This is my paper, published and freely downloadable from the Korean Society of Education Ideas Journal.

Contradictions And Curiosities in The Conception of “Equality” in Education

교육 평등주의 개념의 모순 탐색

Garrido, Benjamin Ross

(Shimonoseki City College)

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Equality is one of the most widely discussed ideals in modern education discourse. For all this prominence, however, the concept in practice suffers from several logical and practical problems. In particular, this paper examines the incompatibility of equal opportunity and meritocracy concepts with equal outcome concepts, why “equity” does not solve the issue, and how equality is often treated, dangerously, as a synonym of “ambition.” These problems, it is found, can trap both students and educators in situations with impossible expectations and severe mental stress. Historical theories of equality, including those of B.R. Ambedkar, Adolf Hitler, bell hooks, Hannah Arendt, Jacque Ranciere, and Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn will be examined, used for context, and consulted in creating more rational alternatives to current equality discourses. The paper concludes that educators ought to minimize ambitious equality, which is harmful and irrational. Instead, educators ought to emphasize either equality of outcome or meritocracy, but not both.

Key Words: equality, meritocracy, education opportunity, equality hypocrisy, ambition

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Ⅰ. Introduction

This paper shows that confused and contradictory ideas of equality cause major psychological and social stress for Koreans, particularly students. A rationalization and analysis of the concept of equality is therefore needed to clarify when and how educators ought to employ equality in their lessons, their class structures, and their dealings with parents. As such, this paper proposes dividing equality into three – equality as ambition, equality as equality of condition, equality as meritocracy. It further encourages educators to focus on the one type of equality best suited to their students’ needs while rejecting the other two. This is because all three are found to be, in most cases, mutually incompatible.

Equality is one of the hottest issues in not just education, but society generally, and has been since at least the beginning of the European Renaissance. The struggle of lords to gain “equality“ with kings, white bourgeoisie men to gain ”equality“ with lords, white working class men to gain “equality” with bourgeoisie men, non-white men to gain “equality” with working class white men, women to gain “equality” with non-white men, and people with exotic sexualities/genders to gain “equality” with women, in this order, would be a fair if basic description of ideological evolution stretching from Thomas Cromwell to Hong Seok-cheon. However, for all this importance, the equalities mentioned above are poorly defined and, often, contradictory.

Because they are contradictory and poorly defined, these equalities are associated with serious problems. Education equality problems led to class stratification in schools and a great deal of psychological stress. Gender equality has been not only a sensitive and divisive issue for young Koreans, it has profoundly affected the last three presidential elections. Those who see women as oppressed were important in electing both Park Geun-hye and Moon Jae-in, while the backlash against these egalitarians turned the race between Yoon Seok-yeol and Lee Jae-myeong into, at least partially, a contest of who could oppose feminism the most (Rich et al, 2022). More equalities, such as “fair” regional development, the threat of international marriage, and the “equal” treatment of illegal workers, also disturb Korea. It thus seems that the desire for equality, whichever of the three mutually incompatible varieties mentioned above is meant by “equality,” can cause important problems in a variety of contexts. If so, it is vital that egalitarian educators understand the nature of the powerful and often dangerous concept they wield.

II. Curiosities and Contradictions

While examples of ambiguous, curious or contradictory equalities can be found in many fields, we will primarily use examples from education access discourses for this section. The topic of education access will furnish examples that explain, at least in part, some common problems in the conception of “equality.” This paper is not intended to “solve” educational access problems, simply to illustrate the contradictory equality concepts in action.

While it would be possible to constrain this research to cases of direct contradiction, to do so unnecessarily excludes a class of phenomenon I call “curiosities.” By curiosity, I mean something that is not necessarily impossible or logically contradictory, but highly unusual or alarming. It is not impossible or contradictory, for example, if a consumer finds a pigeon in an unopened box of breakfast cereal, but it would be both unusual and indicative that something has gone wrong. Such curiosities, unusual and disturbing, are found quite commonly in discussions of equality.

The investigation into education access by Yoo (2022) provides an interesting case study. On one hand, Yoo finds the children of middle and upper-class families enjoy greater access to supplemental education if allowed to choose their own schools and academies. Yoo considers this undesirable, and worries that parents feel pressured to over-invest both their own money and their childrens’ time into a private education arms race. Such, he finds, is a major contributor to psychological stress, unhealthy levels of competition, and the loss of self-direciton in young Koreans. It seems logical, at this point, to conclude that reducing the amount of private education alleviates the burden on private education consumers and equalizes their levels of happiness relative to those families that shun private education.

However, Yoo also notes that private education consumers have unequal access to the best colleges. Students whose families cannot or will not invest in private or supplementary education do not get into top universities as often and consequently suffer life-long penalties to their earnings potentials. Both premises – supplemental or private education is bad for mental/physical health, supplemental or private education is good for future earnings – are almost certainly true.

Yoo concludes that we should strengthen public education and focus on happiness (his paper is not really focused on equality), and this is a valid recommendation. However, many other researchers, such as Kim (2021), do include an analysis of equality in the private education access debate. Doing so leads to the unusual conclusion that rich families are privileged because their children get preferential access to a system that makes them sick.

This is not necessarily a contradiction, but it is the same logical construction as if I were to claim people in jungle climates get privileged access to malaria. Of course, people in jungle climates, as a result of their “privileged” access to malaria, often become more resilient. Further, the positions of richer and poorer private education consumers can be readily explained by noting that people often choose to suffer to achieve higher status and that some students, those from poorer families, are not allowed to trade their suffering for this higher status.

That said, the curiosity of privileged access to suffering does illustrate the problem of calling educational access an equality problem. A policymaker wishing to equalize the happiness of rich and poor students would reduce the amount of private and supplementary education. At the same time, a policymaker wishing to equalize college admissions opportunity would increase access to private and supplementary education. That both courses of action, the first directly contradicting the second, would be considered egalitarian, points to confusion in the use of the concept.

Another difficulty with the equality curiosities is the way they tend to cause “race to the bottom” dynamics. A prolific consumer of private education, for example, might win sympathy and support if he can convince policymakers that non-consumers enjoy an unequal amount of peace and happiness. A non-consumer, by contrast, might profit by convincing policymakers that she suffers inequality due to her lesser access to elite colleges.

In the research of Young and Sullivan (2016), this is symptomatic of a phenomenon called competitive victimization. Contestants in these “Oppression Olympics” seek to convince others that they are most victimized, their enemies are less victimized, and that as the ultimate victims, they deserve preferential treatment. Young and Sullivan find that competitive victims over-emphasize their own pain, ignore the pain of others, romanticize their own causes, dehumanize their opponents, and pursue vengeance much more than non-victims do. Not only does this pattern seem similar to the behavior of individual narcissists and sociopaths, Young and Sullivan find that nations engaging in these competitions – Israel and Palestine, Kosovo and Serbia, etc. – are responsible for many of the world’s nastiest, most brutal, and most interminable conflicts.

