Segregation in Education

Why our educational system is a moral travesty and needs a radical change.

“[…] of all the men we meet with, nine parts of ten are what they are, good or evil, useful or not, by their education. ’Tis that which makes the great difference in mankind.” -John Locke

Let me start with a thought experiment:

Imagine a country — called Lostland — with an educational system similar to real countries in many ways: In Lostland, children usually enter school when they are around 4 or 5 years old, and they will generally finish it when they are about 18. Some of those who leave school go on to a university, and some others choose not to further their formal education. In this country, the educational quality varies — sometimes to a quite large extent — between schools. Some schools in Lostland are incredibly prestigious and offer an exceptional education: they have an amazing and dedicated teaching staff, high-end gear and great facilities. It is no wonder those schools are known and renowned throughout the country for approving a huge number of their students into Lostland’s greatest universities. The majority of Lostlandian schools, however, cannot possibly catch up with the prestigious ones, since they suffer from a whole plethora of problems. They don’t have a good teaching staff overall — it isn’t rare, for instance, that in those schools some teachers lack an academic background on the very subject they’re teaching. They have old and outdated gear, a very limited budget and sometimes even their own facilities are unsafe for students. They rarely approve pupils into good universities, and a huge part of their students do not enter higher education after leaving — that is, if they have even finished high school. There are even some schools in Lostland that are so terrible it would be preferable for the students to never attend a class and instead study at home at their own pace. Even if, at their homes, they just studied very little and spent most of their time procrastinating, they would still be better off than going to such horrible schools. In summary, the educational quality throughout Lostland schools is very discrepant and unequal. It probably seems pretty much like your own country, doesn’t it?

The peculiar and unique thing, however, is the way Lostlandian society determines who goes to prestigious schools — and hence, most likely, receive a good education; and who goes to standard schools — and hence, most likely, receive an average education at best or a poor education at worst. The way they do it is pretty simple: minutes after a child is born, the doctor throws a twenty-sided die. If the die falls on 1, the child will go to prestigious schools. If the die falls on any other number (from 2 to 20), however, the child will go to standard schools. They do not care about the child’s learning capacity, intelligence, integrity, how hard they will work or their ability to seize the opportunity of a great education — none of that matters. The only thing that matters when determining which school a child will go to is the number the die fell on when they were born.

It seems like this criterion of determining which children should go to which school is completely ludicrous, arbitrary, unjust and — more importantly — unethical. And it really is all that. Yet, morally speaking, it isn’t much different from our society’s¹ current criteria for allocating children and teens to prestigious and standard schools. Our criterion is basically this: if a child is lucky enough to happen to be born into a sufficiently affluent family, then they will likely go to a great school and receive a good education. If, on the other hand, a child happens to be born into a family that cannot afford to send them to a prestigious school — be it because they lack money to pay the school’s fees; because those schools are restricted to children of diplomats and ambassadors or any other reason — then this child is condemned to go to an average or bad school and likely receive a lacking education. Just like in Lostland, in our lost society it generally doesn’t matter how smart and promising a child is, how hard-working and focused they are or how integral and ethical they are. What ultimately decides the quality of the education a child will get is something that — just like throwing dies — is totally up to luck: how rich the family they happen to be born into is. We might as well flip a coin and decide who is going to get the better education available.

This unfair allocation of students in schools is a complete shame, an utter travesty that instantly makes anyone who claims our society to be meritocratic a clown. A society that distributes its most precious asset, education, so carelessly and arbitrarily could not be further away from being fair, just, good or moral. The fact that this huge injustice is barely talked about in the media and rarely addressed by politicians makes it almost impossible for the general population to question, let alone challenge, the status quo. Such moral crime, which happens and has happened for centuries in broad daylight, is accepted and seen as ‘normal’ in our society — which is completely insane if one thinks about it.

Imagine a radical revolution just happened in your country, and the new government appointed me, you and a guy called David to redesign the whole educational system. We would have, at some point, to decide which pupils would go to the very best schools — which, let’s say, represent around 5% of the country’s schools. Say I propose we should establish a general exam, which every child should take at a certain age, and the children with the greatest scores would go to the best schools². You could reply by saying that maybe it isn’t a good idea to base admissions on one exam’s score, it would be better to look at things more holistically: access the child’s general performance at school, their capacity to learn and their general dispositions and interests. Now say that, while we were deliberating this matter, David politely said he had a suggestion: “What if we decide that the children who should go to the country’s top 5% schools are the children of the 5% richest parents in the country, regardless of the child’s traits?”. We wouldn’t even take him seriously. And yet, David's criterion is the one largely used by today’s capitalist societies.

