There is so much wrong with this statement and way of thinking that I don't even know where to start. I'm upvoting, because I don't want this comment to disappear, but it's still wrong-headed.
1. Answering the first quesiton directly:
No, that's not the solution proposed by the article. The goal was to get the poor involved in politics, in the largest sense of the word. At the end, he reported that almost everyone in the first class was either in school or employed full-time. No mention of managerial roles, or what they were training to be. One tried to start a union, so she is not heading towards a managerial role.
There are plenty of programs out there that do try to train people in technical skills, like nursing, engineering, or management, but this was _not_ one of those programs. This is a way to help the poor break out of the vicious cycle of poverty themselves by giving them the tools to think about their situation. Who knows what they'll do with those tools.
2. Answering the second question, allowing for your premise:
Robots, programmed by all of these engineers we wouldn't've had otherwise, and the people that are too poor to be helped, or unable for other reasons. This is what we call a _good_ problem.
3. Making fun of you/sarcasm:
OK, sure, lets not help the poor at all, because what if we're _too successful?!?_ That would be horrible! We'd starve to death in dirty streets, because people would be too busy nursing, engineering, and managing each other, and not realize there was no food!
4. Rejecting your premise and addressing the second question:
Who's going to do the blue collar jobs? Mostly the same kinds of people that do them now, except they will have more political empowerment, and a greater capacity for reflection and critical thinking. I know a few educated people that choose to work as farmhands, so it's not impossible, and I myself enjoy an "honest day's work" (speaking as someone with the privilege of an education in the humanities).
Can you imagine how awesome it would be if we had a society of critical thinkers and moral philosophers, instead of the reactionary, anti-intellectual, gullible, fundamentalist society we have now[1]? Can you imagine if the lowest common denominator weren't so low? I'm not saying it would be a utopia, but for at least the last few hundred years, people have been dreaming of a time when machines had taken over every menial task, and humans could spend their time as they wished, free to follow pursuits of their own choosing.
[1] I'm not trying to say 100% of society is like that I'm just saying that significant fractions of the American population at least show one or more of these characteristics, and I don't think it's making for a better society.
Whoa there. I merely questioned the notion that simply educating everyone will solve all of our problems. I was implying that there's a lot more to it than that. Look at the media industry, for example - we have developed technology which makes information freely accessible to everyone yet we have a considerable amount of resources being thrown at locking that down, which makes no sense in the grand scheme of things.
I agree that education is a must, but it's also about addressing the social structures we currently have in place and recognising that they will fight tooth and nail to keep things the way they currently are.
Please forgive me for misinterpreting, since at the only clarification you had at the time of my comment was
> And the implication of everybody being well educated is that everyone will have white collar jobs or prestigious blue collar jobs. If everyone is well educated then who will want to take a job as a street cleaner when they've just spent $80k on their education? The solution is clearly not limited to just educating everyone, is it?
While the latter part of your statement is the same as the beginning of what you just said, I took the former to mean that educating everybody would cause additional problems, not that it wouldn't solve all the problems we have. If you didn't mean to imply this line of thinking, or if you have abandoned it, then great.
To address this new point, did you see anything in my comment that suggests I want to keep our current social structure? The very act of empowering the poor into participating in politics (again, not just in the election sense) on a large scale will change the structure of society. And then, instead of the privileged deciding what the poor need and pushing potential solutions, we would probably start to see the poor creating their own solutions, and further changing our societal structure. I imagine that their solutions would work better than those that came from outside, and they might even be highly resistant to recommendations from a model society (some didn't even trust that this education would help, since "the white man wouldn’t let you up no matter what.").
It's like the various Housing First problems out there. Most of the homeless have a host of other problems (addiction, mental illness/disorder, lack of education, etc) but these programs get them an apartment first, and merely make the other services available. And from what I've read, they work. People stay off the streets and clean themselves up, for the most part.
That said, there is _no_ reason we can't educate everyone in the humanities and do other things, too.
I've thought a fair bit about this now and finally understand what point I was trying to make. Educating the poor is not enough because the rich are an integral part of the problem. Just as the poor are so because they lack education, so the rich hold deep prejudices against the poor because of their lack of education. It's just like psychotherapy on an individual scale - the problem is never limited to just the person in question. The problem is the whole family, the whole society, not just one aspect of it.
In other words, our entire society needs to be re-educated in order to solve this problem, not just the poor.
>we would probably start to see the poor creating their own solutions, and further changing our societal structure.
Indeed we would, but we would also see a great deal of resistance to it from the powers that be. This needs to be addressed with equal importance. What's the point of bringing people up when others will just try to push them down more? We need to bring them up and make space to accommodate them.
Thank you for engaging me in this thread. I still think you're missing the point, if you think people need it pointed out to them that there's more than one reason the poor are poor. Well, they do, but not if they've read this article, since the author is more than aware of this, and illustrates what he calls the "surround of force" throughout.
In terms of educating the rich, what exactly do you propose to teach them and how do you suggest convincing them to give you the time of day?
1. Answering the first quesiton directly:
No, that's not the solution proposed by the article. The goal was to get the poor involved in politics, in the largest sense of the word. At the end, he reported that almost everyone in the first class was either in school or employed full-time. No mention of managerial roles, or what they were training to be. One tried to start a union, so she is not heading towards a managerial role.
There are plenty of programs out there that do try to train people in technical skills, like nursing, engineering, or management, but this was _not_ one of those programs. This is a way to help the poor break out of the vicious cycle of poverty themselves by giving them the tools to think about their situation. Who knows what they'll do with those tools.
2. Answering the second question, allowing for your premise:
Robots, programmed by all of these engineers we wouldn't've had otherwise, and the people that are too poor to be helped, or unable for other reasons. This is what we call a _good_ problem.
3. Making fun of you/sarcasm:
OK, sure, lets not help the poor at all, because what if we're _too successful?!?_ That would be horrible! We'd starve to death in dirty streets, because people would be too busy nursing, engineering, and managing each other, and not realize there was no food!
4. Rejecting your premise and addressing the second question:
Who's going to do the blue collar jobs? Mostly the same kinds of people that do them now, except they will have more political empowerment, and a greater capacity for reflection and critical thinking. I know a few educated people that choose to work as farmhands, so it's not impossible, and I myself enjoy an "honest day's work" (speaking as someone with the privilege of an education in the humanities).
Can you imagine how awesome it would be if we had a society of critical thinkers and moral philosophers, instead of the reactionary, anti-intellectual, gullible, fundamentalist society we have now[1]? Can you imagine if the lowest common denominator weren't so low? I'm not saying it would be a utopia, but for at least the last few hundred years, people have been dreaming of a time when machines had taken over every menial task, and humans could spend their time as they wished, free to follow pursuits of their own choosing.
[1] I'm not trying to say 100% of society is like that I'm just saying that significant fractions of the American population at least show one or more of these characteristics, and I don't think it's making for a better society.