Comment by kace91

Comment by kace91 2 days ago

Counterintuitive argument:'No one left behind' policies increase social segregation.

Universal education offers a social ladder. "Your father was a farmer, but you can be a banker, if put in the work".

When you set a lower bar (like enforcing a safe environment), smart kids will shoot forward. Yes, statistically, a large part of succesful kids will be the ones with better support networks, but you're stil judging results, for which environment is just a factor.

When you don't set this lower bar, rich kids who can move away will do it, because no one places their children in danger voluntarily. Now the subset of successful kids from a good background will thrive as always, but succesful kids from bad environments are stuck with a huge handicap and sink. You've made the lader purely, rather than partly, based on wealth.

And you get two awful side effects on top:

- you're not teaching the bottom kids that violating the safety of others implies rejection. That's a rule enforced everywhere, from any workplace through romantic relationships to even prison, and kids are now unprepared for that.

- you've taught the rest of the kids to think of the bottom ones as potential abusers and disruptors. Good luck with the resulting classism and xenophobia when they grow up.

Viliam1234 2 days ago

There will always be a gap between kids who are rich and smart (if school won't teach them, a tutor will) and kids who are stupid (no one can teach them). We can only choose which side of this gap will the smart poor kids stand on. The attempts to make everyone at school equal put them on the side with the stupid kids.

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kbelder 2 days ago

And rich dumb kids. Where do they fall?

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- fn-mote 2 days ago
  
  Rich dumb kids do not fail. At least not secondary school. They go to “party school” university ~~and major in business~~.
  Had to do it for a laugh. Posting long after discussion finished.
  
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bonoboTP 2 days ago

Not sure if counterintuitive or not, but once you have such social mobility-based policies in place ("Your father was a farmer, but you can be a banker, if put in the work") for a few generations, generally people rise and sink to a level that will remain more stable for the later generations. Then even if you keep that same policy, the observation will be less social movement compared to generations before and that will frustrate people and they read it to mean that the policies are blocking social mobility.

You get most mobility after major upheavals like wars and dictatorships that strip people of property, or similar. The longer a liberal democratic meritocratic system is stable without upheavals and dispossession of the population through forced nationalization etc, the less effect the opportunities will have, because those same opportunities were already generally taken advantage of by the parent generation and before.

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