In 1940 if you didn’t graduate from high school you weren’t automatically consigned to poverty. Today there are basically no jobs you can get that pay better than 10 bucks an hour that don’t require one.
Not everyone needs to know how to do anything more complicated than addition and subtraction, and most people don’t need much beyond basic algebra. But it absolutely is important to society and their future usefulness to that society for them to be able to do at least that.
I am genuinely concerned for the bottom half of the intellectual distribution though. I struggle to imagine what society will even need them for in a few decades, and the supply glut for them is already pretty much unworkable. Some of them make up for it in other ways, but seriously if they aren’t at least good in some other way we’re going to have to figure out how to handle people who are suddenly more disabled than a smart guy in a wheel chair just because their IQ is 90.
Right now the plan is just to kill them with attrition lol. Morality aside I don’t see that working out long term.
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A solar installer who worked for me back when I had people working for me and didn’t graduate HS made $30/hr. Very smart guy…definitely as smart as typical major University student…still it would be a tough job to teach him Pythagoras’ theorem.
I probably paid too much…I didn’t average $30/hr in those days…but starting at $15/hr and a ceiling of $40/hr or $50/hr is doable in the trades.
But, sure, there is an erosion of good paying jobs for all but select groups like finance and tech. What’s really really lacking is security. When every job is Uberized no one has to be fired. They just get less/no work.
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It is difficult for me to overstate how much I loathe coming of age stories about upper class adolescents.
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HC doesn’t really come of age.
A student who isn’t interested might be in the wrong place. Maybe they’d be interested if they were learning carpentry. Maybe they’ve had curiosity beaten out of them; that happens to some extent to most of us. They aren’t dumb though. They’ve at least learned a basic truth about the system: only the grade matters. They’ll do the minimum required and resort to conning the teacher, getting their work done by other students, or cheating on exams if that’s what it takes.
Teachers, students, parents, administrators, budget, texts, materials, equipment, facilities,… Trying to fix the system by isolating single components and saying there’s a problem here isn’t enough. And “fixing” that component can even make things worse. The components interact. Start at the system level.
Thinking about this makes me feel quite a bit of empathy for the frustrated leftists.
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I agree, but I also think there is some nature/nurture here. Its probably a good idea for a society to treat every child as an opportunity to create an avid, lifelong learner and then slowly lower expectations from there on a case by case basis.
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OK, but none of that is really captured in standardized testing.
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How about some Shakespeare? Hal in Henry IV? Or Hamlet and Ophelia? Or Romeo and Juliet? The couples don’t work out and they die young. The first pair because they were mentally ill, the second because they were dumb.
I can remember the first time someone didn’t share my love for this book. I was pretty shocked.
Next thing you will tell me there are people who don’t like Bukowski.
How can anyone hate Superbad?
I don’t hate the fictional kids, I hate the authors who come from near identical backgrounds and expect me to gaf about their stories. Oh, you want to write about the exact same teen angst everybody goes through, but at a private prep school that costs more per semester than a family of 4 makes in a year? How precocious! Let me pinch those widdle disaffected special boy cheeks as he move between a childhood without worries and an equally carefree adult life. Let’s ring up Wes Anderson and see if he can find a screenplay in it!
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Ham on Rye by Bukowski is my favorite coming of age story. The opposite of a privileged upbringing.
eta: Actually, thinking about it, I like Wait Until Spring, Bandini by John Fante better. My avatar is a pic of John Fante.
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Taken together, these two details indicate that the anti-poverty estimates touted for this program are vastly overstated. Various number-crunchers put out figures suggesting that this program would cut child poverty in half in 2021. But these estimates assumed the full amount would go out in 2021 and assumed that non-filers would receive the money. Instead, only half the money will go out in 2021 and non-filers, who make up around 10 percent of children and who are overwhelmingly poor, will not be getting it. We’ll be lucky if the real poverty-reduction number is even half of what has been projected.
sad trombone
I find that weird, but to each their own. I just find HC annoying as shit and the story bland.
Man did that book age poorly
With respect to the monthly child tax credits payments that are due to roll out this summer, what am I missing? If my withholding is set so that I try to owe ~$0, doesn’t this just mean they give me money now and then I have to pay it back when I file my taxes? What’s the point?
Not for Cuomo. He got his while the getting was good.