Quote:

---

Originally posted by SigmaNunki:
Now I think that the whole point of the two party system was to have one on the extreme right and the other on the extreme left. That way they'd balance each other out.

---

Quote:

---

There are many reasons why public schools are neglected. The one I find most troubling is a curious aspect of practical genetics, one that an evolutionary viewpoint helps illuminate because it is nepotism at one remove, with all the same long-run disadvantages for the community at large.

Take two high-IQ parents, say 130 each, and consider their offspring. While it is true that a child of 150 IQ is more likely to come from such parents, it is also true that their average child may be only 120. (This statistical law is called regression toward the mean; it also works to bring up children of lower-IQ parents closer to the 100 average.)...

This is the familiar problem with family businesses and lines of royalty: the second and third generations often aren't as smart as the founders. More intensive education can, of course, help make up for any performance differences between parents and offspring. In this odd, unexpected way, high-IQ parents feel more of a need for private schools for their offspring than do average parents, because they want their children to do at least as well as they themselves.

The problem is that there is another way of helping the less-well-endowed offspring of those who have made it: decreasing the competition. It helps explain the generation-ago puzzle of the mother who was against admitting women to medical school; she thereby helped to double the chances of her on-the-edge son getting admitted. If there are spaces for only one percent of the population, eliminating females meant that twice as many males made it in. And who can be sure that their child is in the top one percent?

Discrimination to reduce the competition works, alas, for any sizeable group. And while one naturally thinks of the twentieth century racial-religious examples in higher education, it also works with the following group: those who cannot afford private education, but have the talent to compete with those who can. By slowing down the competition, those well-off (and often influential) parents can help their kids to get ahead. An effortless way of hobbling the competition is to neglect public education.

This is, of course, not in hardly anyone's conscious reasoning - it's not intentional so much as conveniently incidental....

If you think quality public education is expensive, consider the costs of ignorance and polarization, of an intelligent underclass that becomes stubborn, apathetic, and perverse.

---