Early Childhood Policies Favor Individual Merit
Do we climb the social ladder alone or with help from our communities? Early childhood education (ECE) policies are betting on the former, according to a study published July 2, 2025, in the open-access journal PLOS One by Katarzyna Bobrowicz from the University of Luxembourg and University of Liège in Belgium, and colleagues. A 53-country survey of global ECE policies indicates favoritism of competition over cooperation, individualism over solidarity and talent over luck.
Recent decades have seen a rising belief in meritocracy: a 1950s-era Western ideal that one’s individual merit (i.e., their skill and talent), begets success rather than random, uncontrollable factors such as health or family status. In parallel, global governments are increasingly investing in ECE. With this study, Bobrowicz and colleagues explored the extent to which new-and-improved ECE policies promote economic meritocracy.
The researchers examined 92 official ECE documents from the European Union (EU) and Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) and from 53 countries across Africa, the Americas, Asia, Europe and Oceania between 1999-2023. Using text coding and statistical analysis, they searched for references to four contributors to lifelong success: individual skills, individual agency, uncontrollable factors (e.g., health, childhood, climate) and reliance on others (e.g., teachers, family and community).
Results indicate that overall, the countries surveyed embrace economic meritocracy in their ECE policies, promoting individual skill and agency over solidarity and community reliance. Further, countries perceived individual agency as integral to success, and only four countries — Ireland, New Zealand, Malaysia and the Philippines — acknowledged that uncontrollable factors may have an impact. The researchers acknowledged that the OECD and the EU reiterated the importance of universal, equitable access to ECE.
The researchers note that economic meritocracy is reported to strain health and psychological wellbeing, adding that “the peace and prosperity of future societies hinge on social cohesion” rather than hyper-independence. They posit that ECE curricula should be designed to prepare students for collaboration and global cohesion as adults.
Due to this study’s limitations in scope and scale, the researchers recommend further inquiry into local and regional variation in ECE policy, differences (rather than similarities) among the cultures studied, and changes across time.
Katarzyna Bobrowicz adds: “In the last two decades, globally, societies have shared the belief that life outcomes in adulthood are closely tied to individual skills and agency, or, to put it simply, that adults get what they hustle for, what they make of themselves, ultimately – what they deserve. We were curious whether this belief had been inscribed into documents that, in principle at least, determine what toddlers and preschoolers learn in childcare facilities.”
“We expected that this might be the case, and it indeed was. At the outset, we thought that the pivotal role that teachers, parents, peers, and others – who produce food and cook meals, drive the school bus, clean the school corridors – would be actively highlighted and appreciated in the documents. However, to our surprise, this role was missing from most of the analyzed texts, which comprised both government-endorsed curricula and international advisory reports. Finally, we found that the impact that uncontrollable external events, such as illness, misfortune, or inherited social (dis)advantage, have on individual outcomes made way to less than 10% of the analyzed curricula.”
“What children learn in early childhood, or, in fact, at any stage of formal education, is never neutral, values-free, immune to dominant discourses, and so young children may implicitly assume the beliefs promoted by national and international education stakeholders in documents that shape such education. We showed that these stakeholders currently promote the role of individual skills and agency far more than solidarity or social cohesion, and overlook a number of external factors that shape individual outcomes beyond individual agency. We hope that this work will fuel conversations among teachers, parents, and the civil society at large, as to whether they wish for children to be exposed to economic meritocratic beliefs in early childhood education.”
“I was born in a post-communist state, shortly before the Soviet Union was to collapse, into a society where power was up for grabs. My family has not grabbed it, not to the same extent as many others at least, but I nevertheless grew up with opportunities that were available to many of my peers. Like many in the West, or even around the world, I grew up thinking that my merit and my actions would crucially shape my future, and to some extent they perhaps did. But as I chatted with my family and strangers at work or in the streets across Europe, and saw what life opportunities are actually available and to whom in the society, I finally realized the obvious: that ultimately I will never have access to opportunities that many of my peers would have due to parental socioeconomic advantage or network, or personality that was a better fit in formal structures, to name but a few. Then, I listened to an eBook of ‘The Meritocracy Trap’ by Daniel Markovits as I was painting the walls in yet another rental apartment in 2021, and I could not help but wonder whether economic meritocratic beliefs described there, in the context of college education, may set in already in early education. Since this is the educational context in which I typically conduct my studies, I decided to find out whether this might be the case.”
Pablo Gracia adds: “Internationally, early childhood education (ECE) programs disproportionately promote skills and values linked to individual competition, whereas skills and values favoring solidarity and social cohesion are largely neglected.”
In your coverage, please use this URL to provide access to the freely available article in PLOS One: http://plos.io/3TxUcPj
Citation: Bobrowicz K, Gracia P, Teuber Z, Greiff S (2025) The meritocracy trap: Early childhood education policies promote individual achievement far more than social cohesion. PLoS One 20(7): e0326021. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0326021
Author countries: Belgium, Spain, Luxembourg, Germany.
Funding: The author(s) received no specific funding for this work.
https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0326021