SESSION
IV:
COMPARING WAYS OF DEALING
WITH MERITOCRACY IN DEMOCRACY
Peter Wood:
Welcome back to our concluding session on "Comparing
Ways of Dealing with Meritocracy and Democracy." The first speaker will
be Agnes van Zanten, who is a senior researcher at Paris University, an
authority on the sociology of education and the impact of educational
reform on institutions. She will be speaking on "French Discussions of
Immigration: The Republican Model." The second speaker is David
Pryce-Jones, a novelist and historian. His books include
The Strange Death
if
the Soviet Union
and
The Closed Circle.
He will be speaking on "How Is
England Educating its Immigrants?" Michael Meyers, who is a columnist
for the
New York Post
and the executive director of the New York Civil
Rights Commission, will be speaking on "What Can We Do Concretely
to Achieve Equality?" And finally Nathan Glazer, who is professor in the
Graduate School of Education at Harvard University and the author of
several books on multiculturalism, education, and social policy. He will
address the issue "What Is Multiculturalism?" Professor Glazer has
changed his views on this subject dramatically over the years; most recent–
ly, his book
J,#
Are All Multiculturalists Now
suggests some of where we may
go with this final topic.
Agnes
van Zanten: I
will talk about the Republican model in the French
debate on immigrants in education. I think it is important to compare
countries by taking into account their structures, economies, their political
life, as well as their national ideologies-the sets of values and beliefS that
frame the institutions and the political thinking of state agents and every–
day citizens. Because ideologies develop in interaction with political,
social, and cultural contexts, national ideologies frequently seem coherent
from the inside but seem incoherent to outsiders, who may have difficulty
in understanding the hidden assumptions and associations that are deeply
embedded in the history of each nation-state. These ideologies are a pow–
erful mechanism of what you would call "symbolic violence" by which
one or several groups maintain their political, social, or cultural domination
without resorting to force. But they also help to ensure internal cohesion,
political allegiance, patriotism, and international recognition. In some
countries, national ideologies remain implicit; in others they are explicitly
spelled out by politicians, intellectuals, or state agents. In that case, they
become national models which are then imitated, reworked, criticized, or
used as a foil by other countries.
The United States and France provide an interesting comparative case
of international models and they frequently look at each other in that
sense. These days, whenever there is violence in French schools or when
we
talk
about what's happening in some urban areas with immigrants, titles
in newspapers, discussions in schools almost always state that "We are
