The Big Test

About this book

"This book shows us for the first time the ideas, the people, and the politics behind the fifty-year-old system that determines the course of Americans' lives." "It began as a utopian experiment - launched by James Bryant Conant, president of Harvard University, and Henry Chauncey, head of the brand-new Educational Testing Service (ETS) - to use the then-young science of intelligence testing to assess and sort American students fairly and dispassionately in order to create a new democratic elite that would lead postwar America to progress, strength, and prosperity. No writer before Nicholas Lemann has gained access to the archives of the all-powerful ETS, and none has understood the significance of this extraordinary drama." "Lemann describes the consequences, for individual lives and for society as a whole, of this effort to create a new meritocracy." "For the utopian experiment didn't turn out as planned. It created a new elite but also generated conflict and tension, particularly over the issue of race, and America is now a society whose best-educated, most privileged, and most powerful people seem to be leaders without followers - prosperous, resented figures who don't hold the country together around their ideas yet who are trying, like the old elite, to perpetuate themselves down through the generations. Lemann shows that this American meritocracy is neither natural nor inevitable, and it does not apportion opportunity equally or fairly."--BOOK JACKET.

Themes & subjects

About the author

Nicholas Lemann

1954

Nicholas Berthelot Lemann (born 1954 )is an American writer and academic, and is the Joseph Pulitzer II and Edith Pulitzer Moore Professor of Journalism and Dean Emeritus of the Faculty of Journalism at the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism.] He has been a staff writer at *The New Yorker* since 1999. **Source**: [Nicholas Lemann](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nicholas_Lemann) on Wikipedia.