By the dawn of the twentieth century, a new way of thinking about the nature of the child, classroom methods, and the purposes of the school increasingly dominated educational discourse. Something loosely called progressive education, especially its more child-centered aspects, became part of a larger revolt against the formalism of the schools and an assault on tradition. Our finest scholars, such as Lawrence A. Cremin, in his magisterial study of progressivism forty years ago, have tried to explain the origins and meaning of this movement. One should be humbled by their achievements and by the magnitude of the subject. Variously defined, progressivism continues to find its champions and critics, the latter occasionally blaming it for low economic productivity, immorality among the young, and the decline of academic standards. In the popular press, John Dewey's name is often invoked as the evil genius behind the movement, even though he criticized sugar-coated education and letting children do as they please. While scholars doubt whether any unified, coherent movement called progressivism ever existed, its offspring, progressive education, apparently did exist, wreaking havoc on the schools.

In 1851 the conservative journalist and social critic Wilhelm Riehl placed the blame for the revolutionary upheavals of 1848–49 in Germany on the Volksschullehrer, the elementary schoolteachers, who allegedly acted as the ringleaders of rebellion in their local communities. Riehl labeled the “perverse schoolmaster” as the “Mephisto” and “evil demon” who inspired the peasantry to rise against the established order. Riehl's diagnosis of the source of the revolutionary disease appeared quite plausible and convincing to the rulers of various German states who had long harbored the suspicion that dangerously pretentious, miseducated schoolteachers were, as a Bavarian government decree issued in 1829 put it, “spreading mistaken doctrines and erroneous political views among their pupils and in this way dripping the poison of partisan political struggles into the unprejudiced souls [of the young].”

Asian Americans have lived in the United States for over one-and-a-half centuries: Chinese and Asian Indians since the mid-nineteenth century, Japanese since the late nineteenth century, and Koreans and Filipinos since the first decade of the twentieth century (an earlier group of Filipinos had settled near New Orleans in the late eighteenth century). Because of exclusion laws that culminated with the 1924 Immigration Act, however, the Asian American population was relatively miniscule before the mid-twentieth century. As late as 1940, for example, Asian immigrants and their descendants constituted considerably less than 1 percent (0.0019) of the United States population. In contrast, in Hawai'i, which was then a territory and therefore excluded from United States population figures, 58 percent of the people in 1940 were of Asian descent.

Few books have the scope and sweep of Nicholas Lemann's The Big Test: The Secret History of the American Meritocracy (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1999). In 400 pages the author takes up five large topics. The first third is a history of the rise of standardized testing, especially the origins of the Educational Testing Service (ETS), the largest and best known nonprofit testing corporation in this country. The second part traces the post-World War II expansion of higher education, with detailed case studies of the California system and Yale University. The final third features a series of snapshots and essays on affirmative action. Running throughout the entire book are the interrelated topics of college admissions and economic mobility—(the universities supposedly became a “national personnel department” p. 345, which “grant the high scorers a general, long-duration ticket to high status that can be cashed in anywhere p. 347.”)

In The Big Test Nicholas Lemann argues provocatively that the seemingly benign use of academic merit as a principal criterion for admission to selective American colleges has had perverse effects. Selection devices like SAT scores may have given a previously under-advantaged group an admissions advantage, but that advantage cannot be fairly characterized as helping to equalize educational opportunity. Those who cannot play the academic merit game fall behind. Opportunity for all is thus not really broadened.

Life, as the poets have observed, imitates art. Nicholas Lemann has produced the most fascinating brief against meritocracy since Michael Young's 1957 novel that gave the world the term. And Lemann's critique is in a way prefigured in the populist “Chelsea Manifesto” that appears near the end of Young's The Rise of the Meritocracy:

The third section of Nicholas Lemann's book, The Big Test, culminates with the 1997 battle in California over Proposition 209, the antiaffirmative action amendment known as the Civil Rights Initiative. This amendment, which passed, ended racial preferences in state personnel, contracting, and college admissions decisions. This portion of Lemann's book discusses the issues of meritocracy, equal opportunity, and the politics involved in accomplishing these goals. These issues are viewed through the lens of the battle for Proposition 209 and the various individuals—“guardians”—who were beneficiaries of the open meritocracy that allowed them entrance in elite Ivy League institutions.

In 1995, Nicholas Lemann wrote an essay for the American Historical Review (AHR) in which he called himself a “non-academic historian” and described the rewards and challenges for that tribe. The Big Test should be scrutinized as the work of an historian, as this Forum does (and as I have done elsewhere, taking issue with his account of the formation of the Educational Testing Service in 1946 and 1947.) Here I will focus on the nonacademic part of Lemann's identity by comparing his work with several dozen books from his profession on American education.