Recent controversies in the realm of Korean gender politics seem to illustrate this competetive victimization in the field. The case of Yoon’s “Morphogenesis of Insect-Voyeur in the Field of Digital Sexual Crime” (2019) (sic), accepted for publication in the Philosophical Studies Journal, seems to demonstrate that a quite nasty view of gender is both present and deemed worthy of attention in the Korean academic community. Likewise the online “Ilbe” group is found to be both associated with a politics of brutality and mysogyny (Park, 2022) while representing more than a decade of interminable conflict and misery (Kim, 2022). Both Yoon and the online activists consider themselves champions of equality – Yoon wants men to overcome patriarchy and the Ilbe activists fight for the rights of Korea’s male-only military conscripts. Both are competing to be seen as more victimized – women are parasitized by sexual insects (Korean men) in Yoon and males are exploited by vile feminists in Ilbe.

If Ilbe and Yoon are indeed competitive victims, and if Young and Sullivan’s model of nasty, brutal, and interminable conflict between competitive victims applies to the controversy above, we would expect Korean gender politics, at least between Yoon and her supporters and Ilbe and its supporters, to manifest nasty, brutal, and interminable characteristics. Such an interpretation seems likely, given the history.

It is thus vital educators must clear up the confusions surrounding equality to solve both the issues examined so far. In order to minimize the influence of Yoon and the Ilbe netizens, along with other bad actors and competitive victims, Korean educators should oppose competitive victimization. Likewise, if they wish to understand the suffering caused by the educational access problems, they should untangle the confused equality that both supports and opposes private education.

III. First Explanation – Equality is Ambition

The first explanation for these contradictions and curiosities is to dismiss “equality” as a dishonest synonym for “ambition.” If this is true, a person saying “I want equality” could be understood as saying “I wish to be wealthier and more powerful relative to others.” This definition, however cynical, does solve both the education equality and gender equality cases examined above. The economically disadvantaged students, excluded from equal access to the stress and mental illness of private education, might legitimately mean “I wish to be more like rich students” when they speak of equality. Likewise, the competitors in the games of competitive victimization can rationally exclude “irrellevant” people from their analyses if they are using equality as a synonym for ambition. Namely, Ilbe activists can ignore the numerous cases of excellent male outcomes and focus on the military draft while Yoon, ignoring the typically much safer lives led by women, can exclusively focus her analysis on the trauma caused by human cockroaches.

In addition to the deductive argument offered above, there is inferential evidence that much of what we call equality is, in fact, ambition. Abrams et al (2015) find what they call “equality hypocrisy” and discover that even the most committed equality activists prefer to give more equalities to certain groups while removing equalities from other groups.

Already, the idea one can give or withdraw equalities is a highly curious real-world example of Orwellian Newspeak and implies that “equality” is being used as a synonym for “privilege” or “ambition.” If not, how can “equal” things, which are by definition the same in some sense, be more or less “equal?”

The inference that this “equality” is ambition or privilege is further supported in Abrams et al’s final analysis that there are four main groups of people to whom egalitarians wish to either extend or withdraw equalities (privileges). The first group is classed as “warm and incompetent.” This group includes women, the elderly, and the disabled. The egalitarians wished to extend greater equalities (privileges) to this group, but only so long as the woman, elderly person, or disabled person remains oppressed. Should one of these people demonstrate competence, the egalitarians shift them into the “cold and competent” group with men, Jews, bankers, and Asian immigrants. These groups are unworthy of equalities (privileges) to Abrams’ egalitarians and become objects of envy and fear. The third group was warm and competent and included very few people – war heroes, long-dead ancestors, and martyrs mostly. These aspirational figures were deemed worthy of more equalities (privileges), in contrast with group four, the coldly incompetent. Egalitarians wished to reduce the equalities (privileges) given to coldly incompetent Muslims, homosexuals, and blacks because they were seen as both threatening and useless – objects of contempt in the egalitarian eyes.

In summary, Abrams et al found that egalitarians wish to remove equalities (privileges) from those they find threatening and those they envy, while extending equalities (privileges) to those they find pathetic or aspirational. This partially explains the competitive victimization seen in Young and Sullivan (2016). If egalitarians extend equalities (privileges) to warm and incompetent actors, people wishing to receive privileges will be incentivized to portray themselves as helpless, oppressed, and blameless. Such is strikingly illustrated by the recent, suprisingly widespread tendency for American academics to falsely claim they are black or Hispanic (Kaplan, 2020). If the fake black or Hispani academics can be seen as oppressed minorities, they might correspondingly receive the extra equalities (privileges) mentioned above, a strategy that works at least some of the time. C.V. Vitollo, not even 30 years old, used her fake black identity to get a tenure track job offer at a leading California university, fake-black activist Rachel Dolezal used her victim status to achieve high position in the NAACP, Jessica Krug used her fake Hispanic and black identity to become a finalist for a famous civil-rights book prize, and H.G. Carrillo used his fake Hispanic identity to become president of the Pen Faulkner Foundation. Other research finds similarly ambitious victims outside academia who, like the fake minorities above, commonly use their victim status to both avoid responsibility and gain benefits (Kaufman, 2020). If equality is simply the ambition to rise above others, it’s not just Yoon, the Ilbe activists, and the fake black or Hispanic academics who are causing trouble. The very mainstream idea of educational “equity” seems at the least related. It is not clear how equality hypocrisy or equality as ambition, along with the incentive structure favoring competitive victimization, can be excluded from the equity defined in Debnam et al (2021).

Equity is a demonstration of social justice which compels an ethical responsibility to avoid unfair treatment. Equity is also different from equality, which refers to the equal distribution of resources and processes; in contrast, equity means that resources and processes are fairly distributed in the face of systemic disadvantage.

An equitable educator, by this definition, would seem likely to withdraw equalities (privileges) from cold and competent groups like Jews, Asians, and males while extending equalities (privileges) to warm and incompetent groups like females and the disabled (so long as female and handicapped students refrain from developing competency). Functionally speaking, Abrams et al’s equality hypocrisy and Debnam et al’s equity would both serve the interests of students who wished to see their more privileged classmates crippled and who, portraying themselves as victims, wished to get more “equitable” (privileged) treatment.

On a related note, I conduct an informal thought experiment about this ambitious equality once a year. I ask my sophomore education students if they wish the world was more equal, more or less using the definition in Debnam et al. They, mostly middle or upper-class South Koreans, universally wish for greater equality. I then point out that, in a world with equal outcomes, they would earn 1,046,600 Korean won per month (Flynn, 2023), lose ten years of life expectancy (World Health Organizations, 2023), and be incapable of reading properly by the end of their primary educations (Roser, 2022).

