‘To assign people their place in society’: School grades and the quantification of merit

Abstract

The political ideal of meritocracy has increasingly come under attack, but continues to figure centrally in the national identity of many self-declared liberal democracies, including Germany. A question which remains underexplored is where and how meritocratic thinking becomes ingrained in individuals to account for its pervasive appeal. This paper argues that the school grade plays a pivotal role. Ethnographic fieldwork in a German comprehensive school revealed that students consistently defended grading even though they often received very low grades themselves. The pupils’ arguments evoked core meritocratic motifs of betterment, hierarchy and social ascent. In order to explain this finding, grades are situated in a wider theory of quantification, arguing that it is in their capacity as numbers that grades encourage meritocratic thinking.