A combination of British angst and American complacency may be the beginning of a great reversal
Paine’s argument has been a fixture of British thinking ever since. “England is the most class-ridden country under the sun,” George Orwell complained in 1941: “a land of snobbery and privilege”. In William Golding’s novel, “Rites of Passage”, published in 1980, a character laments that “Class is the British language”. And it is to America that the British habitually look for opportunity unencumbered by nonsense about parentage and the pronunciation of the letter “h”.
Social mobility stagnated in both countries as the winners from the Thatcher and Reagan revolutions consolidated their gains. But Britain is trying much harder than America to get it going once again. : Britain is becoming more meritocratic, even as America becomes less so. The two countries’ differing trajectories are perhaps most obvious in education, especially in admissions to the universities that act as gatekeepers to the elite. A comparison of Oxford and Harvard is telling. Oxford is trying hard to attract poor and working-class applicants, and several of its colleges have introduced a “foundation year” to get them up to speed before they start degree courses.
By contrast Harvard, like other elite American universities, practises plutocracy modified by affirmative action for African-American applicants and, to a lesser extent, Hispanic ones. The intention is to compensate for the terrible injustice of slavery and, more broadly, to find merit where it was once overlooked. But it is undermined by an almost wilful blindness to disadvantage that stems from class, not race.
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