The Mean Between Extremes: Meritocracy in the Balance (Paperback) (ISBN-13: 9798187491278)

Ideas rarely remain confined to the ivory tower.

Like fashions that begin in small circles before quietly finding their way into everyday life, ideas often spread from a handful of scholars and institutions until they reshape the assumptions the rest of us scarcely realize we have inherited.

In The Mean Between Extremes: Meritocracy in the Balance, Albert Arnesto traces the surprising journey of ideas about merit, objectivity, fairness, and identity from philosophy seminars and university departments into schools, corporations, courtrooms, and the public square. Drawing on history, philosophy, psychology, education, and computing, he explores subjects as varied as grade inflation, intelligence testing, the history of computing, artificial intelligence, mathematics education, and the changing role of universities in American life, asking how abstract theories came to influence the institutions that shape everyday experience.

Neither a nostalgic defense of the past nor an argument against the ongoing pursuit of equality, inclusion, human dignity, and broader opportunity, The Mean Between Extremes explores whether a free and pluralistic society can preserve rigorous standards without abandoning either excellence or humanity. At once intellectual history and philosophical inquiry, it invites readers to reconsider one of the defining questions of our time: How should a society recognize merit when the very standards by which merit is measured have themselves become contested?