Quote from: K-Dog on Oct 05, 2023, 11:18 AMIt's just going to happen.
Slowly.
I have absolutely ZERO argument against any of this rant, and anyone who does IMHO is either willfully ignorant or as incredibly stupid as they have been taught to be through the public school system. I happened to be lucky enough to actually get a good education, because when I went to the NYC Public Schoolls they functioned as a sieve to find genetically gifted kids and track them all with finer and finer mesh until only the smartest of the smart kids got into Stuyvesant, or just below Bronx HS of Science and down further to Brooklyn Tech. 3 true college prep schools that were as good or better than the most expensive private boarding schools in Amerika, or England. Schools like Phillips Andover, Exeter and Choate. Only Stuyvesant did better than Andover, and won more of the Westinghouse 1st Place Award for Science or Math achievement.
To get there, in elementary school you had 3 tracks, 4-1,4-2 & 4-3 when I rejoined the system after my time in Brasil. Only 4-1 track students tested 4 the Special Progress program in JH, where you could either do 7-8-9 with "enhanced curriculum", or 7-9 i you wanted to get it over with faster. In 9th grade you were tested yet again for the 5 "Magnet" HS, which besides the 3 mentioned included HS of Music & Art and HS for the Performing Arts (the school made famous by the "Fame" film). That is 5 out of 571 public high schools, or of course, slightly under 1%. Surprised?
In later years these tracks were eliminated in favor of "mainstreaming", which mixed smart kids and stupid kids, special needs kids, behavioral problems like ADHD treated with meds all together in one classroom, and nothing got done. Why? Because by 1990 at the latest they no longer needed to grow the elite caste from the ranks of the poor and middle class any more. In fact they had too many engineers and scientists and college professors already.
The only thing I quibble with a bit is the definition of "slow". In terms of the human lifespan maybe, but in Civilization terms, very fast. You can peg Industrial civilization to beginning with the Steam Engine around 1750, so 270 years to get up to here. If it takes 50 years to get back to the equivalent 1750 level I'll be surprised. In 100 years, if there are people living at H-G level, that will be a good outcome.
RE