Is education no longer the ‘great equalizer’?

You have to ask if the majority of 'educated' people actually do things of value. Perhaps we should simply follow a Lysenkoist approach of simply handing out a diploma to one and all.

Forgive me for the old man moment, but I was just musing about how little my life has changed since the 1970s. Noticeable differences: TVs have more pixels, airliners look the same but are slower, you can order manufactured goods from your house without using the mail system, improvements in medicine where they can see what they are doing (surgery),these kids music it's all noise. Digital music and arguing on a communications network have been around since the 1980s.

After all the fuss and fury, it's really all on the margin. You have to wonder what all these newly minted degree holders actually do. The growth of the FIRE industry is one answer.

What does this even mean? What in-group jargon is this?

Controlling education is a political life source for the Democratic party in the U.S. One of the largest, if not the largest, unions is the teacher's and they are a major donor to the Democratic party.

Thankfully, the one good thing about the shutdowns has been the ability for parents to observe a couple things:

* how little the school system cares about the child

* the indoctrination and political ideas being passed to children

There are a number of states that have passed a "school choice" this year and its a rapidly growing movement. The idea is primarily to tie the funding money to the child rather than to the land. It generally means that if you move your child from school A to B, without school choice, school B wouldn't receive the money because it was bound to A.

Heres an article from Reason talking about West Virginia passing the school choice:

https://reason.com/2021/03/23/school-choice-is-coming-to-uni...

> Is education no longer “a great equalizer of the conditions of men,” ... but instead a great divider?

The article is very "feet on the earth", it reviews existing data and arguments, and generally advocates for a "no" as an answer to that question.

But what if education were a great divider? What if--like wealth--the education gap were self-reinforcing, even across generations?

To the well-educated, that seems far-fetched, but it's easy to find examples across the world where some people choose to believe or live according to X, which results in less emphasis put into "modern" education, which in turn makes it easier to keep believing in X, and so on.

On the other side, learning skills A, B and C may require a considerable investment in time and money. Right now is not that bad, but just imagine for a moment that ten or fifteen years of education were needed for job K, which pays three orders of magnitude more than the jobs that people who live according to X have access to.

Still, death would seem the perfect equalizer (not education), except if expensive life-extension is added to the mix...

In a lot of European countries, a robust social safety net is the great equalizer. You don't get locked up to work in order to afford healthcare, food, etc. - and are thus more free to take chances.

Furthermore, strong labor laws have compressed salaries towards the mean, so people are not locking themselves into poverty by working low-wage / low-skill work, but there's a difference enough that people are incentivized to get educated. I think it's a decent harmony - compared to other countries, where you have a poor working class and rich/wealthy middle/upper middle class.

I think that if education is the only ticket to a better life, then you get stuck with the problem that not all educated people are equal, and only certain educated people get to climb socioeconomic classes (too many schools, too many graduates, i.e inflation)