Ability, Inequality and Post-Pandemic Schools: Rethinking Contemporary Myths of Meritocracy

Alice Bradbury discusses how the meritocracy myth reinforces educational inequalities and analyses how the recent educational developments of datafication and neuroscience might challenge how we classify and label children as we rebuild a post-pandemic schooling system.

The Covid-19 pandemic closed schools, but this hiatus provides an opportunity to rethink the fundamental principles of our education system. In this thought-provoking book, Alice Bradbury discusses how before the pandemic the education system assumed ability to be measurable and innate, and how this meritocracy myth reinforced educational inequalities - a central issue during the crisis. Drawing on a project on ability grouping practices, Bradbury analyses how the recent educational developments of datafication and neuroscience have revised these ideas about how we classify and label children, and how we can rethink the idea of innate intelligence as we rebuild a post-pandemic schooling system.