John Schaar on Equal Opportunity

John Schaar condemns equal opportunity as wickedly conservative in a classic 1967 paper. It's a shame this line of thinking hasn't gotten much attention.

No policy formula is better designed to fortify the dominant institutions, values, and ends of the American social order than the formula of equality of opportunity, for it offers *everyone* a fair and equal chance to find a place within that order...The facile formula of equal opportunity...opens more and more opportunities for more and more people to contribute more and more energies toward the realization of a mass, bureaucratic, technological, privatized, militaristic, bored, and thrill-seeking, consumption-oriented society--a society of well-fed, congenial, and sybaritic monkeys surrounded by gadgets and pleasure-toys.a