Sorry, I should make it more clear when I'm being sarcastic. I tried to juxtapose these two clauses as close as I could: > (1) education is just a ranking game

Sorry, I should make it more clear when I'm being sarcastic. I tried to juxtapose these two clauses as close as I could: > (1) education is just a ranking game > (2) since the point of education is to help people learn I feel like people who actually believe your situation was for the best must have a certain level of cognitive dissonance. Either that, or they just don't actually care about you and feel alright with hurting you for a chance of a slight gain for the people they do care about. It's also a pretty hard sell to claim these kinds of situations are the best for society. If you could produce 2x as many billionaires by expelling the bottom 10% of the population from the education system (and imprisoning them for life), that would be better for society (financially). It might be worse for social reasons, but I kind of find that hard to believe. This is why I think empathy doesn't scale. It's much easier to point people's empathy towards the person who is ruining their own life, and many others' at school, because they won't have a happy future. It's much harder to point people's empathy towards someone who will likely be successful in the future, even if they're being beat, stabbed, and abused in the present. Especially if they're not even being physically abused, just imprisoned for half their waking hours in a classroom. Empathy is great in very small groups, but not when you're setting policy for hundreds of kids in a school, thousands in the city, or millions across the state. At that point, empathy just ends up hijacked by the worst actors to redirect attention and resources to their own pet causes.