Students, correctly realizing that global equality would devastate their lives, shift to claiming that they really only want equality inside Korea. As for why foreigners should be excluded from equality, students argue that we should respect the “cultural preferences” of poor people who want to be sick and illiterate. This argument is very curious, but even if we assume the people of Haiti, Yemen, and Bangladesh prefer early death and poverty, almost all of my students come from families earning more than the average Korean. When I point this out, my students suddenly abandon Korean equality as well.

It is only when I ask “When I first mentioned equality, who were you thinking of?” that a solution emerges. The students discover that the targets of their equality were high status business people, media personalities, and world leaders. In other words, when they thought of an “equal world,” they imagined themselves as millionaires, celebrities, and politicians.

At this point it’s important to note that ambitious equality is not a logically valid category. Elites are by definition minorities, and so this idea that everyone can be an elite is by definition wrong. Further, my students and the equality hypocrites consistently ignore those below them on the social hierarchy. My students, coming from economically successful families in a rich country, honestly thought an “equal” world would profit them, not because they are stupid, but because they simply don’t consider the existence of poor people or poor countries. Finally, ambitious equality relies on the conceit that victims are morally or spiritually superior to non-victims. Such is curious, and considering the verifiably bad behavior of those who wish to see themselves as victims (Young and Sullivan, 2015), probably the opposite of the truth.

It is likely impossible to deduce exactly where this irrational and ambitious equality comes from. A combination of self-interest and not thinking very deeply seems likely at least in part. On a deeper level, however, it is interesting to note the similarity of my students’ ambitious equality with the inspirational falsehoods taught in many textbooks and educational programs – “everyone is special” (by definition false), “you can be anything you want given hard work” (obviously untrue), and “you need to follow your dreams no matter what” (bad advice).

Regardless of the cause, the consequences of calling ambition “equality” are manifold. In addition to the competitive victimization problem, calling one’s ambition equality lends it a feeling of justice, truth, and sanctity that is not present when one honestly says “I’m ambitious.” Few think society has a moral duty to fulfill individual ambitions but most do think society has a moral duty to support “equality” (Tonti, 2022; Poushter, 2019). Several disasters therefore follow from this supposed social duty to support ambition-as-equality. First, it is wrong if an individual does not achieve “equality“ with a celebrity or CEO. Second, if a young person fails to live up to the ambitious “equality“ expected by her parents, she can correctly be dismissed as a failure. Third, when a society fails the impossible-by-definition task of making everyone elite, it’s evidence of injustice.

This toxic equality can be observed in the behavior of Korean “school parents” in both popular fiction – the TV show “Sky Castle” is a good example – and in news reports following on student suicides. In such cases a parent will set an unspeakably high standard for his child and, reasoning that anyone can be equal to Ban Ki-moon or Kim Yeon-ah, mercilessly pressure the young person. The young person as well, believing in this equality-is-ambition model, will have little choice but to see her inability to be an extremely successful politician-athlete as evidence that she is defective and/or the victim of an unjust world. If, therefore, educators care about the suffering of the 33.8% of Korean students who considered suicide for academic reasons (Yonhap, 2019), equality-as-ambition should be considered a major problem.

IV. Second Explanation – Equality is Equality of Outcome

The equality-as-ambition interpretation, while applicable to much equality and equity discourse, is perhaps too uncharitable for the concept of equality as a whole. The equality hypocrites discovered by Abrams et al and the students participating my annual thought experiment, it can be correctly pointed out, are very unlikely to be experts on equality, or to have even thought about it very deeply. Indeed, Limone and Tito (2022) find that most moral values are little more than passively acquired cultural artifacts and rudimental preferences for conformity.

For this reason, it is perhaps better to consider the idea that true equality is a system in which each individual, to the greatest extent possible, has a similar life outcome. This equality has a long history and, in many senses, is the core of the education access debate in Kim (2015). Evidence that Korean private education causes inequality, after all, is based on the unequal outcomes of students who do and do not get private education. If we agree that more similar outcomes between the students who do and do not get private education would be a more equal situation, it thus follows that outcome is the dominant standard for judging equality.

Racial, class, and gender equality ideals follow a similar formulation in many cases. That such and such group has unequal outcomes with some other group is assumed to be evidence of racism, classism, or sexism in many cases, while a closing in the gap of group outcomes is taken as evidence of greater equality. The UN, for example, argues that 51 percent of elected officials would be women if not for discrimination (United Nations, 2021). This assumption makes sense only if we adopt an equality of outcome standard a priori.

However common this formulation is, a theoretical explanation for why we want equal outcomes will be necessary for the argument to carry any weight. The most powerful justifications for equality-of-outcome come from theorists Jacque Ranciere, bell hooks (who chooses not to capitalize her name), Gert Biesta, Clifton Mark, the Deuteronomic History in the Bible, and the totalitarian traditions of the 20^th century – communism and facism.

Starting with the postmodernists and their allies, there is a romantic argument that equality should be the axiomatic truth from which all else derives. Ranciere takes this position when he rejects the idea that equality is an endpoint we strive for, stating rather that it is the a priori condition. He tries not to “explain” his point – explanation implies the explicator is in a higher position than the listener – but nonetheless argues that the things a student does not know are unknown only because the oppressor-teacher hides them within unequal power structures. Equality is taken as an article of faith (Ranciere, 1991: 27), and it is axiomatic that “there is no hierarchy of intellectual capacity.” This statement is not qualified by factors like age or experience. A nuclear physicist and kindergarten student, he argues, have exactly equal intellects.

On one hand this is almost meritocratic, believing that a student can self-teach and self-develop according to his or her needs, and that the results of this development will be unpredictable and “maybe nothing.” On the other, it is powerfully allied to the idea of equality of condition, insisting that in a world without unequal power relations or teachers who “stultify” through their insistence on “understanding” (Ranciere, 1991: 11), everyone would learn whatever they want naturally. After all, it is only because the destroyers of equality demand “understanding” that an expert can be considered superior to a novice. Eliminate the understanding and you eliminate the inequality and therefore, an ignorant schoolmaster who tells the student he or she knows nothing, the hidden knowledge is suddenly unmasked.

At this point, a reader might confuse Ranciere’s argument with the Socratic method. The Socratic teacher seeks to help the student draw knowledge out of himself, such as when Socrates helps Meno’s slave to teach himself mathematics. Ranciere (1991: 29) rejects this, arguing that by guiding the slave, Socrates shows that he is capable of guidance where the slave is not. By being more capable, he shows inequality. By showing inequality, Socrates has shown the slave that he can never approach the level of himself and thus must remain a slave forever. That Socrates knows the answers to the questions he is asking is thus the “highest form of stultification.”

