Yet fairness, as England will no doubt point out following the heavy rain that denied them a chance of victory in Barbados, is not always a reliable currency in sport and form horses tend to provide just as many losers as winners. The selection of Mark Ramprakash and Angus Fraser for England's one-day squad, scheduled to play five limited-over internationals after the final Test, are two such picks. But I would point out that the alternatives have not prevented something very similar from arising - without the compensatory benefits.. FORM can sometimes be a distorting mirror, accentuating one aspect of a player's game, while hiding another. The whole philosophical drift of Blairite thinking tends in that direction. The centre-left has not yet found a way to embrace it without sounding callous; snobbish even. But it will, because the alternative does not serve average achievers in schools well, let alone below- average ones.We will then face a forgotten question, put by Michael Young in his study of meritocracies after the war: how ruthlessly can a society afford to implement such an idea? If we really assessed people by ability and rewarded them accordingly, what would we do with those who, however generous the interpretation, are left behind in the race? Young pointed out that the disadvantage of meritocracy was that it tended to produce a disillusioned, embittered under-class, isolated from and hostile to the rest of society and which took little part in civil society I don't have the answer to this.
It then becomes hard to argue against children who are very gifted at mathematics or any other academic subject being selectively educated too.We might go the whole hog and encourage every school to specialise in something, as districts in some educationally enterprising American cities (such as Seattle) have done. The most uplifting aspects of widespread specialisation is that it extends way beyond the traditionally academic definitions of meritocracy. A child of modest academic ability who is passionately fond of basketball can opt to attend a school with brilliant basketball facilities. It would certainly be an improvement on our crude league table assessment of schools, which consigns so many to the disheartening category of being deemed to be not very good at anything.Meritocracy is an idea whose time has come.
The same devotion to nominal pursuit of equality has afflicted education. Belief in this is steadily seeping away, although the official language remains unchanged. David Blunkett, who eschews selection, nevertheless believes that it is all right to allow children with certain special talents like sport or music to attend special schools. The same principle will soon be extended to schooling for promising linguists. It did not concern itself so much with disparities of wealth after that. Yet after 1945, the gap between rich and poor came to obsess the Left. Outside the wilder shores, it has accepted that equality of outcome is impracticable and that attempts to engineer it would result in a strongly centralised, heavily miserable society - what the East Germans used to call "the equality of shortages".
