Bigthink - Idea Comments Feed

Comment on: Equal Opportunity in Education

Bigthink — Wed, 06 Feb 2008 22:40:19 +0100

Princeton should start using some of its huge endowment to provide scholarships for low-income, qualified students. Diversity should be based on class as much as race.

Comment on: Equal Opportunity in Education

Bigthink — Sat, 19 Jan 2008 06:40:23 +0100

Lets say education does become equal. Then what? Not everyone has the brain power to become rocket scientists. It will no longer be the access to education that will give us our janitors and cleaning ladies, but simply the innate intelligence of a person. Then we are left with another social dilemma: why should a person have better opportunities simply because of their intelligence? Capitalism is cruel..

Comment on: Equal Opportunity in Education

Bigthink — Fri, 18 Jan 2008 00:37:13 +0100

In my opinion, i think her claim on equal oppertunity in education was quite strong. She has shown appeals toward emotion as well as examples to support her arguement. She started out will a strong beginning on why she thinks education should have equal oppertunities and throughout her arguement, she supported her claim through facts. Overall, her arguement was concise and straight to the point.

Comment on: Equal Opportunity in Education

Bigthink — Thu, 17 Jan 2008 23:22:22 +0100

What about the necessary jobs in our culture, like janitors, store clerks, food service workers, etc.?

I get real kick out of seeing how higher education institutions try to simultaneously be both the gateway of class distinction - as defined by the amount of money you make - and the aribiters of social change - making everyone equal. It's high hypocrisy.

The problem is that most of the people who are making these declarations have never indeed been really poor themselves. They don't understand the mindset.

Ms. Tilghman has never really thought about this issue from a systemic standpoint. She just has an emotional opinion based on her feelings of "fairness" although I can guarantee that there's nothing fair about how she or others like her actually operate in the world.

Here's the solution, if you really believe in fairness - pay your cleaning lady what you make. If you're not willing to do that - if you want to dump the whole thing onto our social institutions - I leave the conclusion to you.

Comment on: Equal Opportunity in Education

Bigthink — Thu, 17 Jan 2008 20:22:34 +0100

I strongly agree! Furthermore, education is what separates most classes from each other. With the notion that most populations in the US who fail in education is minorities, this is due to inherent-built-in inequalities throughout our system. For example compare the 50% drop-out rates among Latinos and the neighborhoods that they live in along with the employment that the providing members of the household. This is no coincidence.