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Though I disagree with Freddie on a ton of stuff, I do respect him for things like this: he sees and has seen the reality on the ground, and pushes back against the idea that all that is needed for every kid to go to Harvard is moar money. He acknowledges that - gasp! cover your ears from the horrid notion! - there is indeed a range of intellect and intelligence, and not every kid is as bright as the others. That you can't make a silk purse out of a sow's ear.
This does not mean ignoring the less academically able kids, but it does mean facing up to the truth: some kids are never going to go to any sort of college at all. That is a truth that can't be accepted, however, because we've constructed society (or are being swept along by the whirlwind of technological progress) where in order to get any kind of decent life you need that degree. Permanent, pensionable jobs have pretty much gone by the wayside as what you expect to do: get a good job, stay with one company for most of your career, retire from there. The world of work is much more fragile, transient, and vulnerable to shocks and upheaval now, and you have to be constantly re-inventing yourself, upskilling, keeping on top of new tech, jumping from company to company to get promotions, and so on. Even the white collar world is not immune to this, and unless you have a good education in the desirable skills that will land you a decent job where you can be fairly sure you can sell your skills for good salaries and have a career, then you are looking at the uncertain world of the gig economy, the temporary contract, the freelancer, and now the threat of being replaced by AI.
So to get on the career ladder, you need a college degree (let's put aside all the Caplan stuff about signalling for the moment). In order to do that, there is the idealistic notion of "everyone can go to college" and the practical realisation that if you admit that not all can or should go, and that merely having a degree is no longer in itself the guarantee of upward mobility and security that once it was, then you are saying "a lot of kids are going to be, for all intents and purposes, on the scrapheap once they are adults, unwanted by society since they can't contribute anything useful to the new knowledge economy".
That last is political suicide and also possibly setting the scene for widespread social upheaval and unrest. So you put pressure on the schools and the education system to pass everybody, to put them all on the college (any kind of college) track and you ignore or bury any evidence to the contrary that yeah, you do need streaming in schools because not everyone is equally able for the subjects and yeah, not everyone is fit for college so how about we tailor their education to what they can do?
That blue-collar work (unless you're a tradesman, and even that is hard work and no guarantee that everyone is going to be an independent small businessman) is diminishing, that we've outsourced it overseas for cheaper labour, and that there aren't the traditional manufacturing industries to soak up labour around anymore means that a lot of people in the lower half of the population are facing a future that is grim; possibly go into service work, which is low-paid, low-status, and biased towards shift work and cutting down hours so that employees don't hit the limits at which legal entitlements kick in. For a section of the upper half of the population, in certain white collar jobs, that future is already there (journalism) or looming with the threat/promise of AI.
Freddie sees this because he's been at the coalface. But there are a lot of people in power in the existing system for whom it is imperative that they turn a blind eye to all that, hence "all kids are equally smart and capable, it's down to grit and growth mindset, and if that doesn't work then it's the fault of systemic racism, and all must have prizes".
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