[applicative]

I was aware that all these changes reduce to the fact that half society’s brainpower used to come cheap, but hadn’t registered this very pure expression of it

“The cheap and effective Catholic school system of old has largely collapsed due to the dearth of nuns“

[port11]

Is the modern non-Catholic school system somehow expensive or ineffective? I fail to understand this take. Education also got vastly more complex, we teach kids a bunch of new stuff.

[applicative]

In the 30s, say, the proportion of Catholic population constituted by nuns living in poverty, chastity and obedience for the good of the church and its people was higher than the proportion of American schoolteachers to population today. Remember that in those days Cstholics were paying for our schools too. They could afford their own parallel school system because an astonishing proportion of the women committed to poverty and communal living to supply it. The rest of the United States benefited quite massively from these pious women. We noncatholics benefited again from the fact that women generally had so few choices. It was just a more complex version of the Catholic case.

I am over 60 and can assure you that the older women who taught me in public school would be federal judges and high class lawyers today. The system will be righted when schoolteachers get the pay and respect of eg federal judge and not a moment before.

Quality has deteriorated because we aren’t willing to pay for what we used to get for free.