Re:The case for mutual educational disarmament
by ZeroGravitas on Sunday August 22, 2021 @08:52AM
(#28265084)
I feel this is one of the obscure benefits of a universal income and/or reducing wealth inequality.
Once you accept that every human deserves a basic level of economic comfort, you need to structure society to actually harness their talents.
If you can make your child's life easier by waving a wand and making everyone in your society dumber and/or worse educated, then that would be a terrible temptation, and that's basically what we have now. Imagine a world where the simplest way to your kids and grandkids being healthy and wealthy was to maximize the human potential of the population.
This is the promise of meritocracy, but we seem to already have hit the limits of that, with everyone jockeying to keep other people's kids out of the good schools. Why don't we just build another good school? Oh, because it's not about what they learn, or how much they could learn, it's about dividing the population into winners and losers.
Once you accept that every human deserves a basic level of economic comfort, you need to structure society to actually harness their talents.
If you can make your child's life easier by waving a wand and making everyone in your society dumber and/or worse educated, then that would be a terrible temptation, and that's basically what we have now. Imagine a world where the simplest way to your kids and grandkids being healthy and wealthy was to maximize the human potential of the population.
This is the promise of meritocracy, but we seem to already have hit the limits of that, with everyone jockeying to keep other people's kids out of the good schools. Why don't we just build another good school? Oh, because it's not about what they learn, or how much they could learn, it's about dividing the population into winners and losers.