Equality of Opportunity

I didn't intend my comments to be an attack on capitalism in any sense. Having a lower class working for an upper class is a natural result of the system that we have in place and is also a fundamental necessity of it. There is no alternative to this. I meant only to point out that we shouldn't dismiss their relative failure purely to apathy or inadequacy.

This discussion can also be applied to the educational world and as a teacher I would be very interested in hearing some of your comments to my personal philosophy.

I believe it is essential to level the playing field of opportunity. By that I mean that society should attempt to provide an equal opportunity for success to every person. I've had conversations with people who will assault policies like affirmative action as heinous because they aren't rewarding someone who is the most qualified. However, is it really fair to expect someone who came up through inner city public schools to achieve the same standards as someone else whose parents paid $20,000 a year for a private school? I don't think affirmative action is a perfect policy, actually it is far from it, but I think its goals are defensible.

I know what some of you will say to this. In the greater scheme of things this policy does more harm than good b/c it puts less competent people in jobs that should go to someone more qualified, and you know what, from that standpoint you might be right. However, I can live with that fact knowing that this levels the playing field for people who by no fault of their own were put in situations that dealt them a much shittier hand than others were.

I am all for people being able to give their kids the best education possible and if people are willing and able to pay more to ensure a better education (typically by moving to a city with higher property taxes, or paying for a private school) than they should be able to. I believe school choice is the most important thing that can be done to fix American schooling right now. However, so many inner city schools simply cannot provide the most basic education for their students (for many reasons, the biggest of which is poverty) that until we do a better job as a society of leveling the playing field and providing a basic education to these people that we cannot expect them to compete on the same level as other people. Each person that is put into a competitive situation should have a basic level of preparedness for that situation and that doesn't exist in this country right now. Until it does I think we need to provide policies that might seem to be detrimental to people who succeed, but when looked at from the flip side are really only attempting to eliminate the inadequacies of the system (whether they do a good or bad job of it is a whole other question) that attempted to prepare these people for the society they are entering. It might have some negative effects, but the intent is a worthy cause.

One last thing...

I want to recommend HBO's "The Wire" to everyone on this blog. It is easily the best television show I've ever seen and intelligently touches upon many of the issues we have been discussing in the context of a drama about life in inner city Baltimore. It is like a visual novel, and worth purchasing if you are looking for something good to watch in the midst of the writers strike.

Eagerly awaiting your comments,

- Hodges