Chrkeller said:
Agreed and I don't think flattening the playing field does that. No student left behind, as an example, means we teach mediocrity, we aren't pushing excellence. Opportunity means letting excellence shine. Likely we have to agree to disagree. Not being rewarding for excellence means many will just settle for average. When I graduated secondary school, the school banned valedictorian because it was offensive to everyone else that wasn't best in class. My view is that is BS, excellence should be celebrated, not condemned. The US has a cutthroat society.. and 8 out of the top 10 companies in the world are American. Who here goes a day without Apple, Meta, Alphabet, Nvidia, Microsoft, etc? Nobody. Excellence drives innovation. |
Is providing opportunities to certain groups of people who face certain problems unique to members of their group really "flattening the playing field" though?
As an example. My mother dropped out of high school in 10th Grade. Why? Because her father sexually assaulted her from the age of 6 until 12 years old and then killed himself when caught. There was no way she could've focused on education in that particular situation. She faced severe developmental challenges. Now if we collectively gave resources (and we do in some capacity) to help people in this situation recover their mental health and self-worth, and expedite their path to development is that "leveling the playing field?" In some sense, yes, but that is the right thing to do given the circumstances of what had happened to the individual. It also helps society to make that individual the fullest they can be.
To go to a less extreme example. A person born in a low SES situation doesn't generally have many role-models of how to navigate a path toward higher-education and a successful stable middle-class income. They also likely have worse or more minimal primary and secondary educational resources. Suppose they really wanted this though. Should society not provide this person alternative resources or pathways that help mitigate this handicap and enable them to achieve their maximal result?
I personally think the path towards the result matters just as much as the result as well. For example, if it is many times harder for student A to get a 750 on their Math SAT than student B, because they had to cobble together resources that were already provided by others to student B, then there is some level of meritable capacities that student A has shown that we have no evidence of from student B (not to say student B doesn't have it, but that we haven't seen evidence of it.) The ability to navigate society and combine resources that were not easily provided is a merit-able skill that should be considered in assessments of an individual's capacities to perform a task. That is what, say, holistic admissions do. Other countries have much more rigid, objective metrics, but these other countries also have much more equalization of opportunity earlier in life.
The irony is that you're extolling the American system over Europe as being able to successfully produce innovative companies, but the American system of tertiary education considers much more than exam scores, while most European countries have entrance exams for universities and tier students into different occupational tiers very early on. Germany, for example, literally has different high schools depending on how a student performed in middle school, and getting a diploma from only one category of high school enables a student to go to academic tertiary education.
Last edited by sc94597 - on 04 September 2025