The possibility that a student can match or surpass the teacher after being “enslaved” is not considered. Neither is the possibility that Socrates can have a superior mathematical intelligence but inferior musical intelligence. Such omissions seem curious but can be explained by assuming, as is implied by Ranciere, that intelligence is a monolith and power structures are universal. A basketball coach’s authority on a basketball court would extend into a court of law by this logic, and one who can stultify by understanding the principles of zone defense can also stultify by understanding legal procedure.

Ranciere then makes the surprising claim that a “master” – Ranciere’s term – is still necessary in egalitarian/emancipated education. This is because a master liberates the student through domination (Ranciere, 1991: 13). Such domination separates the will, which is acceptable and egalitarian for the master to dominate, from the intelligence, which is not. In other words, if Socrates wishes to liberate Meno’s slave in the egalitarian style, he should dominate the slave into learning Chinese writing, a subject unknown to both.

This confusion about “liberation through domination” is common not only in postmodern discourse but with advocates of “freedom” generally (including Biesta, Solzhenitsyn, and Wollstonecroft-Shelley later in this paper). It arises due to a misunderstanding of the logical construction of the terms freedom, liberty, emancipation, etc. “Emancipation” in the abstract, as Ranciere uses the term, is its own opposite. This is because any emancipation to x will, by definition, be the opposite of an emancipation from x. This is not an eccentricity of the English language. The Korean X하는 해방 and X으로부터 해방 have the identical problem, as does the freedom/emancipation/liberty of every other language I know.

Therefore, when Ranciere “dominates” a student for the purpose of “emancipation,” he is choosing to ignore “emancipation from domination” in favor of “emancipation to dominate.” Neither “emancipaiton” is more valid than the other and therefore, when Ranciere mentions emancipation in the abstract, we need to infer his intent from other clues. If we do not, his argument is meaningless. That nitpick aside, Ranciere reasons that by dominating the will but understanding nothing, the teacher and student demonstrate, through the student’s ability to learn, that they share an equal intelligence. They also demonstrate an inequality of will, but that is an artifact of the emancipation/freedom/liberation confusion mentioned above.

The most important part of Ranciere’s argument, shared with many other equality-of-outcome theorists, is that a higher, spiritual and ethical goal renders the practical results of equality unimportant. Intelligence, he argues, can never be correlated with intelligence (Ranciere, 1991: 47) because intelligence is immaterial and all immaterial things are equal “by definition.” Why immaterial things must be equal in any way, much less by definition, is not explained. If I am allowed to infer, it seems he is appealing to a cosmic spirituality idea that differs little, if at all, from the Christian’s immortal soul. Ranciere also insists it doesn’t matter how quickly or effectively the egalitarian method works because the sacred quest for “liberty” is a higher standard than any measure of accomplishment or proficiency (Ranciere, 1991: 14).

A similarly spiritual condition is found in Biesta (2021). Education is, in Biesta’s analysis, corrupted by the economic or social imperative to be useful. Reducing economic instrumentality in education, he argues, will restore education to its previously exalted position, liberated from the need to fulfill any purpose. Biesta fleshes this out by equating economic usefulness with “control,” by which he means hierarchical domination.

This is not the emancipating domination of Ranciere’s ignorant schoomaster, but an unchosen and anti-democratic domination created by democratic governments and free markets. Functionalization and instrumentalization are the devices by which this control marginalizes liberated education, and should be de-emphasized. Instead, students should be educated with the goal of “being.” By making education “dysfunctional” – Biesta’s term – students can avoid fitting into existing social roles and instead cast off traditions in favor of emancipated new worlds. Biesta is cautious, though, pointing out that Nazi Germany’s successful attempt to liberate students from practical functions and existing hierarchies during the 1930s is but one example of the mistakes that might arise.

The EU’s decision in the 1990s to promote education focused on job skills and economic productivity marked a departure from the ideal of “dysfunctional” and emancipated education, Biesta argues. These changes characterized education as a tool for helping workers adapt to new circumstances. Pushing workers to adapt, Biesta points out, assumes that capitalism is a “fact of nature” and that workers would not, if emancipated, ignore the demands of the labor market in order to develop themselves toward “fulfillment.” By shifting education from “right” to “duty,” governments also make learners responsible for their own educations. If education were divorced from the imperative to be useful in a capitalist system, education would be necessarily reconceptualized as a welfare benefit the state has a duty to provide.

While Biesta, suffering from the liberation confusion explored above, admits it might be “liberating” when workers choose the education they want or need from a private market, the market-provided liberation is stultified by the need to change with the times. This is wrong, in Biesta’s very conservative opinion, because the conceit that times change or that people should adapt is an assumption neo-liberal education simply takes for granted.

What is required, therefore, in order to reclaim the future of education … is the emancipation of education itself, that is, the liberation from ongoing attempts to see and approach education in merely functional and instrumental terms. (Biesta, 2021)

The postmodern intersectional feminist equality of hooks (2004) expresses reasoning along similar lines to Ranciere and Biesta. She argues that human beings are best when their ability or production ceases to matter and equality becomes the standard. Male rage, male sexual abuse, male violence, and male despair, she argues, arise from this sexist pressure to be instrumental and functional. Patriarchal culture, in other words, degrades men by expecting them to be useful.

“In patriarchal culture males are not allowed simply to be who they are and to glory in their unique identity. Their value is always determined by what they do. In an anti-patriarchal culture, males do not have to prove their value and worth. They know from birth that simply being gives them value, the right to be cherished and loved.” (hooks, 2004: 32-33)

The egalitarian path, hooks argues, is to ensure all people reach an equal level of honor, comfort, and status, determined by “love” and without any reference whatsoever to cruder standards like wages earned, useful implements created, or value contributed to the group. This is a softer stance than Ranciere, admitting that equality of condition is something people have to strive for, but it maintains Ranciere’s position that ethical imperatives are primary over merely worldly concerns like money, production, or power. She is also, like Biesta, skeptical of instrumental and functional education.

This spiritual, romantic, and anti-functionalist view likely derives from the Old Testament. There we learn that the God of Israel loves the foolish, the unhappy, the weak, and the poor (1 Samuel 2:1-11; 2 Samuel 22:28) and discover He is hostile to those who excel (Amos 6:3-7; Psalms 128:2). The New Testament expands this equality of condition, particularly in the Beatitudes of Luke (Luke 6:20-26), where Jesus curses riches, laughter, nourishing meals, and popularity while blessing poverty, tears, hunger, and marginalization, and in James 4:4 where we discover that those who love the world are enemies of God.

