[com2kid]

> You're not going to improve the lives of impoverished children by lowering the bar. It's absurd.

As a poor kid in Seattle, I am now no longer poor because of a high bar.

In my high school (West Seattle High School!) we edited DNA. We spliced DNA, inserted a gene, closed it up, and made bacteria change color. It was awesome.

> The best solution I can think of is to pay children to succeed in academics or extracurriculars

Unfortunately, extrinsic motivations mess people up and don't end well long term.

[HlessClaudesman]

Extrinsic motivation works, for a decent percentage of people, as long as the reward keeps comming. Therefore it would probably need to be coupled with more vocational training/ apprenticeships/ internships to ease passage into the adult world of extrinsic motivations.

[com2kid]

> Extrinsic motivation works, for a decent percentage of people, as long as the reward keeps comming.

Therein lines the problem.

Pay people enough $ and they'll go to the gym and get in shape, but once the $ stops they'll almost universally stop going.

Take people who have a regular gym habit, start paying them, stop paying them and most of them will stop going to the gym, adding in the extrinsic motivation will actually destroy the intrinsic motivation (and pleasure!) they once had around the activity.

With enough extrinsic only motivators, people stop feeling any actual joy in life, everything becomes a fight for an external reward.

[HlessClaudesman]

How can a public institution foster intrinsic motivation within an individual? Better to focus limited resources on what institutions have some competence at: throwing money at a problem.

[t0suj4]

For starters treat the kids like people. I don't know how many times kids compared their schools to prisons. Nobody wants to be in prison.

The home environment also contributes a great deal to academic success or failure. I know of households that actively dissuade kids from pursuing academic success. If parents won't intervene in their children's education for any reason that diminishes their chance of success.

[com2kid]

> How can a public institution foster intrinsic motivation within an individual?

Honestly, it is part of the social contract that the government, or at least society, needs to maintain.

If you look at cultures where education is valued, where academic achievement is high, there is a very strong social contract in place that equates academic success to success later in life. China has had national exams for over a thousand years, with the same promise: Anyone who does well in school and succeeds can have their station in life elevated by doing well in school.

Rich or poor, rural or urban, everyone (or at least a large swath of people) in China has traditionally had this guarantee lying around.

Do good in school, and you will be taken care of after that. You can get a good spouse, a good job, and life will get easier.

America has actively worked to break such promises. Historically when a minority community worked together and excelled, their houses and businesses got literally burned down to the ground, or sometimes, less violently, just taken away from them.

That teaches a lesson right there, "work hard, and fuck you".

Rather recently, middle class white students in America studied hard only to find the social contract involved universities jacking up tuition fees to sky high levels, loading them down with tons of debt, and then leaving school for crap jobs and a life of constant interest payments.

A shit ton better than being burned out of your house, but it still shows how American society is willing to tear up social contracts so that powerful institutions can earn some extra $$$.

Housing then folds into this, it used to be American cities worked hard to expand the housing supply, they eagerly courted young families, now cities are actively hostile to anyone new coming to town.

But the fact is, maintaining that social contract pays for itself many times over with social stability, a lesson America has apparently forgotten.

Some parts of the government get this, some types of inefficient contracts (build/buy American) are in fact job creation programs, but we need to do a lot better.

Build more housing, a ton more, and force state universities to have much lower tuition by removing the obscene overhead. I rarely advocate for "just cut funding and make people figure it out", but honestly, pass a law saying State Universities aren't allowed to cut any faculty positions, then demand they cut tuition by 50%, and have their new budgets independently audited. Sure the student swimming pool may get shut down, but too bad.