Harvard Club of Georgia Book Club - April

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Book: The Tyranny of Merit

by Michael Sandel (Harvard University's Anne T. & Robert M. Bass Professor of Government)

What’s Become of the Common Good?

In an eighth-grade math class at Pacific Palisades junior high in the late 1960s, Michael J. Sandel’s teacher seated students in precise order according to their grades. As their G.P.A.s shifted with the dramatically announced results of every quiz, so did the seating. “I typically shuttled between the second desk and the fourth or fifth,” Sandel recalls, and at age 14, “I thought this was how school worked.”
“The Tyranny of Merit” is like a brilliant response to that misguided but well-meaning math teacher from the viewpoint, as it were, of a kid in some back-row seat of any classroom in a Rust Belt, prairie town or inner-city school in America. What do grades and degrees tell us, Sandel asks, about the widening gap between rich and poor, proud and humiliated, trusting and suspicious, opponent and devotee of Donald Trump.  –NYT  By Arlie Russell Hochschild

If you have not signed up before and want to join the Book Club, please email the organizer, Robert Hahn at rahahn5@gmail.com and give him your email address.