The Myth of Meritocracy in Education: A Philosophical Inquiry into Desert, Success, and Moral Legitimation

This article examines the myth of meritocracy in education by focusing on three closely connected concepts: desert, success, and moral legitimation. Its main aim is to analyze how meritocratic discourse transforms educational achievement and failure into moralized categories of deservingness, and how this transformation contributes to the legitimation of educational and social inequalities. The article challenges the modern school’s self-description as a neutral and fair selector by showing that meritocratic language often operates not merely as a technical principle of selection and placement, but as a moral narrative. Within this narrative, educational success is commonly interpreted as the natural and deserved result of individual talent and effort, while failure is framed as evidence of personal deficiency. The study argues that this framing is not politically innocent, since it tends to obscure the structural conditions that shape educational trajectories, including class-based inequalities, unequal starting points, differential access to cultural and social capital, and the hidden curriculum. Drawing on desert theories and contemporary debates in political philosophy, the article emphasizes that deservingness is a normative claim with moral weight rather than a simple description of outcomes. When combined with exam-based sorting and performance regimes, desert discourse can turn grades, test scores, and credentials into markers of moral worth. This moralization has tangible consequences for students’ self-understanding, intensifying experiences of shame, guilt, and diminished self-esteem, especially where error is treated as a failure of character rather than as part of learning. At the institutional level, belief in school meritocracy can also legitimize wider social hierarchies by making unequal outcomes appear fair and inevitable. The study concludes that a post-meritocratic ethics of education should expand justice beyond formal equal opportunity toward a more inclusive horizon that combines distributive and relational justice with recognition and care ethics. Such a horizon reframes assessment around dignity, participation, and growth, and repositions teachers as ethical carers who support students’ flourishing rather than merely as sorting agents. Methodologically, the study is designed as a theoretical and philosophical inquiry in the field of philosophy of education, supported by document-based analysis of selected theoretical and philosophical texts on meritocracy, justice, and education.