Meritocracy Myth v. the Advantages of Privilege (A Tale of Hubris)
EducationApr 6, 2011In January 2010, I emailed Diane Ravitch after viewing a video of one of her talks preceding the release of her now often mentioned book, The Death and Life of the Great American School System: How Testing and Choice Are Undermining Education, that signaled some significant changes in her views on education and education reform. My email was an apology.
I confessed to Diane that I had been a Ravitch detractor for much of my career, based primarily on my view that she was an essentialist who promoted a narrow view of literacy–specifically that students must be raised on the Great Books. But the Diane Ravitch I heard in the video and eventually read in the new book (and her subsequent prolific life as a public intellectual and frequent voice on twitter) was the personification of the academic, the scholar, the expert that I admire because she was very publicly stepping back from her ideology and reforming her views based on evidence despite the need to change her mind.
As a scholar and a writer, I have always been struck by Ralph Waldo Emerson’s “Speak what you think today in hard words and tomorrow