Daily Inspiration Quote by Robert Sternberg

Meritocracy always needs a receipt. Sternberg’s warning is less about standardized tests as sacred instruments than about what rushes in when you remove a common, if flawed, yardstick: old-fashioned gatekeeping dressed up as “fit” and “potential.”

The phrase “if we don’t have a test” is doing strategic work. He’s not arguing that tests are fair; he’s arguing they’re legible. A test is a public artifact that can be debated, audited, and, at least in theory, improved. Without it, selection slides back into the private realm of recommendation letters, legacy pipelines, interview “chemistry,” and the quiet heuristics that feel natural to decision-makers because they mirror their own backgrounds. That’s why he immediately pivots to “social class” and then sharpens it into the 1950s shorthand: last names and parental status. It’s an accusation that the so-called holistic alternative can be a nostalgia machine, restoring the authority of pedigree under the pretense of nuance.

His time marker matters. The 1950s evoke an era of exclusion that was often polite, procedural, and self-justifying: institutions could claim they were selecting “the best” while defining “best” through inherited advantage. Sternberg’s subtext is that progress in access has been contingent, not inevitable. Remove a standardized mechanism and you don’t get freedom; you get discretion. And discretion, in unequal societies, tends to drift toward the already comfortable.

In today’s admissions and hiring debates, this reads as a caution against confusing “anti-test” with “anti-inequality.” When measurement disappears, power doesn’t. It just becomes harder to see.