From a commenter.
People in education tend to believe two things:
1) School is America’s great driver of social mobility. School lifts up the poor. Without our education system, we would be a terribly unequal, unjust, “rich get richer and the poor stay poor” society.
2) It is not just grudgingly acceptable but good and just that the more education you have, the better you are treated.
This is an interesting dilemma for progressives. They are inclined to see income and status hierarchies as unjust. However, they are inclined to see income and status advantages that accrue from schooling as just. Or, as Orwell put it, some pigs are more equal than others.
1) Our fate is guided by our circumstances.
2) Our fate is guided by our own agency.
Both are true and have been in tension since the beginning of time. Every age has a narrative that has to balance the tension between these two obviously and simultaneously true statements.
“Education” is posited as a magic solution to this riddle.
The Left is just fine with hierarchy, as long as the hierarchy is structured by whatever principles the Left supports at the time.
While everyone should be equal before the law, the law needs to be equitable. Equitable requires judgement and is open to argument. Many things which were legal in the past are illegal today because of it.
3) Children from rich families do considerably better in school than children from poor families. Average “educational achievement” is a monotonically increasing function of family income.
A society in which “the more education you have, the better you are treated” will be unequal and school will reinforce that inequality. Far from being a driver of social mobility, it will be a reproducer of hierarchy.
(I was the commenter.)
2 is obviously false
What makes you say that?
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I don’t see a contradiction here. It’s precisely the point that one’s social status improves with education that makes schooling a “driver of social mobility.” Who would have it otherwise?
The contradiction is that the people who already have status have the kids who do best in school. The people with less status have kids who do less well in school.
So the kids of people with status get their own status from the school system and the kids of people with low status get low status. That is NOT social mobility. Quite the opposite.
Who would care? People who honestly hate inequality, and who want social mobility.
High income parents have high IQ.
IQ is heritable.
Their kids will generally have high IQ. This will happen regardless of the school system they attend.
Poor kids that have high IQ get picked up by the standardized testing system and swept up into the meritocracy in a reasonably efficient way.
“Meritocracy” will therefore be mostly genetic anyway. If you argue for meritocracy, your arguing for a system where power and privilege are 80% heritable based on genes alone.
80% isn’t 100%, so every society has had some system for the bad eggs of the elite to fall off and the genetic lottery winners of the lower classes to move up and become “new men”. Some do that faster, unlucky sons of the elite are dropped from graces quickly. Others allow families to give their less impressive kids advantages to try to smooth over a single generations bad roll of the dice. Nearly all will allow a family whose line is completely spent to fall at some point, if only because others will want what they have and realize its ripe for the taking.
It seems natural to me that people will want to give their children all of the advantages they can in life. That is healthy and good. It’s a primary driver of human accomplishment.
The question is what practices we engage in to try and pass of privilege make sense from a cost/benefit analysis. It seems like many of the things we do in education don’t pass a rational cost/benefit test.
That last paragraph should begin, “Who would have it otherwise?”
I think most progressives feel, “inequality is bad but inequality caused by education is good.” Though many would not feel comfortable stating is so baldly.
“They are inclined to see income and status hierarchies as unjust. However, they are inclined to see income and status advantages that accrue from schooling as just. Or, as Orwell put it, some pigs are more equal than others.”
Wow. Hope you whiplash from putting those sentences together is not serious.
Here, see if you can figure this out:
“Mr. Buffett said repealing the estate tax “would be a terrible mistake,” the equivalent of “choosing the 2020 Olympic team by picking the eldest sons of the gold-medal winners in the 2000 Olympics.” …
The eldest sons of rich people get much farther in school than the eldest sons of poor people.
“[I]ncome and status advantages that accrue from schooling” reinforce hierarchy.
(Of course, “the eldest sons of the gold-medal winners in the 2000 Olympics” would handily beat any randomly chosen team of men their age.)
Key words.
“rich people”
“randomly”
You espouse the idea that being born on third base means you hit a triple.
Silly ideological beliefs locked in concrete.
No. I espouse the idea that being born on third base makes it easier to come home.
The people who do best in school were born on third base.