conuly

"How is this bullshit, let me count the ways...."

Ohhhh man!

Reminds me of a remark my daughter made this evening about her over-privileged frat-boy cousin: "He has a silver spoon wedged up his ass."

Actually, in the scenario you describe, we wouldn't have any more doctors, lawyers or engineers than we do now. The med schools, law schools and engineering schools would simply raise their requirements and their prices. They'd still be selecting the most ambitious students from the richest, best-connected families. It doesn't really matter whether the difference between the top 1% and the bottom 1% is 1000 points or .0001 point, as long as a difference exists, and a difference always will exist. The supply won't outstrip the demand, because it's not in the interest of those providing the supply to allow that.

Y'know, I never see anybody asking any more what education is for. It's like it's just taken as axiomatic that the purpose of going to school is to be graded, and that the best opportunities are awarded to those with the best grades. If you're not born rich, clawing your way up the grade-point average is the best way - often the only way - to avoid a life of poverty.

Not that it's guaranteed to work, of course. Unless one's in a high-enough percentile to be in the running to compete for scholarships, grades alone won't get one to college; there's still the money to be found. How is one to pay for college when one can hardly find a job that pays a living wage?

"Everybody, even the ones with the stupid jobs that anybody can do, deserves to make a living wage from ONE job working REASONABLE hours. Because somebody, in the end, has to sweep the streets."

Absolutely. And there is no good reason to force people who'll spend their lives in jobs anyone can do to write compositions, do quadratic equations or memorize the Krebs Cycle. Let's face it, most people are just not very intellectual by nature, and being more intellectual wouldn't be any benefit to them - it's not even something they want. Why waste their teen years making them jump through hoops, competing for grades in college-prep courses instead of learning useful skills like kitchen and garden management, home and auto maintenance, household and small-business finance, computer skills, health self-care and medical systems, safety and first aid, responsible sexuality and reproduction, child care and development, diversity and nonviolent negotiation, legal and criminal systems, government and participatory democracy, global and environmental issues? They come out of high school as ignorant as they went in, having been taught almost nothing that will ever be any use to them, or that they'll even remember past the last exam.