THE ATLANTIC OCTOBER 2019 59PLACES AT THE
PRESCHOOL WERE
AWARDED ON A
FIRST-COME, FIRST-
SERVED BASIS.
AT THE FRONT OF
THE LINE, PARENTS
WERE LYING IN
SLEEPING BAGS.
THEY HAD SPENT THE
NIGHT OUTSIDE.just 17 months old, for nursery school. I arrived to fi nd
myself, at best, the 30th person in a line that led from
the locked front door of the school up the sidewalk.
Registration was still two hours off , and places would
be awarded on a fi rst-come, fi rst-served basis. At the
front of the line, parents were lying in sleeping bags.
They had spent the night outside.
I stood waiting in the cold with a strange mix of
feelings. I hated the hypercompetitive parents who
made everyone’s life more tense. I feared that I’d
cheated our son of a slot by not rising until the selfi sh
hour of 5:30. And I worried that we were all bound
together in a mad, heroic project that we could nei-
ther escape nor understand, driven by supreme devo-
tion to our own child’s future. All for a nursery school
called Huggs.
New York’s distortions let you see the workings of
meritocracy in vivid extremes. But the system itself—
structured on the belief that, unlike in a collectivized
society, individual achievement should be the basis
for rewards, and that, unlike in an inherited aristoc-
racy, those rewards must be earned again by each
new generation—is all-American. True meritocracy
came closest to realization with the rise of standard-
ized tests in the 1950s, the civil-rights movement,
and the opening of Ivy League universities to the
best and brightest, including women and minorities.
A great broadening of opportunity followed. But in
recent decades, the system has hardened into a new
class structure in which professionals pass on their
money, connections, ambitions, and work ethic to
their children, while less educated families fall fur-
ther behind, with little chance of seeing their chil-
dren move up.
When parents on the fortunate ledge of this
chasm gaze down, vertigo stuns them. Far below they
see a dim world of processed food,
obesity, divorce, addiction, online-
education scams, stagnant wages,
outsourcing, rising morbidity rates—
and they pledge to do whatever
they can to keep their children from
falling. They’ll stay married, cook
organ ic family meals, read aloud
at bedtime every night, take out a
crushing mortgage on a house in a
highly rated school district, pay for
music teachers and test-prep tutors,
and donate repeatedly to over-
endowed alumni funds. The battle
to get their children a place near
the front of the line begins before
conception and continues well into
their kids’ adult lives. At the root of
all this is inequality— and inequality
produces a host of morbid symp-
toms, including a frantic scramble
for status among members of a professional class
whose most prized acquisition is not a Mercedes
plug-in hybrid SUV or a family safari to Maasai Mara
but an accep tance letter from a university with a
top-10 U.S. News & World Report ranking.
In his new book, The Meritocracy Trap, the Yale Law professor Daniel
Markovits argues that this system turns elite families into business enter-
prises, and children into overworked, inauthentic success machines, while
producing an economy that favors the super-educated and blights the pros-
pects of the middle class, which sinks toward the languishing poor. Markovits
describes the immense investments in money and time that well-off couples
make in their children. By kindergarten, the children of elite professionals
are already a full two years ahead of middle-class children, and the achieve-
ment gap is almost unbridgeable.
On that freezing sidewalk, I felt a shudder of revulsion at the perversions
of meritocracy. And yet there I was, cursing myself for being 30th in line.NOT LONG AFTER he drew the picture of the moon, our son was
interviewed at another private school, one of the most highly coveted in New
York. It was the end of 2009, early in President Barack Obama’s fi rst term,
and the teachers were wearing brightly colored HOPE pendants that they had
crafted with their preschoolers. I suppressed dis approval of the partisan dis-
play (what if the face hanging from the teachers’ necks were Sarah Palin’s?)
and reassured myself that the school had artistic and progressive values. It
recruited the children of writers and other “creatives.” And our son’s moni-
tored group play was successful. He was accepted.
The school had delicious attributes. Two teachers in each class of 15 chil-
dren; parents who were concert pianists or playwrights, not just investment
bankers; the prospect later on of classes in Latin, poetry writing, puppetry,
math theory, taught by passionate scholars. Once in, unless a kid seriously
messed up, he faced little chance of ever having to leave, until, 15 years on,
the school matched its graduates with top universities where it had close
relations with admissions offi ces. Students wouldn’t have to endure the
repeated trauma of applying to middle and high schools that New York forces
on public-school children. Our son had a place near the very front of the line,
shielded from the meritocracy at its
most ruthless. There was only one
competition, and he had already
prevailed, in monitored group play.
Two years later we transferred
him to a public kindergarten.
We had just had our second child,
a girl. The private school was about
to start raising its fee steeply every
year into the indefinite future. As
tuition passed $50,000, the cre-
atives would dwindle and give way
to the financials. I calculated that
the precollege educations of our
two children would cost more than
$1.5 million after taxes. This was the
practical reason to leave.
But there was something else—
another claim on us. The current
phrase for it is social justice. I’d rather
use the word democracy, because it
conveys the idea of equality and the need for a common life among citizens.
No institution has more power to form human beings according to this idea
than the public school. That was the original purpose of the “common schools”
established by Horace Mann in the mid-19th century: to instill in children the
knowledge and morality necessary for the success of republican government,