Public education often inadvertently acts as an amplifier for class differences, but your system seems designed to that end. What would be the upside of that? Upper-class and lower-class kids' paths would start to diverge at a very young age, and the kids couldn't very well be held responsible for the result. Anything that cements class differences like that would mean giving up the pretense of equal opportunity, which would create political pressure to officially recognize the existence of different classes with different obligations and different claims on the state. It sounds like a nightmare. Why not try to give a good education to kids even if their families didn't teach them the value of it?
Why not try to give a good education to kids even if their families didn't teach them the value of it?
Fully agreed with the goal. And in fact the newly industrialized countries of east Asia (where I lived for many years) are conspicuous in reaching this goal. But they are also conspicuous in ability grouping of a certain kind (although with higher expectations for the below-average students than the United States has for above-average students) and for a substantial degree of family-chosen, privately funded supplemental education after school hours. My claim is that the instrumentality I propose, letting state funding follow the learner and letting the learner choose the provider of schooling with the program best suited for the learner, actually better achieves your commendable goal of providing all learners with a better education.
You're talking about cultures that already value education, hard work, and obedience to elders. I'm talking about Americans. We have less automatic respect for elders, so poor parents have very little credibility with their kids. Poor kids tend to disregard their parents' urgings to get an education -- in the American mentality, you don't get ahead by paying attention to broke-ass chumps. (Kids still unconsciously emulate their parents, but that's also bad news for the lower class.)
Americans are capitalists -- we only do things when we understand the investment and have confidence in the return. The more educated and successful the parents, the more credibility they have, and the more likely their kids are to work hard in school. Plus, the main effect is still emulation, which works in their favor. So the rich get richer while the poor get poorer.
It would help if poor kids had some exposure to normal well-off people, but their only exposure is through television, and normal people are frickin' boring on TV and therefore invisible. People glamorous enough to shine on TV tend to be terrible role models.