I personally know incredibly bright and hard-working people who — because their parents were not sufficiently rich so as to matriculate them in the schools they deserved to be in — had most of their potential wasted down the drain and didn’t achieve the opportunities they should have achieved. At the same time, I know a lot of middle-class kids from paid schools who are just wasting their parents’ money, since they couldn’t care less about school. The sheer, terrible waste of the educational system is enormous.

Speaking honestly and frankly, if I had a child who went to paid school and I saw that they — for whatever reason — were not seizing properly the education they received: they weren’t performing well on exams, they weren’t very interested in studying or school in general; the first thing I’d do would be to matriculate my child in a free school and take a promising kid from a free school and matriculate them in my child’s previous paid school, paying their fees. That would be the right thing to do: not necessarily as a punishment for my child, but rather as a way to guarantee those who will receive the best education will make great use of it. My child shouldn’t be the one to get the best education just because they are my child and I can afford it.

How our educational system presents itself.

How it actually is.

Education can be a real force for good in the world — this should be obvious to anyone. That is why people who can benefit the most from a high-quality education, who could really seize this opportunity and make the best use of it — using their intelligence and knowledge to make the world a better place — are the ones who deserve to occupy the best schools on Earth. It doesn’t matter their socioeconomic background, their place of birth or residence, their family or ancestry, their race or gender. Are they sufficiently smart, creative, focused, hard-working and integral? If yes, then they are the ones who deserve to study in the best, most prestigious schools — they, and not the uninterested, stupid, spoiled, snob and lazy students who currently fill up great schools worldwide.

The standard-rich-kid student of first-class schools is probably one of the worst possible candidates one could have picked to occupy such institutions. We can barely blame them for that, however, since they are usually too busy drinking and smoking weed at fancy parties, or too worried about what they’ll wear at their high school prom (should they go with Gucci or Prada…? Such a difficult question…); they are so busy with such important matters that they can barely pay attention to their studies and make use of the impeccable educational opportunity they have in their hands. Meanwhile, thousands (if not millions) of working-class kids and teens with exceptional intelligence and great dedication have most of their potential wasted in schools which are not prepared to give a good enough education for them. They, then, will likely grow up disillusioned with education and learning as a whole and will probably waste, through no fault of their own, their intellect and talent by working at a trivial job their entire life.

I don’t claim to have a great, practical solution to this issue. My main goal with this essay is to diagnose the disease rather than to propose a specific cure for it. Some may say the solution lies in some private-public partnership, or in something vaguely resembling Salvador Allende’s Escuela Nacional Unificada — I don’t really know. What is essential, for now, is that we recognize the current requirement for studying in great schools — i.e. your family having enough money — as a problem that needs to be solved and speak about it. That is the first step.

I dare to say that this fundamental problem underlying our educational system is — given education’s paramount role in virtually every civilization — one of the most urgent and pressing issues of our time. Until we solve this shameful, disgraceful unfairness, there cannot be any substantial talk about social justice, meritocracy or equality in our society.

“I am, somehow, less interested in the weight and convolutions of Einstein’s brain than in the near certainty that people of equal talent have lived and died in cotton fields and sweatshops.” -Stephen Jay Gould

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Film recommendation:

A quite good film that addresses various themes discussed in this essay in a very interesting manner is ‘Machuca’ (2004), a Chilean movie directed by Andrés Wood. I highly recommend watching this beautiful and unique film.

1. When I use the admittedly vague expression “our society”, please understand that I’m generally referring to most current western societies, which have paid schools (that are generally better) and free schools (that are generally worse). The terminology for ‘paid’ and ‘free’ schools varies from country to country, but I like using ‘paid’ and ‘free’ because those terms highlight the commercial nature of it. I am not, however, trying to generalize this to every single society that exists or has existed. Maybe the educational system in some parts of Scandinavia or in Allende’s Chile is/were completely and radically different in such a way that my criticism doesn’t apply to those places. Fine: I’m not saying my criticism is universal, but I do think it applies to the way most western societies — and likely to some eastern societies as well — structure the educational system.

2. Sort of like the Eleven-plus exam in the UK.