[Kaezion]

Communism is about economic equality. The right to an equal education is more of a social issue.

High-five for your radical left-wing beliefs! ^ .^

I must say, this should have its limits though. There should be the same level of education for people of different socioeconomic groups, but different levels of education for people who have more talent/put in more effort. That is to say, people who are mentally retarded and will grow up to be a bricklayer shouldn't get the same education as someone who has plans to become a quantum scientist.

I have to agree with you here. People fight for more funding to mentally retarded students, but to be honest they aren't going to help society any. Why should we take money from the gifted students when they could use it the most? It's more of a natural selection issue.

why put laws into place? a society with no laws will ensure that only the most physically or mentally endowed - meaning, the strongest or the most resourceful - citizens survive.

if i extrapolated your argument a little further, i would eventually arrive at the conclusion to exterminate all the groups of people who are a financial burden on society - all the people living on welfare, all the people on social security, and all the people in jails. plus all the others that i'm forgetting that are living off of federal or state funding. all of that money could be better spent on people who would be more of a help to society, can't it?

a society is a group of people living as a collective, whether it be in a city, state, nation, or the whole world. if you sacrifice the good of one part of that society for the good of another in aiming for 'the greater good', you defeat the purpose of helping that society in the first place.

either leave the social darwinism out of your argument or leave the humanitarianism out. they're mutually incompatible, and i think that it's disgustingly hypocritical of someone to use that approach to justify his views.

[Aaron]

I don't think we should abandon the weak and disadvantaged in our society. I just think it is foolish to spend more of our resources on those who cannot make society progress than on those who can. I don't want to sound heartless, but if someone is a vegetable that cannot even communicate with you, why should you provide funding for the person when that money could go toward helping those, say, economically disadvantaged but not mentally? That person may have the ability to succeed, but it is not given to him because he cannot afford a tutor like a more wealthy child can. He is only given what little public education offers.

[Dr. Kebab]

Rofl just ban guns

[Jake]

I say we ban violence

[Neraphym]

Then we go on to ban humanity. Equilibrium for all!

Anywho, I've been in classes with a kid who had a learning disability. The kid was disruptive and he slowed the class down. My education was HARMED by him being there. No child left behind simply drags every kid back to the pace of the slowest. It looks live every kid goes at the same rate, but when compared with Europe and other developed nations, we simply see that EVERY American child is left behind. We are dropping from the top ranks to the bottom in education, and we have to find out why and correct it.

Although we should not completely abandon the weak, we cannot let them drag everyone else. I do not believe that social darwinism and humanitarianism are incompatible. We can help the weak without hurting the strong. That is why society exists; everyone gets a chance.

[Kaezion]

but that's what college level education is for. those with higher intellectual merit are generally accepted into the better schools. and generally speaking, better schools have bigger financial endowments, allowing the economically disadvantaged but intelligent students to somewhat get past the financial obstacles of higher education.

there are obviously casualties of this system - there are inevitably going to be some smart kids who are going to miss out on opportunities. it's not up to us, however, to decide who should get what opportunites based on what kind of criteria. all we can do - actually, what we must do as responsible members of society - is to try our best to push everyone forward.

the results might actually be unfavorable compared to what you might be suggesting - for example, less of the more-helpful-to-society people might miss out as a result of our deliberate tweaking of the system, with more of the useless people filling in the "screwed-over" demographic. however, i believe that crosses a line drawn by both the definition of a society and our consciences. we would be, in principle, deliberately screwing over more useless people so we can save more of the useful people. while that is most certainly a practical decision, i don't think that that is anyone's decision to make.

why doesn't the US military leave its wounded behind? the wounded are no longer of any practical military usefulness. yet, the military values its belief of "leaving none behind" - it's the difference between trying and not trying. as members of a society, we are bound by conscience to try our best to save everyone and accept the risks. there are inevitably going to be casualties of these efforts. but it is an abandonment of our consciences to resort to measures that imply an acceptance of loss, and to focus that loss on a specific group of people.

i believe strongly that humanitarianism and social darwinism are antithetical to each other. humanitarianism has at its core the goal of closing the gap between the well-off and the not-so-well-off - it is the goal of advancing each individual member of the human race as part of a global society. social darwinism, on the other hand, is fundamentally based on the belief that the gap between the top and the bottom is natural, inevitable, and necessary. it has as its goal the advancement of the human race as a species, not as a society.

[Neraphym]

Ok, I'm gonna use pictures to illustrate my point. These are supposed to be bell curves, but I'm too lazy and just drew semicircles.





Take the first one labeled "current" as how we are now. The other three are possible outcomes based on three different goals. The first is No Child Left Behind. We make the dumb kids smarter, but make the smart kids dumber. We are warping the curve upward and in tighter. With Social Darwinism, we exacerbate the problem. We make the dumb kids dumber and make the smart kids smarter. These extremes do little to make us as a nation smarter. What we should be doing is shifting the curve in the right direction, as illustrated in "My Sollution" (even though I'm not really proposing anything).

The problem is, the changes seen from the extremes are much more apparent than those of the shifting given the same resources. As a whole, we might shift up 1 IQ point with X amount of funding should we go with my way. If we take the NCLB version with the same X amount of funds, we'll see the dumb people rising several IQ points. Politicians will parade these results around as better than the good solution, even though they get cancelled out by the smart kids dropping a similar amount of IQ. This fact is simply ignored. This is my impression of whats going on in America right now.

[Aaron]

I see your point, Alpha. We aren't really progressing forward as a society if we try to help the low end that will never get to at least the middle of the pack and neglect the high end. The high end is stalled and it would be foolish to let it to remain stationary rather than move it forward.

[Kaezion]

so what's your Final Solution?

[Neraphym]

Hehe, I said I didn't have one. I'm just outlining what our focus should be. It's so much easier to criticize than it is to propose your own.