The premise that humans are naturally wicked is the basis for this Biblical equality. Equality of condition is therefore desirable because it prevents any one person gaining enough power to truly express his innate evil. This can be seen throughout the Deuteronomistic History where Jewish kings are good whenever they ignore counselors (1 Kings 12:25-30; 1 Samuel 23:5) or resist the urge to fix problems themselves (2 Samuel 13:21) but sinful whenever they listen to “those seen as wise,” and wicked whenever they attempt to use strategy or planning. Universal values such as equality before the Lord, humility, charity, and passivity are thus elevated above the dirty, worldly concerns of statecraft, career development, or personal virtue. The “higher standard” appeals of hooks, Biesta, and Ranciere seem related to, if not directly descended from, the Abrahamic tradition of equality, “higher” standards, anti-instrumentalism, and pessimism..

Maintaining this pessimistic equality requires the rejection of merit and meritocracy. Just like bell hooks, who sees no reason for a productive man to be more valued than an idle man, and the Biblical King David, who reminds his bravest troops they are no better than those soldiers who do not fight (1 Samuel 30:9-25), modern equality-of-condition thinker Clifford Mark (2020) insists that meritorious things are impossible. Even the ability to work hard is the random gift of chance and genetics and meritocracy is therefore a dishonest system of self-congratulation that is “not only wrong; it’s bad.”

The rejection of merit and insistence on equality of condition also appears, according to Garrido (2022), in totalitarian education systems. He finds that the supporters and creators of totalitarian education are mostly males who, like the “loved simply for being themselves” men of bell hooks, do not meaningfully contribute to their social groups. Unable to contribute, they embrace romantic notions of worth, radically discounting action as meaningful and proposing various inborn traits – race, class, gender, etc. – as the true measures of a person. They, as pointed out by Biesta (2021), used their emancipated and “dysfunctional” education to smash existing social roles. They also, like Ranciere’s ignorant schoolmaster, rejected the experts’ “better understanding” and appealed to the “equally intelligent” proletariate or “folk.”

While Marx is the obvious exemplar of totalitarian equality ideologies, and Garrido (2022) does find much Marxist egalitarianism in the educational works of Kim Jong-il and Mao Zedong, action-independent equality of condition is best illustrated in Mein Kampf.

“The State is a means to an end. Its end is the preservation and promotion of a community of physically and psychically equal living beings.” (Hitler, 1971: 417)

In hooks, Ranciere, Mark, Biesta, the Bible, and the totalitarians, equality-of-condition serves the interests of the lowest status people. By rejecting the possibility of merit, they radically increase their own social status and create a “higher” moral standard free from vulgarities like money, school grades, or practical production. This, it is argued in Arendt (1951), is a form of compassion, since even the lowliest sufferers are put on a level with the highest achievers. This removes the painful contrast of ability between different students and the tyrannical standard of “understanding” Ranciere criticizes. The lower status student, like the loved and non-productive men of hooks, can respect herself just for existing.

These equality-of-condition theorists are far more serious than the ambitious egalitarians. Unlike the equality hypocrites of Abrams et al or my sophomore college students, Ranciere, hooks, Mark, Biesta, the Bible, and the totalitarians do acknowledge the double-edged nature of equality. They, like the ambitious egalitarians, do wish to undermine the happy and the capable, but unlike the merely ambitious, genuinely care about the downtrodden.

An education based on equal outcomes, while certainly rare in South Korea, is at least possible. Such education has existed in several historical examples, such as in the monastaries of late Roman and early medieval Europe, within Mao Zedong’s re-education camps, and in the gradeless schools of the United States and Canada.

In the senses of coherence or compassion, equality-of-condition is a large improvement on equality-as-ambition. If we return to the example of the characters in Sky Castle or the student suicides on the news, it is easy to illustrate these advantages. The mother of an average student, no longer expecting her son to match the world’s most successful people, would peacefully accept the child for being himself. Likewise, she would advise her son to think of the less fortunate, turning away from his own struggles and toward to the work of elevating those most in need. Finally, she would ask the teachers to restrain the ambition and dominance of the most gifted students, emphasizing the virtues of humility, charity, and obedience. Such is certainly kinder than the hell of ambitious equality.

V. Third Explanation – Equality is Meritocracy

It would have been possible to change the title of this section to “Equality is Equality-of-Opportunity.” If, the argument goes, all young people get equal access to opportunities, the ones with the most merit will rise to the highest positions and lead future businesses, governments, and institutions with the greatest skill. This is indeed the most common argument in favor of meritocracy. However, I decided against using the terms interchangeably for two reasons.

First, the concept of equal opportunity requires several assumptions and predictions unnecessary for the concept of meritocracy. A modern Korean educator, for example, might think that equality-of-opportunity would emphasize helping all children learn technology, achieve a high level of literacy, and conform to dominant moral ideals like charity, humility, and obedience. This is reasonable but requires the educator to assume that currently dominant morals and currently valuable skills will continue unchanged into the future.

Should Korea encounter a disaster, a collapse of global trade networks for example, the skills most conducive to “opportunity” might shift to fields like agriculture, logistics, and security while values might shift toward independence, toughness, and pride. As such, a student given “unfair” opportunities to become a humble and tender-hearted participant in AI development programs today would likely suffer a lack of opportunity in a future suddenly in need of proud farmers and tough security officers.

If we restrict ourselves to meritocracy, whether or not students get “fair” access to farming or programming classes ceases to matter. We simply judge them by the usefulness of their skills according to whatever our current needs happen to be. As predicted by Biesta, the responsibility falls to the students, who we trust to adjust their own learning in the face of new circumstances, and education becomes a duty rather than a welfare benefit.

Second, judging whether or not a student gets “equal opportunity” requires a standard of fairness that remains subjective, variable, and unworkable. This is because attempts to be “fair” require the educator to evaluate countless handicaps and advantages. Educators have many students, each with an effectively infinite number of handicaps and advantages. The calculations necessary for fairness are therefore also effectively infinite.

This opportunity calculation problem demonstrably plagues research into intersectionality concepts. Sowell (2019), points out that the choice of what to include as an intersectionality and what to exclude is highly arbitrary. As an example, he demonstrates that first born boys enjoy massive outcome advantages over their second and third born brothers. These large differences occur in a group – brothers – that is composed of same sex individuals with similar genetics who are raised in the same families and would seemingly experience the same amounts of racism, gender discrimination, and class discrimination. That the oldest brothers disproportionately succeed from a place of racial, gender, and class equality shows that “incidental” factors play a large and probably dominant role (Sowell, 2019: 5-10).

