YOUTH 2020 - The position of young people in Slovenia

80 principles ” (Krek, 2011, p. 14). Finally, an individual’s social status or social mobility depends mainly on their educational success or performance. Thus, the central measure of a person’s social status is no longer their “background,” e.g. the socioeconomic status of their parents, race, gen- der, religion, etc., but primarily said person’s merit, which Michael Young, in The Rise of Meritocracy, summarises in the formula “merit = IQ + effort” (Young, 1958). What matters, then, or what confers social sta- tus, is no longer circumstances beyond the individual’s control, but their [apparently (un)measurable] performance in the educational process as the sum or result of several factors, including individual effort, talents, etc. “ Both practically and ethically,” Young argues, “ meritocratic education is the basis for a meritocratic society. ” Finally, “the growth of mass educational systems in all industrial societies” was one of the most important phenom- ena of the 20th century (ibid.). “School is essential. If you do not have an education, you will find it hard to get a job. For us Roma, this is even more of a problem. Many of our own have not finished school and cannot get a job because of this.” (Benjamin, 22, young Roma) Nonetheless, the provision of equal opportunities in education has changed significantly in recent decades. Paradoxically, meritocratic edu- cation has become one of the main obstacles in the fight against growing social inequalities and the related distributive (in)justice. Three [at least] of the related problems are worth highlighting as particularly salient, namely the “meritocracy trap” (Markovits, 2019), the “opportunity gap” (Putnam, 2015), and the “meritocratic fallacy” (Sandel, 2020). At the same time, education remains at the heart of public policy as one of themost important indicators of future economic growth and individ- ual well-being. As Stephen Ball points out, education has become “a key factor in ensuring economic productivity and competitiveness in the context of information capitalism” (Ball, 2008, p. 1). His vision of educa- tion as investment – dystopian for many researchers – is based on the