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There is no way to make people perfectly equal. There are, however, ways to improve educational opportunities for everyone. Technology is one way. Educational m
by Prrometheus 18y ago
There is no way to make people perfectly equal. There are, however, ways to improve educational opportunities for everyone. Technology is one way. Educational markets are another. These methods should be embraced.
Raising the quality of education for everyone is important. Maybe I have a capacity for envy below that of the average human, but I would rather see everyone get a 10x better education than see the gap between the best and the worst narrowed by some amount. If we could choose between a program that increased everybody's income by $10,000 or one that reduced everybody's income by 50%, I would rather choose the first program even though the second would dramatically decrease any measure of income inequality.
Unfortunately, children from wealthy homes don't get better educations only because their schools have more money to spend. If this were the case, the United States would have the best primary schools in the world and perennial hell-holes like DC Public Schools would be educational utopias. Rather, parents in wealthy homes play an active role in their children's education and place importance on the role of education in their children's lives, as their parents likely did.
The government could redistribute income, but it can't redistribute culture. Unless we resort to monstrous social engineering schemes like allocating children to homes by lottery istead of by birth, we are not going to eliminate the inequality caused by home culture. And we haven't begun to talk about the inequalities caused by genetics.
But working on a solution to inequality is focusing on the wrong problem. It is a symptom of zero-sum thinking that doesn't reflect the issues of the real world. The real problem is how to improve the educational opportunity for each person, not equalize opportunities between people. After all, you can equalize the education everyone receives by banning education.
Luck will always play a role in life. We can still try to make every life better.
- rw 18y agoWhat is your opinion of the local property-tax education funding system? Education redistribution already occurs in that system; shouldn't we at least redistribute education more equally?
- Prrometheus 18y agoI think a government-run system has incentives that are going to produce a lower quality educational product for everyone. I am for educational markets. Subsidizing the consumption of education by poor people through something like a voucher program would likely mean higher quality education for poor and rich alike compared to the government-run model, for the same price. I suspect that children of wealthy parents would perform better in school than their less-wealthy peers under any reasonable system. I don't think that is the problem that should concern us the most.
- rw 18y agoDoes it bother you that children are limited by the arbitrary socioeconomic status of their families? Again, luck is determining what any child is able to become.
- Prrometheus 18y agoIf I could choose a world where success were not determined by luck, then I would. Unfortunately that is not compatible with the stuff we are made of, right down to our DNA. Helping the very unlucky is a valuable goal, and a realistic one. "Equality" is not.
- kingkongrevenge 18y agoI see no reason to believe that schools can systematically rectify socioeconomic inequalities. Educational attainment and status are outcomes of culture and parenting, not schools and teachers. I think these things are largely immutable, unless you want to start talking eugenics.
- Alex3917 18y agoIf culture and parenting were largely immutable, this would mean that not a single early childhood intervention program would have been able to show a statistically significant improvement. This is not the case.
- Retric 18y agoI would like to point out that giving everyone 1,000 dollars would significantly reduce income inequality. But multiplying everyone income by a number does not change it. PS: Income in equality is measured as a fraction. EX: Top 1% / bottom 20%.