David Brooks writes:

In trying to construct a society that maximized talent, Conant and his peers were governed by the common assumptions of the era: Intelligence, that highest human trait, can be measured by standardized tests and the ability to do well in school from ages 15 to 18. Universities should serve as society’s primary sorting system, segregating the smart from the not smart. Intelligence is randomly distributed across the population, so sorting by intelligence will yield a broad-based leadership class. Intelligence is innate, so rich families won’t be able to buy their kids higher grades. As Conant put it, “At least half of higher education, I believe, is a matter of selecting, sorting, and classifying students.” By reimagining college-admissions criteria, Conant hoped to spark a social and cultural revolution. The age of the Well-Bred Man was vanishing. The age of the Cognitive Elite was here….

Family life changed as parents tried to produce the sort of children who could get into selective colleges. Over time, America developed two entirely different approaches to parenting. Working-class parents still practice what the sociologist Annette Lareau, in her book Unequal Childhoods, called “natural growth” parenting. They let kids be kids, allowing them to wander and explore. College-educated parents, in contrast, practice “concerted cultivation,” ferrying their kids from one supervised skill-building, résumé-enhancing activity to another. It turns out that if you put parents in a highly competitive status race, they will go completely bonkers trying to hone their kids into little avatars of success.

Elementary and high schools changed too. The time dedicated to recess, art, and shop class was reduced, in part so students could spend more of their day enduring volleys of standardized tests and Advanced Placement classes….

Would we necessarily say that government, civic life, the media, or high finance work better now than in the mid-20th century? We can scorn the smug WASP blue bloods from Groton and Choate—and certainly their era’s retrograde views of race and gender—but their leadership helped produce the Progressive movement, the New Deal, victory in World War II, the Marshall Plan, NATO, and the postwar Pax Americana. After the meritocrats took over in the 1960s, we got quagmires in Vietnam and Afghanistan, needless carnage in Iraq, the 2008 financial crisis, the toxic rise of social media, and our current age of political dysfunction….

The bottom line is that if you give somebody a standardized test when they are 13 or 18, you will learn something important about them, but not necessarily whether they will flourish in life, nor necessarily whether they will contribute usefully to society’s greater good. Intelligence is not the same as effectiveness….

Success in school is about jumping through the hoops that adults put in front of you; success in life can involve charting your own course. In school, a lot of success is individual: How do I stand out? In life, most success is team-based: How can we work together? Grades reveal who is persistent, self-disciplined, and compliant—but they don’t reveal much about emotional intelligence, relationship skills, passion, leadership ability, creativity, or courage….

The meritocracy was supposed to sort people by innate ability. But what it really does is sort people according to how rich their parents are. As the meritocracy has matured, affluent parents have invested massively in their children so they can win in the college-admissions arms race. The gap between what rich parents and even middle-class parents spend—let’s call it the wealth surplus—is huge….

In some ways, we’ve just reestablished the old hierarchy rooted in wealth and social status—only the new elites possess greater hubris, because they believe that their status has been won by hard work and talent rather than by birth. The sense that they “deserve” their success for having earned it can make them feel more entitled to the fruits of it, and less called to the spirit of noblesse oblige….

The average high-school graduate will earn about $1 million less over their lifetime than the average four-year-college graduate. The average person without a four-year college degree lives about eight years less than the average four-year-college grad. Thirty-five percent of high-school graduates are obese, compared with 27 percent of four-year-college grads. High-school grads are much less likely to get married, and women with high-school degrees are about twice as likely to divorce within 10 years of marrying as women with college degrees. Nearly 60 percent of births to women with a high-school degree or less happen out of wedlock; that’s roughly five times higher than the rate for women with at least a bachelor’s degree. The opioid death rate for those with a high-school degree is about 10 times higher than for those with at least a bachelor’s degree.

The most significant gap may be social. According to an American Enterprise Institute study, nearly a quarter of people with a high-school degree or less say they have no close friends, whereas only 10 percent of those with college degrees or more say that. Those whose education doesn’t extend past high school spend less time in public spaces, less time in hobby groups and sports leagues. They’re less likely to host friends and family in their home.

