The Myth of Pure Merit

Pakistan loves the word merit. It appears in speeches, university admissions, job advertisements, scholarship announcements and competitive exams. It sounds clean and fair. It tells us that those who rise have earned their place, while those who do not must simply work harder. But merit is never born in the examination hall. It is shaped long before the exam begins. A child who grows up with books, internet access, electricity, private tuition, educated parents and English-speaking confidence enters a competition with invisible support. Another child enters the same competition after studying in overcrowded classrooms, sharing textbooks, travelling long distances, managing household work or learning from teachers who are themselves under-resourced. Later, both are judged by the same test and told that the result is neutral. Gang arrested for snatching woman’s purse This is not fairness. It is inequality wearing the language of fairness. Pakistan’s education crisis makes this clear. The Pakistan Institute of Education’s Pakistan Education Statistics 2022–23 reported over 26 million out-of-school children aged five to 16. The World Bank’s Pakistan Learning Poverty Brief estimated that 77 per cent of children of late primary age are not proficient in reading, adjusted for children who are out of school. These are not small gaps. They are structural barriers that shape who gets to compete at all. Yet our public culture speaks as if the field is level. We say the hardworking student succeeds. That is sometimes true, but incomplete. Hard work matters, but hard work is not equally supported. Some students work hard with quiet rooms, coaching centres and stable meals. Others work hard amid load-shedding, unpaid care work, family debt and the constant fear that education may become unaffordable. DC directs timely completion of Rawalpindi beautification projects The myth of pure merit is cruel because it converts social advantage into personal virtue. The privileged begin to believe they succeeded only because they were brilliant. The excluded are made to believe they failed because they lacked talent, discipline or ambition. In this way, merit becomes not only a system of selection but also a moral story. This story becomes sharper in English-speaking spaces. A candidate who speaks polished English is often perceived as confident, modern and intelligent. A candidate with strong ideas but weaker English may be dismissed as less capable. The interview panel may not intend to discriminate, but it rewards a style of speech that is distributed unequally by class, school type and family background. Police arrest 3 accused in separate cases across Attock The Annual Status of Education Report, ASER Pakistan 2023, showed worrying learning outcomes, including low English reading levels among many children. This means that language confidence is not simply an individual achievement. It is connected to school quality, home environment, region and class. When English becomes the hidden standard of competence, merit becomes another name for cultural capital. None of this means that effort should be ignored. It means effort must be understood honestly. A student from a poor background who reaches university after surviving a weak schooling system has already shown extraordinary merit. A student who performs modestly despite severe barriers may possess more resilience, intelligence and discipline than a privileged student who performs better under ideal conditions. Commissioner reviews medical facilities, CM’s free medicine program at HFH A just society should not abandon merit. It should deepen it. Real merit must ask not only who scored the highest, but who had the conditions to prepare. It must ask who was excluded before the exam. It must ask whose confidence was cultivated from childhood and whose was broken by humiliation. Admissions, scholarships and hiring systems need to look beyond marks alone. They should recognise school background, region, family income, first-generation status, language disadvantage and the quality of previous educational opportunities. This is not lowering standards. It is making standards more honest. Farrukh Khokhar, 2 accomplices get life imprisonment in Majid Satti murder case Pakistan’s obsession with merit will remain hollow as long as it refuses to discuss inherited advantage. A society cannot distribute unequal childhoods and then celebrate equal competition. It cannot starve public education and then blame children for failing to meet private standards. Merit is meaningful only when opportunity is real. Until then, merit will continue to function as the respectable language of inequality. The real test for Pakistan is, therefore, not whether it can identify the best performers after unequal preparation. The real test is whether it can build institutions that make preparation itself less unequal. Without that, every celebration of merit will remain morally incomplete. Muhammad UsamaThe writer has an MPhil in Political Science, Forman Christian College University, and a BS Sociology from Quaid-i-Azam University. He can be reached at osamadhariwal@gmail. com

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