THE ESSENTIALS

• Fifty years ago, sociologists Pierre Bourdieu and Jean-Claude Passeron denounced the meritocratic illusion of school.
• These social and achievement inequalities persist, as highlighted by school assessments.
• Behind the promotion of excellence, we continue to transform socially inherited skills into academic judgments.

The promise that schools make to the nearly 12 million students who attend them, from primary to secondary level, is that of equal access to knowledge . Everyone would have the same opportunities, and the institution would recognize nothing other than hard work or intellectual ability. This is the heart of the meritocratic principle.

Yet, more than fifty years ago, in their now classic work, Reproduction , Pierre Bourdieu and Jean-Claude Passeron established that this principle masks inequalities in achievement, which are objectively dependent on social background. Contemporary sociological research shows that while the ideal of merit has evolved, it continues to justify differences in academic success.

In a context where high school students are protesting against the lack of resources and the inequalities of guidance procedures, let us revisit what this research teaches us about educational inequalities, in line with our collective work on the mechanisms of social reproduction in the 21st century .

Inequalities that resist mass schooling

Although obvious to today’s students, the meritocratic principle accompanied the movement towards the “democratization” of the school system. The Ferry Laws at the end of the 19th century, followed by free secondary education from the 1930s and the unification of secondary school tracks from the 1950s, embody this ideal of broadening access to education and knowledge through merit rather than money.

The waves of mass schooling , from secondary school from the 1970s and then higher education in the 1990s, can thus give the impression that the education system now allows access for everyone to education previously reserved for an elite.

However, no one can ignore today that this principle is an illusion. Since the 1960s and the first INED surveys by Alfred Sauvy or Alain Girard , it has been established that academic success is closely dependent on social background.

The 2025 national assessments in French and mathematics show these differences from the first year of primary school and throughout primary school. Worse, a report by France Stratégie notes that the gaps are widening: while students belonging to a family with a “disadvantaged” profession and socio-professional category (PCS) experience, between the first and fifth years of primary school, a “very positive evolution” in their level in French (+13.6%) and in mathematics (+16.1%), it is children from “very advantaged” PCS who benefit more from school (respectively +37.5% and +45.5%).

According to the same report, in middle school, not only do performance levels in French and mathematics differ from the first year of middle school (6th grade) depending on parents’ profession or level of education, but these gaps tend to widen. For example, in 2022, the pass rates for the national diploma (brevet) were 97% for schools with students from the most affluent backgrounds and 79% for those with the most disadvantaged students.

Merit: an ambivalent discourse

Therefore, it is not surprising that 90% of children of managers and teachers opt for the general education track, compared to 40% of children of unskilled workers, with those from more modest backgrounds predominantly choosing vocational secondary education. In higher education , children of managers are the most numerous in university programs (35% of the total student body in 2024, compared to 8.7% of children of manual workers) and, at the top of the educational pyramid, in preparatory classes for the Grandes Écoles (54% versus 6%) or the Écoles Normales Supérieures (65% versus 2%).

It is this opposition between equality in principle and inequality in practice that Pierre Bourdieu and Jean-Claude Passeron were already questioning a little over 50 years ago in Reproduction . Not only does the school value what is transmitted first in families (the “good” tastes or the necessary language), by validating it in the form of academic judgment (“brilliant”, “gifted”…) or diploma, but it also makes it accepted that those who succeed or fail deserve it.

The myth of equal opportunity serves a purpose: by convincing students and their families of this principle, the education system manages to make academic and social hierarchies inextricably linked. Contrary to popular belief about this work, this is actually one of the crucial points in the two sociologists’ argument.

“For social destiny to be transformed into a vocation of freedom or into the merit of the person (…), it is necessary and sufficient that the School (…) succeed in convincing individuals that they themselves have chosen or conquered the destinies that social necessity had previously assigned to them.”
– “Reproduction”, pp. 249-250.

Freedom of choice or competition?

A whole body of recent work in sociology, history and educational sciences allows us to update and deepen these analyses.

While a discourse defending “school values” and classical knowledge has long been opposed to the analyses of Reproduction , it is less conservatism than competitive individualism that characterizes meritocratic conceptions of educational institutions today. Of course, the former have not completely disappeared; the opposition to the middle school reform championed by Najat Vallaud-Belkacem in 2015 (de-disciplinarization through the creation of “interdisciplinary practical courses,” including the teaching of Latin and Greek) remains a good example.

But the reforms carried out over the last twenty years have added a form of “modernisation” promoting the freedom of students to optimize their resources and free their choices from a system presented as too constrained: the high school reforms of François Fillon and Jean-Michel Blanquer , the implementation of Parcoursup or the deregulation of the school map are emblematic examples.

These measures, conducted like all those that have followed one another since the 1970s in the name of the fight against social inequalities in education, have not reduced them at all: the combinations of specialties from the first year onwards have reconstituted, with more refinement, the social sorting that the old tracks in general education carried out, adding a bonus to knowledge of the education system which feeds the strategies of entry into higher education tracks in the upper classes.

This encouragement of strategic uses of the education system, evident for example in the publication of rankings of the “best schools,” goes hand in hand with autonomy and competition, which reinforce social segregation. It is therefore no surprise that more than 40% of students in private schools come from privileged backgrounds , compared to 20% in public schools.

Promoting “excellence”

This “modernization” of the meritocratic discourse is associated with a promotion of excellence: that of individuals whom the system, through its requirements, should allow to be revealed, and that of institutions, including higher education, whose performance is measured in international rankings.

This excellence is now less appreciated from the perspective of the school itself, for example through the mastery of classical knowledge, than from the angle of its links with the economic world. While the weight of diplomas in career paths remains a characteristic of France, we must take into account the ever-increasing influence of the economic world on educational policies, such as attempts to eliminate certain general academic tracks or the development of programs adapted to “professional realities” through “competency-based learning.”

More than fifty years ago, Pierre Bourdieu and Jean-Claude Passeron demonstrated the relationship between the education system and social hierarchies. While contemporary realities are no longer the same, the meritocratic discourse “version 2026” continues to make social inequalities acceptable.

Author Bios: Jerome Camus is a Senior Lecturer in Sociology – Education, socio-cultural activities, childhood, youth, family at the University of Tours, Bertrand Geay is Professor of Educational Sciences at the University of Paris 8 – Vincennes Saint-Denis, Pierig Humeau is a Lecturer in Sociology at the University of Limoges and Pierre Clément is a Senior Lecturer in Educational Sciences at the University of Rouen Normandy