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Mari, the Happy Wanderer's avatar

I agree strongly with this essay, based on my experiences growing up in a rural, working-class community, where I was one of the very few students whose parents had gone to college, let alone graduate school, and where only about a dozen students out of a graduating class of 650 went to selective colleges (more students went into the military than to college).

A significant problem with educational policy is that people who set the policies didn't attend public schools like mine. They tend to come from elite educational backgrounds and the professional managerial class, and very few of them have direct personal experience with people who are bad at and don't like school. So they think that all students will be like they were and will succeed at school, if we just have high expectations for kids and do this new and fashionable intervention (whatever it may be this time).

It doesn't work that way. I think we need a system like the have in Europe, and yes, I'm talking about tracking students into academic and vocational tracks. I'm old enough to have gone to school when tracking was still done, and it made a huge difference not just for me, but for students who struggled in school. Based on my experience, and pace claims from the experts that stronger students will buoy up the weaker ones by tutoring and challenging them, the weaker students didn't learn or enjoy the academic classes; instead they would pressure the stronger students to help them cheat, or would rely on the stronger students to do all the work in group projects. My high school allowed students to leave campus for classes at the local vocational school and to work at jobs, and the students who participated in these programs enjoyed them and got a lot more out of them than they did from the academic classes.

I believe that the most humane system allows every student to discover his or her interests and talents and receive an appropriate education for those interests and talents. I am grateful that this position has as eloquent and convincing an advocate as you, Freddie.

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Slaw's avatar

"This is the prioritization of the relative over the absolute, and it is foundational to our education system and our labor market."

This, for me, is the crux of the issue. It doesn't matter if an individual gets a higher score on an IQ test compared to previous generations, what matters is where they place relative to their peers right now. Given two candidates for a high paying position in tech or finance who is going to get the job offer? The individual with an average IQ or the really bright one? Labor markets are competitive. In the end it doesn't matter how much an individual's educational attainment has improved if he is still relatively less qualified than the next guy in the interview.

There is nothing inherently wrong with sorting based on intellectual ability in the labor market. Who doesn't want a smarter doctor? But society goes off the rails when it sniffs in disdain at manual labor, dismissed it as "unworthy" and therefore implicitly condones condemning an entire segment of the population to a lifetime of drastically lower wages.

To be clear I don't think there is anything inherently wrong with physicians making more than fast food workers but there are extremes. When we talk about a country where the federal government pumps billions of dollars into higher education while leaving vocational and technical schools to starve we are talking about a country where the class of the college educated has seized the reins of power and are busily engaged in securing their economic advantage. Consider this: workers without a college degree live shorter lies and earn far less than the college educated. Why should they be the ones on the hook for forgiving college tuition debt?

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