The “Race to the Top” mentality is creating an economy – and society – where only the winners matter
http://www.eoionline.org/blog/in-cross-country-and-society-a-fair-race-requires-a-fair-start/
One of the things I do in the fall is volunteer as a coach for cross country runners at Ballard High School. I usually end up coaching the kids at the end of the pack. That’s how it should be. Because with cross country, it’s not just about the fastest runners, it is also about the kids in the middle and the kids who can barely finish — everyone who wants to put their best effort out there to compete for their best time.
Here’s the thing, though: Life is a little different than a cross country race. In a meet, every kid begins at the same starting line. In life, that is rarely the case. Too often, America’s “Race to the Top”-style public policies put a few kids on the starting line or the inside lane — usually those who were born with the luck or heritage to get a strong start in life — and most others a few hundred meters back, or in the far outside lane.
Competition can push us to work harder and get better — and that’s a good thing. But when this “race” mentality runs unchecked, the danger is we start to believe the winners are the only ones who matter. And when our economy, our educational institutions, and our government are creating social and economic injustice — especially by continually giving more advantages to those born with a head start in life — then we’re no longer living in a democracy.
There was a name for this mentality a century ago: Social Darwinism. It was the excuse for the favoritism of the market and the adulation of the wealthy. “Race to the Top” may sound more civil, but it is the same thing. Suddenly, it’s just another day when The New York Times sponsors an International Luxury Conference in Miami, while more than a fifth of Florida residents lack health coverage and 1 out of 7 people there live in poverty.
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I've never been good at maths and will now have to settle for shit-cleaning jobs because I can't program a computer. Nobody in the workforce cares about my A paper on the causes of the Punic Wars. They only care that I can do Excel pivot tables and troubleshoot a network environment. Which -- sadly, -- I can't.
I would have been better off going to trade school for high school and never setting foot in a college classroom. Right-brainers have been rendered useless by a left-brained world. I liken it to how left-handers were deemed useless by a right-handed world. Except dominant hand doesn't matter in STEM jobs, only the ability to do STEM things. If all you can do is analyze novels and paint, you basically fail the basic criteria for usefulness in today's 21st-century tech society.
So I starve. No biggie. I wasn't planning on living past 40 anyway. Which gives me 22 years to live on the streets and avoid "sucking off the system" before I do my patriotic duty and die. Thanks, Eddie Munster Ryan, for that vote of confidence that I'm "life unworthy of life." Geez, even Stalin had respect for writers; he called them "engineers of the human soul." I've gone from being that to ich bin lebensunwertens leben.
TL;DR can't code, I suck. 