Tony Judt is meditating on education again in the New York Review of Books (August 19th), this time not secondary school but university, and in particular King’s College, Cambridge, which he started to attend in 1966.

“My King’s,” he writes, “was the very incarnation of meritocratic postwar Britain. Most of us got where we were by doing well in exams and, to a striking extent, we pursued occupations that reflected our early talents and interests. The cohort of Kingsmen who came up in 1966 stand out in their choice of careers: more than any group before or since, we opted for education, public service, the higher reaches of journalism, the arts, and the unprofitable end of the liberal professions.”

It is depressing, he adds, to note how quickly and in what numbers the graduates of the 1970s and since resorted to the world of private banking, commerce, and the more remunerative reaches of the law.

He speaks fondly of several of his teachers – not all of them necessarily noted scholars – and in particular of John Dunn, “who – in the course of one extended conversation on the political thought of John Locke – broke through my well-armored adolescent Marxism and first introduced me to the challenges of intellectual history. He managed this by the simple device of listening very intently to everything I said, taking it with extraordinary seriousness on its own terms, and then picking it gently and firmly apart in a way that I could both accept and respect.”

This instance illustrates perhaps not so much good education as the very best – which brings us to the slight strangeness of Judt’s understanding of the meaning of the word meritocracy. It is not to be disputed that plucking young Judt from a working class Jewish family in south London and dropping him perhaps (initially and briefly) bewildered into the rituals of “dinner in hall” at King’s was a process which had as its guiding, but arguably not sole, principle the discovery and promotion of merit. Merit, however, may be a rather broad stripe, affecting not just one per cent of the population but five or ten or fifteen, or even more. Its effects then (in a British context) are not just to take the poor London lad to Cambridge and thence on to Berkeley but to take the Glasgow lass from Easterhouse and make her a teacher or to make the steel worker’s son from Rotherham an accountant. And such developments might be seen by many social historians of postwar Britain to be of greater significance than the (perhaps disputed) number of poor children who may have gone to Oxford or Cambridge.

Tony Judt’s greatest sadness of course is at the decline of the selective non-fee-paying grammar school, which was good to him and many of his generation and later ones (that success has been celebrated in so far as it affected Northern Irish Catholics too through focus on the emblematic “Boys of St Columb’s”). Judt  now regrets that access to the elite education available at the ancient universities seems to be virtually confined once more to children whose wealthy parents have sent them to expensive private schools, a development which occurred chiefly on the watch of New Labour, no doubt another matter of bitter regret for this faithful social democrat.