Education Quote by Robert Bork

Bork’s line is less a lament about schooling than a brief for hierarchy, dressed up as common sense. The key move is his use of “necessarily” and “inevitably”: absolutist adverbs that shut down compromise before it’s even proposed. If egalitarianism must, by definition, smother excellence, then any policy aimed at equal access or reduced disparities can be cast as an attack on “achievement” itself. That framing isn’t neutral; it’s a legalistic preemption.

The subtext is a defense of sorting. “Procedures that might reveal differing levels of achievement” sounds technocratic, but it points to testing, tracking, selective admissions, and credentialing regimes that don’t just measure ability; they produce social winners and losers, often by laundering class advantage into “merit.” Bork’s argument needs that laundering to look clean. By equating egalitarian aims with hostility to measurement, he avoids the harder question: whether the measurements are fair, what they actually measure, and how tightly they should govern life chances.

Context matters: Bork was a conservative jurist and public official who became emblematic of a broader late-20th-century backlash against civil-rights-era egalitarian policy and the rise of “equal outcomes” as a conservative cautionary tale. In that political climate, “meritocracy” functioned as moral cover for preserving institutions that reward the already-prepared. The rhetoric works because it flatters the listener: if you’ve done well, the system must be merit-based; if someone questions the system, they must resent excellence. The cleverness is that it turns a debate about opportunity into a referendum on virtue.