The answer and the future is kids will be raised by the state and given an equal playing field. This frees parents to work/spend and ensures the only advantage exists at the gene level. We can selectively breed those traits away .
The problem is we sent kids to school in the first place and ask them to follow a system designed for the average student but not the most typical.
"The fundamental theory of liberty upon which all governments in this Union repose excludes any general power of the state to standardize its children by forcing them to accept instruction from public teachers only. The child is not the mere creature of the state; those who nurture him and direct his destiny have the right, coupled with the high duty, to recognize and prepare him for additional obligations." [1]
"The answer and the future is kids will be raised by the state and given an equal playing field."
I read this as sarcasm, but I re-read it and am not so sure?
I hope you're will to pay for that in blood because there will be war over it.
We get that there's no such thing as a perfectly level playing field, but we're not going to allow children to be raised by the state to achieve what will be frankly in all likelihood not much of a gain in that regard, and a loss of basic freedom, and that's before the obvious risk of totalitarianism.
If you're worried about the state reading your emails, or net neutrality, you should naturally be 100x more concerned about what the state wants your child to believe.
While I am actually in support of good basic public education, I suggest the issue is important enough so that it should be at 'arms length' from the politicians, much like the Central Bank, but with more public input.
We need to get rid of this notion that there's really such a thing as 'perfectly equal' anyhow. Comparative Value. People value different things. Instead, take the approach of 'if there's a will there's a way' i.e. every kid gets access to good, basic, core schooling, and if a kid is motivated and has basic talents, they should have access to basic higher education.
Finally, most of the needle has nothing to do with quality of education, which most kids have access to, it's the quality of their home life. I'll bet material improvements in minimum wage and some kind of basic 'healthcare for all' would yield materially better results for kids than any specific changes to schooling, other than the cost of higher ed.
Edit: thee are enough examples of great public schools i.e. Norway, S. Korea, Canada, we don't need to get all theoretical about it. Work on 'all the issues' and the kids will be mostly ok.
The general idea came to me when discussing equal pay for women and how kids affects a women's career.
Thinking about ways to equalize education with kids frim different economic level. I came upon this idea.
There are many benefits and many drawbacks. No matter how taboo this topic it feels like the natural evolution of putting the children first, equalizing poverty backgrounds, equalizing pay, increasing workforce durations, spending power.
Why would you allow untrained professionals to raise our most valuable resource?
Raising children is different from anything you do in the workplace. "Professional" abilities aren't the key metrics for this responsibility. The best "boost" I'm aware of for being good at the job is being raised by good loving parents and thus having a good model to then emulate when it becomes your turn. Sometimes people can find good models elsewhere, but the number of places one can do that today is pretty small — media and movies certainly don't.
From my research, the sociological numbers bear this out, good homes make better well-adjusted successful and able children who generally go on to make another generation of well-adjusted and successful children.
Broken families, single parents homes, have lower success rates.
If you want to create an environment where our most valuable resource is given the best shot, then we should be teaching about marriage, man+woman partnership, fidelity and faithfulness. We don't have any known better models for raising them — and it isn't even close.
"Why would you allow untrained professionals to raise our most valuable resource? "
I would start by saying that anyone who would even use that kind of language is living in a totally different dimension of reality than I, and so first, I'd have to bridge that gap.
Our children are not 'resources' and while teaching certainly requires a degree of professional demeanour, raising children has nothing to do with 'professionalism' per say.
For gosh sake ... life is about life (!) - the whole gosh darn point of 'the economy' is so that families can be families and communities, not the other way around, i.e. that they can be turned into 'proletariat resource factories'.
We live, we have our communities, our culture, our institutions, our faith, our celebrations, our hopes, our fears, our failures, our conquests, our rituals. The economy can be a part of that. Stopping really bad acting (i.e. abuse) is always good. The state has a role even in education, obviously.
But the language you are using is the same type of culturally secular language that totalitarian systems adopted and resulted in dramatic failure.
If you want to see what that looks like, visit non-Moscow Russia, the parts that were designed in built in the latter part of the 20th century. Or better yet, Poland, because they will not romanticize that era in a perverse way and give you an earful.
The 'best' schools in the world, in Finland, if one could describe their approach it would be 'Communitarian' more than anything. Yes, they have standard European views on equality and somewhat higher taxation, but they are not 'top down secular equality socialists'. Instead, they value teachers as a culture. They value reading, education, intellectualism, they work as local communities. We would consider them 'somewhat progressive' in many ways, but they are not what we would call 'woke'. Their method of education is not anything special, it's downright ancient if anything. They are not what we would nominally call 'capitalist' either, they have a blended communitarian + regulated free-market + socialization in certain sectors and definitely national strategic cooperation between state, established families/wealth, industry.
They are a great example, there are others, though ideas and rhetoric are always good, there's no need to roll back to 100 year old ideas that have been essentially discredited.
> I read this as sarcasm, but I re-read it and am not so sure?
I’ve seen both serious Marxist arguments for it and serious capitalist arguments for it (and also serious critiques of each of those camps that the other camp ultimately leads to that end!), among others, so while I don't think it is a good idea, it is not one I dismiss out of hand as a joke when I see it.
> The answer and the future is kids will be raised by the state and given an equal playing field.
Except for the parents powerful / wealthy enough to opt out of this system for one with more resources, who will, just as we do today.
Who is going to die on a hill to pass legislation banning private schooling and forcing a state monopoly on raising children? We would need generations of culture shift before many people could even debate the idea without involuntarily shuddering in horror.
Probably a reference to the "residential school" system in Canada, which largely served as a way to extract indigenous kids from their nations and raise them instead in the culture of the people running the government, with parents fairly intentionally unable to visit their children. (Also they were in the news in recent months for the recent discoveries of mass graves.) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canadian_Indian_residential_sc...
(It does seem, as another commenter pointed out, that this isn't necessarily the only end result of state involvement in child-raising. In particular, it seems to me you can draw a qualitative difference between greater state education as a way to expand the experiences of children growing up and as a way to constrain those experiences.)
The British and later Canadian (of British descent mostly) Administration had native children raised by the state. The end results are, well, let's just say it makes what's happening to the Uighur look not so bad in comparison. [0]
BTW these "schools" were still around when their current leader's father (Trudeau) was in office.
The problem is we sent kids to school in the first place and ask them to follow a system designed for the average student but not the most typical.