Why race, gender and class – the factors emphasized in Debnam et al – are considered the most important categories for analysis is also not clear, Sowell claims, since they are much harder to isolate and control for than the birth order of brothers. Neither is it clear how intersectionalities are chosen. Why not analyze oppression by height? After all, being 2.5 cm taller increases life satisfaction as much as a 3.8 to 4.4% pay raise on average (Deaton and Arora, 2009). Why not analyze privilege by finger length? After all, Gatz and Pike (2020) find that females with long ring fingers have significantly lower verbal skills in childhood and young adulthood. Why not literally anything?

Scholars of feminism find similar problems in identifying, isolating, and stabilizing intersectionalities. Kim (2017), attempting to apply German intersectional feminist models to the development of gender conflict in Korea, concludes that intersections are overlapping and very complex. Likewise, Kim (2010) finds that the differences between individual capitalist markets overwhelm and complicate analysis of intersections in economics. “Conservative adjusted market” economies like Germany and Japan, she shows, saw minimal growth in female workforce participation, about the same as the social democratic capitalist economies. Social democratic Sweeden was the only country to see a significant reduction in female workforce participation while the free market economies, presumably those with the fewest attempts to correct for gender intersectionalities, saw the greatest growth in female workforce participation. It is thus unclear how much importance, if any, should be attached to these attempts at analyzing and correcting for gender intersectionalities.

My hometown in the western United States provides a convenient example of these problems in the field. The majority population of this small city is white, with a large Hispanic minority and much smaller black and Asian minorities. According to dominant intersectionality theories, we would expect the white students to receive privileged access to opportunities despite the fact they are downwardly mobile (Leicht, 2022), the Asian students to be discriminated against but over-perform anyway (Hsin and Xie, 2014), the black students to lag in practically all metrics (National Center for Education Statistics, 1995), and the Hispanic students to be even more deprived than blacks but upwardly mobile regardless (Joo and Reeves, 2015).

These characterizations are broad to the point of stereotyping, but even if we take them at face value, it’s not certain how we ought to equalize the opportunities given these students. Should we assume that a Hispanic student needs more opportunity to cancel out her disadvantages or should we assume she needs less opportunity because her racial group is so upwardly mobile? Should we ignore the white students because they are privileged, or should we help them because they are downwardly mobile? Should we pity the Asians, suffering discrimination, or should we envy them for their high scores? Should we assume that every black student needs special attention?

Such questions are very difficult to answer and get more difficult when particulars come into play. For example, the white students in my hometown are doing well when they come from the western and southern parts of the city, but very poorly when they come from the north. The black students whose ancestors voluntarily immigrated to the US generally perform well, while the black students whose ancestors were slaves generally perform poorly. Asian and Hispanic families commonly self-identify as white after the second or third generations, making the teacher decide whether to ignore the racial-intersectional self-identifications of said students or to ignore their biological heredities. In addition, calculating advantages, even if it were easy, would seem to invite the competitive victimization problems mentioned above. This situation quickly becomes so complex and dangerous the teacher would probably be better off ignoring theory, attending to students as individuals, and appraising their needs according to some other criteria.

If the equality-of-opportunity standard is thus unworkably complex, dependent on crude stereotyping, and dangerous, it is necessary to accurately characterize meritocracy and explain why it’s a better concept for analysis. This can be done by examining the two main eras in which the “equality is meritocracy” concepts were developed. The most recent came in a burst after the end of the Second World War. These theorists include Alexsandr Solzhenitsyn, Hannah Arendt, and B.R. Ambedkar. The other major era of meritocracy is the Enlightenment and includes theorists such as John Locke and Mary Wollstonecraft-Shelley.

1. Post World War II Meritocracy

Perhaps nowhere in recent history will you find theorists more cautious and skeptical of equality-of-condition ideologies than among those who survived the Second World War. While their reasons vary in the details, the common thread uniting the limited and contingent equalities of Arendt, Ambedkar, and Solzhenitsyn is a sense of disgust or trauma regarding the equality-of-condition programs in Nazi Germany, Soviet Russia, and Maoist China. These equalities, according to Garrido (2022), included physical, mental, and economic equality of condition, achieved through eugenics, genocide, and the nationalization of industries in Nazi Germany. By eliminating unwanted races and the handicapped, those who are too low are prevented from disturbing equality. By destroying bourgeoisie and intellectual institutions, those who are too high are either killed or marginalized. With only average people surviving, Hitler’s physical and psychic equality could be realized. In the Soviet Union, the class, economic, and social equality of condition was achieved through socialism, the dictatorship of the proletariat, and ethnic cleansing/genocide. By destroying bourgeoisie families, forcibly relocating and/or massacring dissidents and unwanted minorities, and preferentially rewarding unskilled citizens, class distinctions and institutional inequalities could be removed. Finally, class, economic, and social equality of condition was achieved through collectivization, re-education, and mob violence in Maoist China. By destroying bourgeoisie and prosperous peasant families through collectivization, re-educating those who had achieved any level of expertise, and empowering mob-terrorist elements like the Red Guards, class and social distinctions could be dissolved and equality of condition guaranteed.

Hannah Arendt, a survivor of two Nazi incarcerations and strong skeptic of both Nazi and Soviet equality, writesthat a politics of freedom – in this case a freedom to participate in politics – is the process of courageously stepping beyond mere survival (Arendt, 2018: 25-31). Instead, politics in the Arendtian sense requires risking one’s life in the interest of distant, difficult, and uncertain goals. This politics of freedom therefore requires an inequality of condition between the survival-focused masses and the far-seeing political elite. The only equality that remains is among the elites themselves. While this is not exactly the same as merit commonly understood, the “equals” in Arendt’s conception must demonstrate courage before they are treated as equals to each other and as superiors to the mass. Nothing illustrates this better than Arendt’s observation that one concerned only with her own wellbeing is an “idion” in Greek or, in the adjective form, “idiotic.” (Arendt, 2018: 38)

B.R. Ambedkar, a politician and philosopher born into India’s Dalit caste, is best known for forcing his adversaries – particularly caste-advocate Mahatmas Gandhi – to legally end the caste system. However, his work provided a limited, meritocratic, and contingent interpretation of equality that’s surprisingly practical for a civil rights leader. His speech The Annihilation of Caste (1936) bluntly states that “the doctrine of equality is glaringly fallacious.” People are, he continues, different in three aspects; heredity, socialization, and effort. If people are therefore different they are also, by definition, not equal to each other.

If the doctrine of equality is so fallacious, and people are not equal, it is no longer obvious what grounds Ambedkar would have for opposing Gandhi’s beloved castes. He answers this with two arguments. The first is a standard equality-of-opportunity argument. If we treat young people as equals at the “beginning of the race,” we are able to reward those with better ability as they manifest said ability. The second is to point out the policymaker’s limited resources, limited trustworthiness, and limited knowledge. No policymaker, Ambedkar argues, can be intelligent enough to predict which young people will be good at which tasks. Even if such a policymaker existed no administrator should be entrusted with the immense power of sorting who goes where. Therefore, treating all young people as equal is good enough and can be thought of as a useful lie. Later, after the young people have shown their respective virtues and become adults, the lie can be disposed of.

