[rtisdale]

>That's the way it's always been. That's the way it has to be.

My sarcasm detector may be off so if it was, please forgive me.

Why must it continue to be that way?

It's possible we must expect and accept that children from broken, impoverished, or abusive homes will just be, well, screwed in comparison to their better off peers.

Can't we instead look for a better way?

- Improve the funding and education of our public schools (particularly by the decoupling of property taxes being the primary source of school funding).

- Take a hard look at our current minimum wage and find a way to make it easier for hard working people to make ends meet, allowing them more time to nurture and teach their children.

Giving up on hard luck children is by extension giving up on our societies future. To me at least, thats simply untenable.

[brighton36]

Because exceptionalism requires knowledge asymmetry, relative to the mean. I think it's definitional that You can't have a macro-scale program that delivers exceptional results to all participants.

I don't think mediocre is unacceptable. But, I do think the country's achievement systems do. And yes, we should look for better systems.

I don't think funding will improve the education system much, unfortunately. Probably we would be better off spending that money reducing the number of single parent families. (Somehow...)

[saiya-jin]

I think I get the downvotes, although there is some truth. If everybody is exceptional, nobody is. For better or worse, we still live in system where parents are responsible for their kids wellbeing. You can't just outsource good parenting to school teachers. Just because somebody has this high paying job and doesn't have time for your kids at all, the reality won't reshuffle itself to make them feel like success. Do your god damn job as a parent, and don't just throw money at the problem.

On the other side, we all would benefit from good quality education for everybody. I mean proper benefit for whole mankind for generations, golden age and whatnot.

Currently, in many places which prefer predatory mindset (looking at you too, US), its everybody for themselves, fuck the rest, the higher I am above everybody else the better I am off. Well, not really if you actually want to live in society. Otherwise you end up walled in your luxury home like in South Africa, with private security, but afraid to go out after dark, carrying guns everywhere, high crime rate etc.

[brighton36]

People don't want to hear what they don't want to hear. The downvotes are reasonable. The vote count has little to do with truth, and much to do with affirmation.

I agree that we all benefit from a high quality education for the children.

I think you're describing 'Bellum omnium contra omnes'. And yes, we seem to be heading in that direction in much of the world.

[ElFitz]

Depends; you can could consider the mean to that of the whole world, or the whole of History, and seek exceptionalism relative to that.

In case, we would seek to have a macro-scale program delivering exceptional results to all of our current participants.

[brighton36]

If we consider the mean to 'that of the whole world' then, our task is done. A child from today needs to merely watch television for an hour a day, in order to be wiser than the average human being across time. School would be unnecessary.

Your last sentence isn't reasonable. We would test the performance of participants in your proposed program, and a bell curve would immediately arise.

[ElFitz]

> A child from today needs to merely watch television for an hour a day, in order to be wiser than the average human being across time.

Depends what you mean by wiser. It really seems we absolutely don't have the same definition.

> Your last sentence isn't reasonable. We would test the performance of participants in your proposed program, and a bell curve would immediately arise.

So what? Nowhere did I say it would deliver equally exceptional results to all the participants.

Just that it's goal would be to deliver exceptional results to all current participants, compared to the means of the rest of the world and all of human history.

How does your inevitable bell curve contradict or invalidate any of it? How does having internal variations invalidate any of it?

[thereisnospork]

>we must expect and accept that children from broken, impoverished, or abusive homes will just be, well, screwed in comparison to their better off peers.

It is worth noting that a world where children from broken, impoverished (etc.) homes are not disadvantaged is a world where one cannot advantage one's own kids.

There is of course a strong argument for significant societal investment in keeping children from broken homes from raising broken homes of their own.

[cjslep]

> It is worth noting that a world where children from broken, impoverished (etc.) homes are not disadvantaged is a world where one cannot advantage one's own kids

This is such an uncreative, broken, zero-sum, awful line of reasoning. One can shift up both the bottom and top rungs of a scale simultaneously, so that there would still be advantaged kids despite there being fewer children from broken/impoverished homes.

In fact, such a thing has been done but not necessarily for morally good reasons either. This uplift is exactly what was seen when schools were desegregated in the South and the bottom (black schools) were uplifted: the emergence of private expensive religious schools that were effectively white-only, raising the uppermost advantaged bar as well.

[keenmaster]

If every kid had an equally advantaged upbringing, the world would be a better place. The metaphorical pie would grow rather than just be subdivided more. Furthermore, the gains would be somewhat non-linear. There are many benefits to having a larger network of people on the same psycho-intellectual wavelength. Contributions from the marginal additions to the network would propagate back and forth across the network, adding value along the way in a manner that transcends the self. That is a strong case for greater state involvement and expenditure in setting our youth up for success, especially disadvantaged youth. It’s also a strong case for easing off of our property tax-based system for allocating school revenues, which naturally results in very different school quality. Even if you’re cynical about how much the government can do, let’s say that 20% of disadvantaged youth that otherwise would have led terrible lives instead become productive citizens and parents as a result of stringent, uncompromising education reform. That 20% will break the cycle for their kids, and after a few generations, the baseline level of parenting in this country will be improved by a good amount.

[thereisnospork]

If every kid has an equally advantaged upbringing then by definition a crack-whore[1] is as good a mother as anyone's. I'm no social-psychiatrist but I'd wager 'wanting to provide better for one's offspring' ranks just behind 'food' and 'sex' as primal motivators.

Please don't take this as an argument against taking steps to improve education and opportunity[2], only that anything approaching true flatness would represent a massive disruption of social order and motivation.

[1] Literal.

[2] I agree with most of your suggestions; educated persons are valuable.

[keenmaster]

Yep, I don't disagree with any of that. What I really meant was that we'd be much better off if every kid had at least the baseline quality of parenting in upper-middle-class suburbs. Competition for even better parenting would still exist at the margins, albeit with diminishing returns.

[mnl]

Well, maybe one's own kids aren't really anything to write home about, hence they really could do with that kind of advantage over more talented yet poorer ones. But then what's the "societal" point in perpetuating such state of affairs?

[SuoDuanDao]

Society definitely doesn't benefit, I think we can afford massive inequality much more easily than reduced social mobility. That the richest classes have the option to 'pull the ladder up' behind their children is an indication that democracy is not delivering the results it should.

But I don't think there are easy fixes, because there's also intergenerational social mobility - working class parents going without luxuries to send their children to a better school etc. It's very tough to give poor-but-ambitious families means to improve their lot over a long time without already-wealthy families monopolizing those opportunities.

[TheOtherHobbes]

The broken families in impoverished homes are far less toxic to society than the broken families in privileged homes.

See recent US and UK politics for examples. Although perhaps like attracts like, so if there's enough dysfunction around at all levels you get a politics of brokenness with dysfunctional broken leaders appealing to broken supporters.