“The myth of equal opportunities cannot hide cultural and social determinism. We want the school of equality and social diversity. To initiate a break with the tyranny of merit, that is what should drive us!” This is what Olivier Faure saw fit to say on the evening of his triumphant re-election as head of the Socialist Party. Should we immediately get on our high horse, taking up the cause of “merit”, this value that the best minds tirelessly opposed to “birth”?
Should Molière be reminded (“people of quality know everything without ever having learned anything”, in The Ridiculous Precious) or Beaumarchais (“Because you are a great lord, you think you are a great genius! Nobility, fortune, a rank, places; all this makes you so proud! What have you done for so many goods! You have given the trouble of being born, and nothing more!” The Marriage of Figaro)? Should we repeat here the efforts made by the Republic, in France, so that income is undermined by diplomas, so that knowledge prevails over titles, and merit over inheritance?
To tell the truth, others may well lead this fight against the first secretary’s position. It is something else that struck us in this remark. It is that “the tyranny of merit” is not an expression coined by Olivier Faure, or his logographer, but by the American academic Michael Sandel. His book, The Tyranny of Merit, acribiously analyzes the American situation. By analyzing social pathways, the sociological distribution of diplomas, the role of money in higher education, but also the American discourse on the hierarchy of grades and the rights granted by access to diplomas, Sandel points to the double standard American: a meritocratic discourse heavily weighed down by a social reality that remains catastrophically unequal.
Olivier Faure feeds at leisure the speech of dissolution of the Republic
When Olivier Faure uses this term, it must therefore be understood that he is applying Sandel’s reading of the American situation to the French case. From this, we can infer several things. First, that he clearly knows very little about the American situation, and even less about the French situation. Because if social inequalities persist in France and are reflected in school careers, placing the two educational systems on an equal footing is a total distortion of the truth, a crass ignorance of the differences between our educational systems, a completely erroneous desire to reduce the difficulties of education in France to the American situation, and even perhaps the deaf desire to import into France solutions that are marginally effective in the United States, but do not respond at all to the challenges of school in France.
Go further. By using this term “tyranny of merit”, Olivier Faure aims to please an ultra-minority part of public opinion (perhaps the few voters who reappointed him as head of the PS?) convinced that France is a neoliberal hell where equal opportunity is a wishful thinking, where an all-consuming classism reigns, where any attempt to get out of it is doomed to failure. In short, he feeds at leisure the discourse of the dissolution of the Republic, of renouncing what built the republican order, and abandons in advance any attempt to repair what must be repaired for the benefit of a dreamed Great Evening whose recipes would come to us from across the Atlantic.
Let’s be careful. It is with the use of words that the corruption of minds begins. The appropriation by Olivier Faure of an almost strictly American software portends the recommendation of remedies which we already know will be inadequate to our society, our culture, our history. But they will be presented in newspeak that appeals to active minorities, with a lot of concepts that will make the notions of instruction, learning, discipline completely old-fashioned, and we will make us regret the pedagogy of the leaping repository. So let’s get ready to see the Socialist Party use what remains of its brains to end up tearing down what has nevertheless built and distinguished it. But I’ll tell you the most serious suspicion I harbor about the First Secretary: I’m sure he never read a line from Michael Sandel.