I'm a High School drop out with no college education. My family grew up in the inner city and was poor. I work for a large software company and have over 10 years experience in linux system administration. I still live in the inner city.

I know other people that are like me in many ways, having well paying jobs and still choosing to live in the city.

It's not everyone's plan.

Meh. I think the "meatheads=people with only HS diplomas" equation is facile. If you're speaking specifically about blue-collar workers, it's still pretty insulting, but you could probably make a better case with that differentiation up front.

Practically speaking, there is nothing sacrosanct about a college degree. It is the educational system, with its bureaucratic filtering mechanisms, elitism, and status-consciousness that has turned it into a humanist sacrament. Education need not be formal for it to be both valuable to the student and the society he/she lives in.

I think by "meatheads" GP means people who undervalue education on the basis of "I succeeded without much of it" (failing to understand the contribution of a particular social context to that success) and thereby promote a culture which undermines the context which allowed them to succeed. (The specifical example he gave was people with only a HS diploma, not people without one, but I think that example was, in any case, illustrative of the problem, not an exhaustive equivalence; nor do I think "blue collar workers" is the right generalization from the example.)

There's plenty of people (blue collar and otherwise) that succeeded with only (or even without) a HS diploma that don't undervalue education, and they don't meet GP's description of the meatheads he is talking about.

Thanks, you're right. Note: I edited it for clarity on the point you mentioned.

Well it's not like American education teaches people about social context and how much it matters.

That would be Communist.

What does this even mean? Is this a Markov criticism, or do you really think US public schools don't teach kids about "social contexts"? From what I can tell, as the parent of a high schooler and a middle schooler, social contexts and algebra problems are the core of the curricula.