Schoeck_2010_EnvyATheoryOfSocialBehaviour.pdf

290 THE SENSE OF JUSTICE AND THE IDEA OF EQUALITY
The Labour Government has now declared itself opposed to this
system, which already has been either partially abolished or watered
down, and this, among other things, because it has become apparent that
the utopian ideas of 1944 are not the way to the egalitarian heaven.
Inequality of opportunity as an alibi
In 1954 a study was published in Britain (based, among other things, on
a questionnaire sent to ten thousand adults) on the subject of social
mobility, edited by D. V. Glass. In this book developments were already
apparent which were to be carried through to their conclusion a few years
later by a young sociologist, Michael Young, in his penetrating book The
Rise of the Meritocracy. 17 The reactions it aroused can be seen from a
review of Glass's work in the leftist weekly, the then New Statesman and
Nation. The reviewer asked: '. . . within a couple of generations there
may be "perfect mobility," except for the few attending fee-paying
schools-if there are any left. But what will happen then? What will
equal opportunity really mean?'18 For, as D. V. Glass pointed out, the
threefold system of grammar, technical and modern secondary schools
did little to equalize and share out opportunities of mobility:
On the contrary, the more efficient the selection procedure, the more
evident those disadvantages are likely to become. Outside of the public
schools, it will be the grammar schools which will furnish the new elite, an
elite apparently much less assailable because it is selected for 'measured
intelligence.' The selection process will tend to reinforce the prestige of
occupations already high in social status and to divide the population into
streams which many may come to regard-indeed, already regard-as
distinct as sheep and goats.
What comes next is Glass's key sentence:
Not to have been to a grammar school will be a more serious disqualification
than in the past, when social inequality in the educational
17 D. V. Glass (ed.), Social Mobility in Britain, London, 1954. M. Young, The Rise of
the Meritocracy. An Essay on Education and Equality, London, 1958.
18 A. Curle, writing in The New Statesman and Nation, August 14, 1954.