The New York Times Education Insert Jan 22,2012
1% Education: The pressure to super achieve makes individual perfection the goal, not social improvement”
As Occupy Wall Street needles American’ s financial sector over the country’s economic imbalance, it also focuses attention on another issue that helps fee that imbalance: education inequity
Pointedly, the Occupy Harvard news release announcing its formation read: “We want a university for the 99%, not a corporation for the 1%”
Who are these academic 1 percenters? To a large extent, they are the children of the economic 1 percent – children of privilege who have been given every chance to excel and often do. The y attend private schools and summer camps, take music lesson, get extensive SAT tutoring, land prestigious internships, take trips overseas and generally do what the less affluent cannot afford to do.
Of the 1.6 million high school seniors who took the SATs last year, roughly 30,000 or 0.2 percent, will end up in the freshmen classes of the country’s 20 highest – rated universities. They dominate the Rhodes, Marshall and other prestigious scholarships.
Harvard, for example, gives students with family income below $65,000 a free ride, and the number of freshmen receiving low-income Pell Grants has climbed to 18 percent this academic year compared to 12 percent five years ago.
Finally, a culture that rewards big personal accomplishments over smaller social ones threatens to create a cohort of narcissists.
Many 99 percenters are awed by the accomplishments of 1 percenters, especially as the gap between rich and poor in SAT scores and college completion widens.
Common Sense Review
I find it so amazing that our society is becoming a “I deserve what you have” society. Building the border between the economic levels doesn’t decide the quality of education. The want and passion to get an education is the key to success..
As a society we need to stop looking to physical wealth as a factor to success. Success in life is living…
I find your position to be awfully inconsistent , thus, hypocrisy.
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