Finally, Alexandr Solzhenitsyn’s vision of equality is shaped by his experiences surviving torture and starvation in the Soviet Union. He attributed the degradation of these gulags to Soviet attempts at creating a state of equal condition. Communism, in his analysis, is a type of cancer, metastasizing all that is crude, ignorant, equal, and traitorous so that virtue gets crowded out (Filosofia, 2024). The mediocrity left behind, by virtue of its sameness, is equal. Solzhenitsyn makes this clear when he criticizes the French Revolution’s equality-of-condition.

The French Revolution unfolded under the banner of a self-contradictory and unrealizable slogan, ‘liberty, equality, and fraternity.’ But in the life of society, liberty and equality are mutually exclusive, even hostile concepts. Liberty, by its very nature, undermines social equality, and equality suppresses liberty – for how else could it be attained? (Solzhenitsyn, 1993)

In short, the meritocracy that arose after World War II opposes equality-of-condition ideas quite strongly, whether we consider Arendt, Ambedkar or Solzhenitsyn. Instead, these thinkers emphasize the uncertainty of the future as a reason to allow exceptional young people the chance to rise above their peers. Education that Biesta criticizes as a “functional,” these meritocrats argue, works best when built upon a foundation of roughly equal opportunity for the young and the young only.

2. Enlightenment Meritocracy

The second main source of meritocracy is the Enlightenment. Perhaps the most influential of these Enlightenment meritocrats is John Locke, whose ideas proved foundational for the creators and theorists of many modern republics – everyone from George Washington and Simone Bolivar to Takumichi Kojo and Baek Jong-hyeon.

Locke’s meritocracy is foundational to his anti-authoritarian politics. All people, he argues, are equal in a state of nature (Locke, 2017: 32) and before God (Locke, 2017: 4). Locke uses these assumptions to argue against deductive systems of authority – royal titles and divine right for example – instead insisting that authority must be constructed bottom-up. This is because virtue develops from a person’s actions over his or her lifetime. The equal starting point before God and nature, as a result of these choices, gives way to useful inequality over time. Where Mark argues that merit is impossible, Locke argues that merit is all that really counts.

A similar argument is found in the work of proto-feminist Mary Wollstonecraft-Shelley. She argues that since rights are given by God to everyone, it is sinful to deny said God-given rights to one or the other sex. This sounds “higher,” almost like hooks or Biesta, but in reality she is more meritocratic than Locke. Denying education to women is foolish, she argues, because it prevents those women performing the instrumental, functional, and worldly work of raising educated, patriotic, and virtuous children.

Contending for the rights of woman, my main argument is built on this simple principle, that if she be not prepared by education to become the companion of man, she will stop the progress of knowledge and virtue; for truth must be common to all, or it will be inefficacious with respect to its influence on general practice. And how can woman be expected to co-operate unless she know why she ought to be virtuous? Unless freedom strengthen her reason till she comprehend her duty, and see in what manner it is connected with her real good? If children are to be educated to understand the true principle of patriotism, their mother must be a patriot; and the love of mankind, from which an orderly train of virtues spring, can only be produced by considering the moral and civil interest of mankind; but the education and situation of woman, at present, shuts her out from such investigations. (Wollstonecraft-Shelley, 2002: 3)

While her argument contains ideas that are controversial in modern feminist discourse –children are desirable, men and women ought to cooperate, motherhood ennobles rather than degrades a woman – the logical structure is still instructive. An educated woman is desirable at least in part because she creates better informed children. Better informed children are more desirable than uninformed children. Girls’ education is therefore desirable because educated females produce more meritorious children and fewer meritless children.

In both post-war and Enlightenment contexts, this meritocracy concept is designed to maximize the economic and social value of individuals. The “spiritual” and “higher” equality expressed in bell hooks, Jacques Ranciere, and the totalitarians is absent, as is the biblical distrust of human endeavor. Envy, a virtue in both equality-of-outcome and equality-as-ambition conceptions, is a vice in meritocratic traditions while ambition is openly expressed. Finally, the compassionate impulse to assure low-achievers they have equal value with high-achievers, honestly expressed in the equality-of-condition theories and dishonestly expressed by equality-as-ambition thinkers, is simply dismissed in meritocracy. Those who produce are better than those who do not.

Implicit in all varieties of meritocracy is the idea that people need to learn how to lose, and that losing needs to be normalized and accepted. If competition is indeed the best way to get the best people in the best positions, the best way to get those people to collaborate, one of the best ways to stimulate intrinsic motivation, and a powerful tool for developing creativity (Bengtsson and Kock, 2000; Gibson et al, 2013; Francisco et al 2022), then it is unavoidable that everyone participating in such a system will fail at least some of the time. It therefore follows that educators should not just normalize losing, but actively teach students how to lose profitably.

This can be done with demonstrably useful psychological outcomes. Learning to accept failure is vital to students’ general mental health (Grubbs and Hertzog, 2016). According to Tominy (2020), it also enables children to develop the following skills. 1. They don’t fear failure, and thus try lots of things. 2. They lose without suffering much, or any, psychological harm. 3. They learn to dissociate shame and failure, shifting shame onto controllable processes – like giving up or failing to prepare – and away from outcomes – like failing when you’ve done your best.

I would suggest that accepting failure isn’t really a problem for most young people. It is true that some throw temper tantrums, or feel shame, and it is true that failing profitably is a skill they need to practice and develop. However, half of the players in any school yard baseball game will lose and almost everyone who partakes in a talent show will fail to get first prize. Yet even with these high rates of failure, students are generally gracious in defeat. Cabaniss (2019) and Bowen (2020) concur, showing that the children aren’t really the root of the problem with recognizing failure.

Instead, it seems that parents in Korea are slow to legitimize failures and losses. The extreme levels of pressure associated with the ambitious equality discussed above, and the vast numbers of students who consider suicide when they struggle in school, point to parents who will only accept total victory and perfect scores. This immature behavior on the part of parents seems very likely connected to the decreasing levels of shame management, psychological resilience, and healthy risk tolerance among Korean students. Indeed, an inability for Korean parents to legitimize failure is found to be a major part of Korean educational misery (Kim, 2021; Kwon et al, 2015).

VI. Conclusion

This investigation finds that “equality” is, in fact, at least three separate ideas. First and most commonly, “equality” is a confused and/or dishonest synonym for ambition. Most casual egalitarians, Abrams et al’s equality hypocrites and my sophomore education students for example, mean by “equality“ that they wish to give privileges to themselves and to those they find non-threatening while removing privileges from those they envy or fear. “Equity” is found to suffer many of these issues as well.

