Inequality is a tremendous force that operates throughout life and in all societies. The question is whether education can be or should be the principal tool that societies use to combat it.

At a basic level, I believe you want to give all children an equal start in life as much as possible. Education is one tool that works towards this. We also want to prepare young people for the opportunities they might encounter later on. In this way, there’s no doubt that education helps create a more equal society.

Nevertheless, other powerful forces are operating during your school years that, before and after, education cannot neutralise on its own. As a famous sociologist once noted, “Education cannot compensate for society.”

Without a doubt, if you want more equality, you must make society more equal. You have to reduce the disparities of wealth, income, cultural capital, environmental circumstances and discrimination. Education can only skim the surface of some of these issues, while it can’t address others at all.

This is why, when you look at the impact of education on social mobility, you find that typically children from advantaged backgrounds do better than children from less advantaged backgrounds. Privileged children use their educational advantages to intensify their advantage over their lifetimes further. As such, education is not the antidote to inequality.

In Britain in the 1960s, there was a growing demand for white-collar employees, especially in retail and clerical occupations, which were growing rapidly. In manufacturing, factories required fewer shop floor jobs and more bureaucratic jobs to operate. The education system wasn’t changing as rapidly as the labour market, so employers merely hired people with lower educational qualifications for these higher grade jobs because they had no other option. These newly created white-collar positions were often called “clean jobs”: they were more comfortable, better paid, higher status and considered better than factory floor jobs. Once the shift towards these positions began, parents realised that better education would make their children more competitive for this type of employment.

Indeed, this was the case, and education grew to keep pace with changes in the labour market. Yet, it wasn’t that employers necessarily required better-educated workers; they didn’t. Employers wanted the best workers they could find, and they hired the best regardless of how much education they had.

My children grew up in Britain. As they approached university age, I told them, “You can go to university in America if you want, and then you don’t have to choose a speciality until the very end. Or, you can stay in Britain and, in which case, the specialisms you’ve already begun to develop will stand you in good stead.”

I had hoped I genuinely wouldn’t care, but I was a little bit relieved when they both chose to stay in Britain. I felt this way because I understand the value of early specialisation, even though it is highly unfashionable.

Eventually, one of my children chose a profession related to his specialism, while the other did not. I think they are much better people for having gained expertise in one subject and delving deeply into its complexities at an early age. I think they’ve benefited from that enormously.

Overall, a good education is one that balances a broad liberal education, like in America, with a highly specialised and more technical education, as many European countries provide.

There’s a widely held belief in meritocracy – and for a good reason. Meritocratic systems are far better than their predecessors, which were based on hereditary talent and hereditary rule.

The term “meritocracy” wasn’t coined until the end of the 1950s. Nevertheless, the notion that everyone should have an equal opportunity to excel based on their native intelligence and hard work originated in the early 20th century. It was undoubtedly preferable to what came before it. More specifically, it was much better to provide everyone with the educational tools for a better future than to give it to a hereditary group of people who already had them.

Over time, we’ve come to learn that education doesn’t solve all the problems of society. Furthermore, it doesn’t create equality; advantaged people do better than disadvantaged people in education as well as outside of it.

The idea of a meritocracy seems more like an illusion. In other words, it’s merely a new, more palatable justification for people who already have privilege to defend and enhance it.

In a democratic world, a continually improving education system that’s equally available does cancel out some inequalities. However, it’s not the magic bullet that will end all disparities. Other actions outside education must be taken to reduce inequality.