I am converting some of my long academic articles into short blog posts using AI. Here is the first one.
For generations, education has been built around a seemingly reasonable idea: meritocracy. Students who demonstrate more ability, work harder, and achieve more should receive greater opportunities and rewards. Schools operationalize this idea through grades, examinations, rankings, credentials, and admissions systems designed to identify who has the most “merit.”
But what if the problem is not simply how fairly we measure merit? What if the idea of ranking people according to a common definition of merit is itself fundamentally flawed?
Ironically, the term meritocracy was not originally invented as an ideal. British sociologist Michael Young popularized it in his 1958 satire The Rise of the Meritocracy as a warning about a society that sorted people according to supposedly objective measures of intelligence and effort. Yet the term gradually became a positive aspiration.
Education has embraced this logic particularly enthusiastically. Students compete for grades, test scores, university places, scholarships, recognition, and eventually jobs. Success is largely defined by outperforming others on measures determined by institutions.
There are several problems with this system.
First, human beings are far too different to be meaningfully judged on a single scale. People have different strengths, personalities, interests, motivations, experiences, and circumstances. Their abilities form what might be called “jagged profiles”: someone who struggles in one domain may be extraordinary in another.
Second, what counts as merit is never neutral. Schools have historically privileged certain forms of knowledge and ability while paying much less attention to others. Mathematics, academic literacy, and test-taking may be rewarded while artistic, interpersonal, entrepreneurial, practical, or other capabilities receive less recognition. Yet what society considers valuable changes over time. The rise of AI makes this especially important because abilities once highly rewarded may become easier to automate, while previously undervalued human capabilities can become increasingly significant.
Third, meritocracy turns education into competition. When opportunities are scarce and everyone is evaluated against the same measures, classmates easily become competitors. One person’s advancement can depend on another person’s lower ranking. This can generate enormous pressure while encouraging students to focus on their own success rather than on what they can contribute to others.
We propose a different organizing principle: human interdependence.
The starting point is not to ask how every student can become better at the same things. Instead, education should help each student discover and develop their unique greatness—the distinctive combination of strengths, interests, passions, experiences, and abilities that enables that person to become exceptionally good at something.
But individual greatness alone is not enough. Its value emerges through contribution.
A person’s strengths become meaningful when they are used to find and solve problems that matter to other people. At the same time, each of us depends upon the abilities of others to accomplish things we cannot accomplish ourselves. Human difference, therefore, is not a problem to eliminate. It is the foundation of genuine collaboration and interdependence.
This changes what schools should do.
Personalized learning should mean more than allowing students to move at different speeds through the same curriculum. It should give students opportunities to discover their interests and strengths. Learning should increasingly involve finding and solving authentic problems rather than completing exercises whose problems and answers have already been determined by teachers. Collaboration should bring together genuinely different talents rather than simply placing several students around the same assignment.
In the age of AI, this possibility becomes even more important. Students can increasingly access information and expertise when they need them. Learning can therefore become part of doing: students learn through identifying meaningful problems, working with others, using AI and other resources, creating solutions, and considering the consequences of their actions.
The fundamental question for education then changes.
Instead of asking, “How well does this student compare with everyone else?” we can ask:
“What can this student become exceptionally good at, and how can that greatness create value for others?”
That shift—from competition to contribution, from uniformity to uniqueness, and from independence to interdependence—may be one of the most important transformations education needs for the age of AI.
Based on the article:
Zhao, Y., & Zhong, R. (2026). From meritocracy to human interdependence: Redefining the purpose of education. ECNU Review of Education, 9(2). https://doi.org/10.1177/20965311251351988
The article was first published online in 2025 and appears in the 2026 volume of ECNU Review of Education.