Second, the Judeo-Christian, totalitarian, postmodern, and social justice traditions advance a much more sophisticated equality-of-condition idea. Equality-of-condition ideology is similar to the ambitious equality conception in that it seeks to restrain the happy and give the suffering weapons against the successful. It ultimately derives from one of two philosophical assumptions; either humans are sinful or human value is a spiritual, romantic essence free from the physical world. In the case of sin, equality-of-condition prevents naturally evil people gaining enough power to commit large sins. If everyone is equally weak, nobody can become tyrant. In the case of romantic, spiritual essences, equality-of-condition reminds individuals that actions don’t matter – merely existing or having a gender/racial/class identity makes you valuable. Both varieties are considered more compassionate than ranking productive people as more valuable than non-productive people.

Third, post-war and Enlightenment thinkers propose a meritocratic version of equality, seeking to make something like equal opportunity more or less available to young people only. This is not done with the goal of making lives more similar or closing wage gaps. Instead, equality is a polite lie, told for the practical, economic, and openly ambitious purpose of creating the strongest citizens possible. Wollstonecraft-Shelley argues for meritocratic education for girls not on the grounds of compassion, but on the simple calculation that a stronger, more educated woman will lead a stronger, more educated household. Ambedkar rejects Gandhi’s beloved castes on the same grounds. If an exceptional low-caste person is not allowed to achieve power and influence, such is a waste of talent.

These three equalities – ambitious equality, equality-of-condition, meritocracy – are not compatible and in many cases contradict each other. As such, the egalitarian educator must, if she wishes her students to have a reasonable and possible view of equality, decide which to pursue and which to ignore. If she chooses equality-as-ambition, she should openly explain that her class will function as a type of martial art. Students will learn to use competitive victimization as a weapon, shaming and crippling those with higher status while ignoring the less fortunate. In such a class, the student learns to see the world as a zero-sum game and prepares for a life of ruthless scheming, using equality to disguise personal ambition, and tricking others into destroying themselves. It’s difficult to see why any educator would willingly pursue this path.

If the educator follows in the steps of hooks, Ranciere, Biesta, the totalitarians, or the Biblical heroes, she will instead restrain her best students for the sake of the weakest. Talented math students might be removed from advanced classes and used to tutor weaker students. Knowledgeable oppressor-instructors might be exchanged for Ranciere’s “ignorant schoolmasters,” exceptional athletes might be given weighted vests to equalize performance, and school competitions might recognize participation rather than achievement. This is a rational and likely effective system for keeping any one student becoming too powerful, too popular, or too arrogant. It is a reasonable equality if the educator wishes to emphasize the unique essences of her students while minimizing the importance of action or if she wishes to keep the corrupting and functionalizing influence of the capitalist market out of the supposedly sacred classroom.

Finally, if the educator follows in the tradition of Arendt, Solzhenitsyn, Ambedkar, Wollstonecraft-Shelley, and Locke, she will set up a series of competitions and work to ensure all students have not just a chance to win but also the skills to accept loss. Such an educator would need to teach her students the importance of action and the unimportance of romantic essences while normalizing failure and recognizing hierarchies. If she does not, students will, as observed by Yoo (2022), suffer significant physical and psychological stress as life becomes a string of harsh, high stakes competitions they cannot afford to lose.

In sum, I wish to propose that much of the immense educational suffering experienced by young Koreans in the 21^st century is a consequence of these contradictory and curious ideas of equality. Many contemporary scholars argue for excessive meritocracy as the cause, and it’s true meritocracy is rougher than equality-of-condition, but it seems dangerous to prevent students trying their hardest and developing their merits. Fortunately, limiting ambitious equality poses no such danger and can be done easily if educators learn to recognize the competitive victimization, impossible standards, and dishonesty of such systems.

Equality-of-condition ideology is far more serious. It is certainly better than ambitious equality but requires the suppression, rejection, or marginalization of happy people in the Bible, of educated people in the totalitarian traditions, of people with understanding in Ranciere, of useful men in hooks, of economic people in Biesta, and of meritorious people in Mark. It also dispenses with the painful work of learning how to lose. Students need not deal with the pain of losing if there are no competitions or if the competitions don’t matter.

The central philosophical question when deciding between meritocracy and equality-of-outcome ideology seems to be the individual’s view of failure. If failure is a tragedy, the unavoidable competitions and failures students experience in a meritocracy are far too harsh. If, however, educators believe that failure is a natural and acceptable part of life, and that students can learn and strengthen themselves through failing, compassionate equality-of-outcome ideology loses much appeal. In either case, whether educators judge the compassion, spirituality, and softness of equal outcome ideology to be so desirable as to justify sacrificing the best students, the most “understanding” instructors, and the most privileged children should be discussed openly, rather than muddling through the confusions and curiosities discussed above. Ambitious equality and the competitive victimization that goes with it, on the other hand, should be eliminated to the greatest extent possible.

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교육펴응주의 개념의 모수 탐색

오늘날의 교육학 연구에서 평등은 매우 중요한 주제로 다루어지고 있다. 하지만 논리적 측면과 실제적 측면에서 봤을 때 평등은 주제의 타당성과는 별개로 많은 모순과 문제를 내재하고 있다. 이러한 문제는 기회의 평등과 결과의 평등의 사이에서 특히 두드러지게 나타나고 있다. 상황에 따라서는 평등의 개념이 ‘야심’적 평등으로서 주로 사용되고 있지만 일반적으로는 ‘야심’적 이외에도 평등의 개념으로서 ‘결과’적 평등과 ‘능력’적 평등 또한 내제되어 있다고 볼 수 있다. 학생과 교사는 “야심”적 평등과 “능력”적 평등과 “결과”적 평등의 모순 때문에 스트레스를 많이 받고 불가능한 기대를 경험할 수 밖에 없다. 본 연구에서는 암베드카르, 히틀러, 벨 훅스, 한나 아렌트, 솔제니친의 평등 개념을 고찰하면서 합리적인 평등론에 대한 논의를 시도해보고자 한다. 본 연구로 인해 교사들이 ‘야심’적 평등을 완전히 배제하거나 줄이는 것을 학술적 의의로 생각한다. 또한, 교사들은 ‘능력’적 평등 혹은 ‘결과’적 평등 중에 어느 쪽을 선택하여 교육을 제공하는 것에 문제는 없지만 둘 다 선택함으로서 교육을 제공하는 것은 모순적이라고 할 수 있다.

주제어: 평등, 평등의 위선, 능력적 평등, 교육의 기회, 야심