Many well-meaning people in modern societies see education as the rightful engine for social progress.
Underlying this belief is the modern conviction that merit, rather than birth, tradition, race, gender, class, or age, should determine advancement up the social ladder or hierarchy.
The answer to inequality that many schools offer or aspire to is need-blind admissions. If you are academically good enough, you will get in regardless of your financial status. Such meritocracy is a nice idea, but there are problems in its implantation.
Those who apply to good schools come disproportionately from privileged families, which tend to have more time, taste, and money for education. No matter how merit-based the school, most of its student and faculty applicants hail from middle and upper class families.
Current meritocracy rarely questions the social ladder's height, let alone its existence. Meritocracy only seeks to ensure free movement up and down the ladder. What it misses are the fundamental ways schools deepen social inequalities and undermine democracy.
Professional administrators, faculty, and members of state, national or global economic, political and cultural elites - not the whole school and surrounding community - make the vast majority of the school's decisions. Routinely putting decisions in the hands of a few consolidates takes power away from most. The fewer people directly involved in the decisions, the less interested they are in such decisions, but also the fewer their resources.
Prestige-hungry schools seek to distinguish their faculty and students by professionalizing knowledge, strengthening alumni connections, and plucking the most promising youth from across the world, including its most troubled communities.
Strengthening alumni connections turns putatively meritorious students into social climbing graduates who may climb because of their connections and not merit.
Plucking promising youth from troubled towns may advance a school's prestige and self-righteousness, but this individualistic approach does little to solve community problems. It propels youth up the social ladder, but they rarely to return to their troubled communities.
The solution to these problems is to foster participatory democracy in schools.
Schools that practice rather than simply espouse democracy do not assume the mindset that few should make decisions while the rest study physics, teach classes, clean floors, or serve meals. Democracy entails some substantial measure of routine sharing in decision-making not only when an election rolls around. Schools need to be democratized so that all a school's participants, including students, faculty, and administrators, participate together, routinely in school decision-making large and small.
Routine and shared decision-making helps bridge the silent social divides between teachers, students, and workers as it instills education about community, decision-making, and power as a lifelong practice for all rather than the professional province of a credentialed few.
Second, rather than pluck promising students from troubled communities, democratic schools build long-term partnerships with communities to address their respective needs. Such an approach engages schools in directly tackling community problems - from poverty and crime to pollution and war - rather than extricating a few from social problems, leaving the problem in place for those remaining to endure. In return, the school community gains ongoing, invaluable, hands-on education in addressing public problems.
Third, schools more committed to democracy than prestige can devote the alumni network to sustaining students' nurturing relationships with communities as much if not more than fundraising and social climbing.
Schools need to achieve the democratization of knowledge. They can reform education, tenure, and promotion so that students and faculty are rewarded as much for communicating with ordinary citizens as academics. They can also move knowledge beyond journals and books and even the printed word to other media that more people consume, from film, television, radio and the internet to posters, cartoons, and popular art of all kinds.
These are by no means the only possible paths to a more democratic education. But if we as members of educational institutions support genuinely participatory democracy, we have every reason to question and start changing some of our schools' most taken-for-granted goals and practices. Democracy begins at home.
