the consequences. there’s a wide spread in characteristics for graduates of the singapore education system.

thankfully, not all our individualities got rubber-stamped out. for me, i guess i was far too stubborn to yield. it has cost me time and time again, but i don’t care. i like to think that i escaped without too many brainwashed influences. if anything, i have been actively unlearning all that brainwashing (think national education, haha. no of course not, i mean temptations to chow mug and all that) since jc, possibly even since secondary school.