157 © Springer International Publishing AG, part of Springer Nature 2018 A. C. Joerchel, G. Benetka (eds.), Memories of Gustav Ichheiser, Theory and History in the Human and Social Sciences, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-72508-6_9 Chapter 9 Ideology of Success and the Dilemma of Education Today Luca Tateo Distinctions and Inequalities In many contemporary societies, education has a peculiar characteristic: Based on its own premises, its ultimate goals are unachievable, yet it will never fail to achieve those goals. Gustav Ichheiser (1943a) stressed this paradox some 70 years ago in what he called the “discrepancy between the norms of success and the conditions of success” (p. 139). Every society has, indeed, a general idea and some established ideal conditions specifying which type of individuals may achieve success and the corresponding ways in which success ought to be achieved. These ideal conditions represent the frame of reference and the lens through which society sees itself as “just” and “ordered.” Yet, the actual conditions under which success may be attained do not always correspond to the ideal representation of the norms for success. A widespread term like “meritocracy,” which is the idea of a social division of labor according to individual skills which should be able to cultivate the talented (Lampert, 2012), represents a good example of the interplay between (1) the ideo- logical assumption that “individuals ‘ought’ to attain success who are competent and worthy, and, to formulate it negatively, the incompetent and unworthy should be denied success” (Ichheiser, 1943a, p. 137) and (2) the impossibility of realizing the ideal conditions for success in an actual social context. Nevertheless, the simple existence of this general norm, attached to the value of success, is per se an evidence supporting the fairness of the existing social order. Despite the fact that citizens will probably never experience a real and complete meritocracy, the existence of the norm becomes a paradoxical justifcation for the very same social order that itself is not actually able to fulfll the meritocratic norm. The most common solution to the L. Tateo (*) Department of Communication and Psychology, Research Centre for Cultural Psychology, Aalborg University, Aalborg, Denmark e-mail: luca@hum.aau