Tainari88 wrote:PO, there are two areas of any modern society's need to NOT have it become a business. The areas are Health care and Education. Again, because it is about the foundation of modern societies. You limit that to wealthy people only? The entire premise of having educated and healthy people working and contributing to the society for decades is compromised and stunted.
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Poverty is a huge problem. Got to make the changes. Not caring makes everything fail. Again, effort, respect, caring and adequate education and training for teachers and educators. The USA spends a lot. But it is not doing what is the basis of all great education.
There is a far wider consideration in these matters Tainari, which sadly requires a little linguistic semantics. Much depends on what you meant - and what others understand - by 'worth it'.
On this side of the pond, at least, we hear a lot about American society being a 'meritocracy' and, superficially, a meritocracy sounds good. But to my eye it seems the US meritocracy is an
economic meritocracy, which immediately distorts the word 'merit' and biases it toward wealth, to the point where unconsciously many Americans see merit and wealth as essentially the same thing - the latter being the product of the former that can then be used as a metric for 'merit'. Thus whether or not something is 'worth it' is less about any intrinsic value it may have and more about how much
economic merit it has.
PO alludes to this when he says:
PO wrote:When it comes to high schools, if you live in a wealthy neighborhood with much higher property values, those high schools are going to get more funding and more money and thus be better schools than other high schools that are located in poorer neighborhoods with lower property values who do not get as much funding. Guess where the better teachers are going to be teaching? You got it, the wealthier neighborhood with higher property values that pay more money in property taxes and thus whose schools get better funding.
In an economic meritocracy, the wealthy get better education (and healthcare) and so such a society ceases to be a meritocracy and becomes an exercise in what one might call socio-economic Darwinism. If wealth is a measure of merit, then that's ok...but I question the 'if'.
Both PO and (in this thread) Drlee are veterans (and I was a veteran, joined up again and will return to veteranhood very soon), so they and others may recognise something from my own experience. As both a mental health clinician and an educator, I have lost count over the years of the number of soldiers I have encountered who were clearly highly intelligent, but who had been systematically failed by our education system and joined up as 'foot soldiers', without any formal qualifications. I imagine the US military has a similar cohort. One in particular comes to mind - a guy from a deprived background who didn't bother trying at school because he needed no qualifications to join the Army, who having done so was treated as 'thick' for many years until a bright Army Education Officer spotted that he had dyslexia. Once that was identified and allowed for, he raced up the ranks, did an online degree and when he retired did a masters degree. He's now the CEO of a Veterans charity.
Now in fairness to PO, he did earlier state:
PO wrote:Moreover, it is extremely important that the less privileged members of society have access both to a high quality education and college education to ensure a well informed and educated society. The poor and less privileged members of society having access to both a high quality education and college education helps tremendously towards ensuring the survival of democracy and a well functioning society that is less dysfunctional.
And whichever side of the notional political divide you sit on, "the survival of democracy and a well functioning society", has to be the goal. Political differences exist only around how that is to be achieved. Even an ardent socialist (which I'm not, btw) would agree that economic factors are important, but in a society that has subconsciously married merit with wealth, those factors have a disproportionate influence. We can see that in the relative remuneration of different jobs and professions. Those that overtly and more or less directly contribute to wealth generation are remunerated far more than those whose contribution is seen as more toward esoteric and abstract notions (to some) of quality of life and the overall human experience - like nurses and teachers in this instance. Those groups and many others
do contribute to wealth generation, but the link is less obvious.
Here in the UK (and I'm sure in the US, too) the recent pandemic has clearly shown society that many of the less glamorous, less 'meritorious' (in an economic sense) and therefore less well paid jobs have been utterly critical to our collective survival as a society. As well as healthcare workers, teachers, grocery retailers, delivery drivers, sanitation workers and a host of other 'economic little people' have had to work heroically to keep society safe. But sadly, once the pandemic has faded in the memory, the dominant, wealth-centric view will reassert itself and nothing will have changed.
So whether a college degree is 'worth it' will continue to be mostly contingent upon whether it has economic merit. PO spoke of a 'dysfunctional society'. Well to me, any society that denigrates its essential (and often pulbic service) workers and lauds its overt wealth generators - and remunerates them accordingly - will continue to be dysfunctional.