Re: Widening gulf

[Ed Weick]

Thanks, Harry.  One of the brightest kids I ever met  was a little seven year old girl in a huge slum in Sao Paulo, Brazil.  She had a tremendous sense of what was going on around her, and was the most adept student of about thirty or forty in an adult (yes, adult) evening English class.  I was sorely tempted to put her in my suitcase and bring her back to Canada, where she had a chance of getting a good education.  The average schooling in the slum was about three years, which means that little Veronique may no longer going to school now and is on the street.  While she was outstanding, there were several other bright kids in that slum as well, all probably going nowhere.   Before one says anything meaningful about intelligence and class, one has to recognize how difficult it is for people to move upward in a stable, class-stratified society like Brazil.  Upward mobility is possible, but within very narrow bounds.  However, sometimes, after an event like a revolution or a major war, the opportunities for upward mobility can increase almost exponentially.  A case in point is Canada, and much of the western world following World War II, when rebuilding the post-war world led to a tremendous surge in the demand for educated labour.  I and many other people from the working class benefited from that surge.  Had it not occurred, I doubt very much that I would have finished high school, let alone university.   Following such a surge, the whole nature of class can change.  Many of the unemployed and underemployed low income people of today have had considerable education.  Many come from solid, middle-class backgrounds.  Keith Hudson may very well be right in proposing that class in future will increasingly be defined by something like technical or scientific aptitude, with those who have it rising to the top.     Getting back to my Brazilian slum, one should not think of the people living in it as having sunk to the bottom, but as having risen to the highest level open to them.  In many cases, their backgrounds were rural.  Many were displaced by the mechanization of large-scale agriculture, such as coffee plantations.  They flocked to the cities where, even if they live in huge slums, their lives and those of their children probably improved.  Education in Brazil is free, but poor parents find it difficult to pay for the books, clothing, etc., etc., needed to keep a kid in school.  So, it's possible that little Veronique may not have dropped.  I certainly hope she didn't.   Ed Weick   ----- Original Message ----- From: Harry Pollard To: Ed Weick ; [EMAIL PROTECTED] ; [EMAIL PROTECTED] Cc: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Thursday, November 08, 2001 4:24 PM Subject: Re: Widening gulf Ed, I think Heinlein did a good  (and prescient) job many years ago in the "Marching Morons". A Rip Van Winkle awoke in the future in a field. He went to a road, where he was picked up by a motorist who tore along the country road at 90 mph. Except to our RVW it seemed the car wasn't moving much more than  perhaps 30. The intelligent people who were actually running the planet from the pole - I forget which one - made cars with speedometers that read 90 - but were actually 30. This was one of the many ways the morons were protected from themselves. However, I don't think the people at the bottom are particularly unintelligent. Intelligence can be honed by experience. The underclass simply don't meet with situations that improve the skill called intelligence. In my travels around California, I get depressed when I see a bunch of black kids in an inner city high school - bright-eyed and bushy-tailed - but who I know will face 50% unemployment and an automatic "underclass" when they get out of school. Harry ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Ed wrote: > I think Kurt Vonnegut's book "Player Piano" dealt with Keith's dystopian > scenario. > > Vonnegut wrote it as science fiction, but it seems to be turning out to be > ever closer to reality. > > Arthur Cordell Perhaps some new Orwellian slogans: "Democracy is Inequality!" "Big Brain is Watching You!" "Dark is Light!" "Dense is Bright!" Etc. Ed Weick ****************************** Harry Pollard Henry George School of LA Box 655 Tujunga  CA  91042 Tel: (818) 352-4141 Fax: (818) 353-2242 *******************************