> I'm advocating changing education so it works for "the other 70%". You seem to advocate just giving up on them because they can't be reached. This is our disa

> I'm advocating changing education so it works for "the other 70%". You seem to advocate just giving up on them because they can't be reached. This is our disagreement. That's a fairly pedantic stance to take. Would you still hold this belief if you talked to the students and parents and they basically said "we don't want this"? I have asked this question to many people, and that is what they said. When asked what they do want, they said they wanted things that will get them (basically) money, power, and/or social currency (with an element of stability/consistency thrown in for each of these). FWIW, I do not advocate giving up on anyone. That said, I don't agree with force-feeding them certain types of education because those are the types of learning that upper middle class people value. The short summary of the research in this area is that it doesn't work particularly well. > Your position seems to be that education should identify strengths and build on them at the exclusion of weaknesses. My position is that education should fill in gaps and make everyone more balanced. These are fundamentally different positions. Maybe at an abstract level, but I don't really see that in what I have said so far. My actual beliefs are quite the opposite -- fill the gaps. The issue is what is considered a "gap". What many educated folks call "gaps", less educated folks call "features" (e.g., creationism). > Also, made up numbers like "70% of people don't care about education" raise red flags for me. Meh, it's a little hand-wavy, but it's not far off from a literal perspective or from an eyeballing it perspective. About 32% of any given cohort of high school aged people will graduate from college before they are 24. That's the source of my number. There are definitely arguments to be made around the periphery, but that's the target audience I refer to. I think the total college attending % is 50-something (stats say 66% of high school grads, but they leave out the 18% high school dropouts in their counts, so it's off by a bit), so feel free to use that if you like. I personally consider most of those folks who did not finish to be not a good fit for college from the get go (and that's totally ok for them not to be a good fit). My overall point is that the modern high school curriculum was designed at a time when most of the folks who went to high school went to college or worked with people who did. For example, in 1900, only ~6% of the population graduated from high school, ~2% finished college, and a few more got "letters of instruction" after two years of higher ed. Basically, high school education was for the elite. Yet that curriculum oriented towards the elite is still used in practice today. Why? I really encourage you to go to a school (probably inner city or rural) that has a very low college-attendance rate. Talk to the students. Talk to the teachers. Talk to the parents. Their perspectives are fairly valid -- they just want a good life for the students. The tricky question is what constitutes "good life" and what is the best way to get there. I personally don't think that our current system answers either question particularly well.