Human beings don't have the capability to solve poverty. Sure, depending on how you measure it, poverty sometimes decreases and sometimes increases, but without being able to tease out the exact causes of these fluctuations there are no levers to pull. Those who claim to be experts in these matters have so far failed to created profound, lasting economic prosperity.
You'd do better to blame it on gravity, we know how to defy that.
Besides which, if we go to some place like Africa where those students are in far deeper poverty, they sit there listening attentively to their teachers. So I don't think your theory pans out. It's not poverty itself that is the problem (especially not in a country where every child gets a textbook), but a culture that is associated with poverty.
And culture is such an impossible problem to solve, right about now you and I should be hoping that it was still the economic problem you originally claimed. We at least have a slim chance of figuring that out.
Have you ever wondered, kethinov, why it is that we think education is something that can be solved the same way that we solved the problem of "how do we make millions of cars"? We send children to a big institutional building 5 days a week for the 8-to-4 shift, where workers try to pour factoids into their head in assembly-line style, then QA comes around and rejects those with defects for rework. And at the end of the line, a conveyor belt cranks out something that has no spirit, no inspiration, and nothing unique about it? Maybe the same sorts of systems that crank out mass produced retail products is a bad system for teaching our children.
Just because some cultures living in poverty still place a strong emphasis on educational attainment doesn't mean that poverty plays no role in the achievement gap. Poverty produces cultures that are hostile to education. Not 100% of the time obviously. There are exceptions. But those exceptions prove the rule.
I don't think we're incapable of solving poverty. We've been steadily eroding it piecemeal for centuries. There are new, innovative policy proposals being thrown out all the time to erode it further, of which my personal favorite is a universal basic income, or citizens dividend. That would completely end poverty. All we need is the political will. The way I see it, if it happened for Social Security, it can happen for that some day.
You'd do better to blame it on gravity, we know how to defy that.
Besides which, if we go to some place like Africa where those students are in far deeper poverty, they sit there listening attentively to their teachers. So I don't think your theory pans out. It's not poverty itself that is the problem (especially not in a country where every child gets a textbook), but a culture that is associated with poverty.
And culture is such an impossible problem to solve, right about now you and I should be hoping that it was still the economic problem you originally claimed. We at least have a slim chance of figuring that out.
Have you ever wondered, kethinov, why it is that we think education is something that can be solved the same way that we solved the problem of "how do we make millions of cars"? We send children to a big institutional building 5 days a week for the 8-to-4 shift, where workers try to pour factoids into their head in assembly-line style, then QA comes around and rejects those with defects for rework. And at the end of the line, a conveyor belt cranks out something that has no spirit, no inspiration, and nothing unique about it? Maybe the same sorts of systems that crank out mass produced retail products is a bad system for teaching our children.