Out of Egypt:

This discussion is getting interesting...

We don't need more jobs, we need more workers, or so Ryan Davidson writes, in his critique of the send-everyone-to-college American educational system.

Some prior reading that might give his argument context: Life (near) Minimum Wage, my thoughts on the demoralization inherent in low-paying jobs and people's inability to maintain a decent standard of living on the pay. Ryan wrote back saying training was the solution, essentially what he's saying now, but I (and John Dagen) replied that they'll always need to be someone to mop the floors. And, as I said in my follow-up post, unless we want to live in a welfare state, those people need to be able to live on the pay too.

About a month later, Bob offered some brief thoughts on How to End Poverty (Yeah Right). And that about brings you up to the present.

So, then, what do I think about all this? Well, I'm not exactly sure what I think, but I probably agree with Bob more than anyone else, as he seems to be striking the mediating position. Extremes scare me.

I hope Ryan was being hyperbolic when he suggested that we abolish inner-city high schools. Perhaps we should give everyone one year of high school education and we can evaluate their interest and potential at that point. Then those who decide they aren't suited for traditional high school (got to give people a say in their own outcome; we don't want people to feel like pawns and simply live up to others' expectations) can go to vocational training in a field which seems appropriate and in which they have some interest.

Definitely I think that the current system has problems. Perhaps high school teachers wouldn't spend so much time babysitting, answering again and again the quite-relevant question "When are we going to use this in life?" if people who weren't going to use it in life weren't there.

On a deeper level, the question is, How comfortable are we, as a society, with inequality? As Americans we confess that all people are created equal, but we know that in reality we can only be equal in our standing before the law, not in our abilities. To be equal in opportunity would be nice, but perhaps unachievable - David Brooks wrote an excellent editorial about America as a meritocracy based on education. This would be fine as long as people have similar circumstances controlling their access to education, but, of course, this is not the case. I don't want to keep people in the inner city from going to university simply because that's not what we expect of them, but on the other hand, I see Ryan's point as well.

Maybe Plato's myth of the metals has more truth to it than we'd like to admit. For social stability, are we willing to say that, when it comes to ability (in this case, intellectual), some people are gold, some silver, and some bronze? I have no problem with saying that - as long as people are given a chance to reveal their own ability through their work, rather than being locked into one of those classes through the chances of birth, wealth, and place.