The advantages of elite higher education compound over the generations. Affluent, well-educated parents marry each other and confer their advantages on their kids, who then go to fancy colleges and marry people like themselves. As in all caste societies, the segregation benefits the segregators. And as in all caste societies, the inequalities involve inequalities not just of wealth but of status and respect….

At the core of the game is the assumption that the essence of life fulfillment is career success. The system has become so instrumentalized—How can this help me succeed?—that deeper questions about meaning or purpose are off the table, questions like: How do I become a generous human being? How do I lead a life of meaning? How do I build good character?…

Many people who have lost the meritocratic race have developed contempt for the entire system, and for the people it elevates. This has reshaped national politics. Today, the most significant political divide is along educational lines: Less educated people vote Republican, and more educated people vote Democratic. In 1960, John F. Kennedy lost the white college-educated vote by two to one and rode to the White House on the backs of the working class. In 2020, Joe Biden lost the white working-class vote by two to one and rode to the White House on the backs of the college-educated….

If I were given the keys to the meritocracy, I’d redefine merit around four crucial qualities.

Curiosity. Kids are born curious. One observational study that followed four children between the ages of 14 months and 5 years found that they made an average of 107 inquiries an hour. Little kids ask tons of questions. Then they go to school, and the meritocracy does its best to stamp out their curiosity….

A sense of drive and mission. When the Austrian neurologist and psychiatrist Viktor Frankl was imprisoned in Nazi concentration camps, he noticed that the men who tended to survive the longest had usually made a commitment to something outside the camps—a spouse, a book project, a vision of a less evil society they hoped to create. Their sense that life had meaning, Frankl concluded, sustained them even in the most dehumanizing circumstances.

A sense of meaning and commitment has value even in far less harrowing conditions. People with these qualities go to where the problems are. They’re willing to run through walls.

Some such people are driven by moral emotions—indignation at injustice, compassion for the weak, admiration for an ideal. They have a strong need for a life of purpose, a sense that what they are doing really matters. As Frankl recognized, people whose lives have a transcendent meaning or a higher cause have a sense of purpose that drives them forward. You can recognize such people because they have an internal unity—the way, say, the social-justice crusader Bryan Stevenson’s whole life has a moral coherence to it….

In an effective meritocracy, we’d want to find people who are fantastic team builders, who have excellent communication and bonding skills. Coaches sometimes talk about certain athletes as “glue guys,” players who have that ineffable ability to make a team greater than the sum of its parts. This phenomenon has obvious analogies outside sports….

Agility. In chaotic situations, raw brainpower can be less important than sensitivity of perception. The ancient Greeks had a word, metis, that means having a practiced eye, the ability to synthesize all the different aspects of a situation and discern the flow of events—a kind of agility that enables people to anticipate what will come next. Academic knowledge of the sort measured by the SATs doesn’t confer this ability; inert book learning doesn’t necessarily translate into forecasting how complex situations will play out….

When the education scholars Jal Mehta and Sarah Fine toured America’s best high schools for their book, In Search of Deeper Learning, they found that even at many of these top schools, most students spent the bulk of their day bored, disengaged, not learning; Mehta and Fine didn’t find much passionate engagement in classrooms. They did, however, find some in noncore electives and at the periphery of the schools—the debate team, the drama club, the a cappella groups, and other extracurriculars. During these activities, students were directing their own learning, teachers served as coaches, and progress was made in groups. The students had more agency, and felt a sense of purpose and community….

The whole system says to young people: You should be the same as everyone else, only better. The reality is that there is no single scale we can use to measure human potential, or the capacity for effective leadership. We need an assessment system that prizes the individual over the system, which is what a personal biography and portfolio would give us—at least in a fuller way than a transcript does….

If the meritocracy had more channels, society would no longer look like a pyramid, with a tiny, exclusive peak at the top; it would look like a mountain range, with many peaks. Status and recognition in such a society would be more broadly distributed, diminishing populist resentment and making cultural cohesion more likely….

We want a society run by people who are smart, yes, but who are also wise, perceptive, curious, caring, resilient, and committed to the common good. If we can figure out how to select for people’s motivation to grow and learn across their whole lifespan, then we are sorting people by a quality that is more democratically distributed, a quality that people can control and develop, and we will end up with a fairer and more mobile society.