Schoeck_2010_EnvyATheoryOfSocialBehaviour.pdf

EQUALITY OF OPPORTUNITY 289
intelligence, but on pure chance alone. The unforeseen but inevitable
result of this system is merely the postponement of the struggle for
status, for since all cats look the same in the dark, the individual's
education up to the age of eighteen signifies little. But after he has left
high school his parents begin the desperate struggle to get him at all costs
into a college having the maximum prestige. Since, however, 50 per cent
of all Americans are sent to some sort of college, thanks to the downgrading
of high schools in the name of equality, the deterioration of the
already low standards of these educational establishments is accelerated,
so that today 75 per cent of all those graduating, at about the age of
twenty-two, from such colleges feel as unqualified professionally as did,
thirty years ago, the graduates from high school. This has recently given
rise in America to yet another surge toward the so-called 'graduate
schools'-those establishments, that is, at real university or technical
college level, for which virtually all students are given scholarships,
regardless of their parents' means; yet there are more free places in
graduate schools today than there are applicants who meet the conditions
of entry. Hence the universities send out talent scouts to find recruits.
Finally, after enormous public and private expenditure, a population has
been produced in which those who have been at school up to their
twenty-eighth year look down on those who had to leave school at
eighteen. Both groups, however, having had far too much purely vocational
instruction, suffer equally from classroom tedium, from staleness,
and thus are often spoiled, at different levels, for the very careers which
would have suited them. The boy kept in school by every possible means
until he is seventeen or eighteen years old cannot face the prospect of
technical training because he feels he has already had enough of teachers;
the young man who has hung around graduate school until he is
twenty-six or twenty-eight to acquire his doctorate or M.A. in the
(correct) belief that his college diploma was no longer of much significance
is not really content to be a trainee in a bank or a business firm.
2. Again in the name of equality, over the past twenty years Britain has
evolved a system that seeks to afford equality of opportunity, independent
of family and income, but it differs from the American system in
that, at the age of eleven, children may be divided between three types of
school whose requirements vary, as consequently, does their quality.
This process depends upon a stiff, general examination.