The Tyranny of Merit: What’s Become of the Common Good? - Political Philosophy Book for Social Justice Discussions & Book Club Readings

I strongly recommend "The Tyranny of Merit" to everyone. Most critiques of our meritocratic ideals focus on whether or not our society is, in fact, a meritocracy. What I enjoy about Professor Sandel's book is that he takes the bold step of asking whether we should pursue a meritocracy at all. I come away from this book with the impression that the pursuit of a meritocracy, while noble on its surface, leads back to class stratification and all of the strife that goes with such stratification. Also, as the author points out, under the pursuit of meritocracy even being a child born into socioeconomic privilege comes with burdens and pressures that did not exist under previous systems of class stratification since the wealthy were not previously expected to "earn" their wealth.On a more personal note, there was a section of the book that really "hit home" for me. Namely, the "Wounded Winners" section under Chapter 6. I teach computer science courses at a high school in a relatively affluent district in which many students come from households with high-achieving parents (doctors, engineers, military officers, etc.), many of whom went to Ivy League schools themselves. When I observe my students, I can definitely see the negative psychological consequences of the types of academic pressure and helicopter parenting that Professor Sandel describes in this chapter. It is probably more pronounced to me than to my coworkers because I recently transitioned into this profession after an engineering career while my fellow teachers started teaching after college. When I was in high school, we (and our parents) found out about our grades every few months when report cards came out. Now, students and parents can check grades several times a day, and the stress that this causes the students is very obvious to me - I will often get comments about a grade I entered sometimes minutes after I enter it into the electronic grade book. Also, I was taken aback when I learned the statistics on depression and suicidal ideation within my district when I started teaching, but now that I see the pressure these students are under I can definitely understand. Sadly, there is little acknowledgment from the district of the relationship between academic pressure and psychological issues - instead, there is a mentality that the mental health problems can be rectified by adding more work to the students in the form of "social and emotional learning" exercises.To summarize, I think that this book contains some excellent insights, and I recommend this to anyone trying to gain a better understanding of the problems of meritocratic thinking and where we ought to go from here.