Reddit mentions of Unequal Childhoods: Class, Race, and Family Life

> In reality its all just people expressing preferences regarding how they want to spend their time, preferences that are as rigid as our DNA.

That is an extremely bold statement you just made, and it's at best an oversimplification.

One, preferences for work over leisure or vice versa is certainly not a biological constant determined at birth. The culture of labor and leisure has differed drastically in time and place. If we just restrict our view to Western Europe, Jan de Vries's Industrious Revolution documents a substantial shift in patterns of consumption, leisure, and labor from the late 17th century onwards, predating actual industrialization itself. Cultural attitudes shifted towards favoring capital intensive consumption over idle leisure, and hence implicitly increased the relative priority of labor over leisure. Similar shifts are also documented in Song and Ming China, and in early industrial Japan, and are probably an ongoing process even today, particularly in developing countries. Unless you can somehow demonstrate that such shifts are due to spontaneous shifts in the underlying genetics of homo sapiens in time and place I'm not sure how your statement can possibly hold.

Second, a preference for work alone is not a decisive determinant of even middling success. Two equally dedicated workers, even if they had the exact same innate abilities, can have different outcomes based on how they work. And how people work and otherwise interact with the world around them is a function of imperfect information and environmental influences in addition to innate tendencies. Annette Lareau's Unequal Childhoods for example documents how poor parents fail to equip their children for upward mobility, not out of laziness, but because of inferior child rearing strategies which are not at all obvious to them. For example, poor parents are more likely to discipline their children sternly, rather than engage them in debate like middle class parents. The subtle but substantial advantages imparted by the latter are not at all obvious to the former, who only know to raise their children the way they themselves are raised. Human beings operate in a world of extremely limited information, particularly predictive information, and they also operate in a world governed by irrational social norms. It's silly to think that work alone can create success. For work to be productive it requires social support, quality education, material capital, i.e. things beyond any one individual's full control.

Third, the kind of success on display here, the $100 M / yr kind, is beyond the power of any single person to achieve without a significant element of luck. If you are born in a upper middle class family and go to all the right schools and get all the right jobs, you might be able to guarantee yourself a 1M / yr income, say as a trader or surgeon or lawyer. There is enough liquidity in high income labor markets for anybody with the right preparation to find a place, but this is far beyond that. Genuinely spectacular wealth like this can not be taken for granted by anyone, no matter how well informed or well prepared.

What makes you an expert on the subject?

I'm not going to claim I'm an expert either, but as part of my sociology of education course, I've read several books (Unequal Childhoods, The Schools We Need and Why We Don't Have Them, and Ed School Follies) and the gist of what I've learned from them is: 1) There is a huge difference in the quality of education received by children who happen to go to well-funded schools (and therefore probably live in upper class areas, and therefore probably have upper class parents) and those who don't. In other words, class absolutely plays a part in education. 2) The variation in curriculum from school to school/district to district/county to county/state to state is so huge that those who have to move regularly are at a huge disadvantage (i.e. you move to a new district, and that district taught the basics of something in 1st grade, but you were in a different district in 1st grade, and your district planned to teach the basics of that thing in 2nd grade, but you're now in 2nd grade learning the complexities of something you don't even understand the basics of). Poor people tend to move a heck of a lot more due to complications or trying to pursue opportunities. The quality of curriculum overall is pretty poor (in that it's not rigorous or specific enough in a lot of cases), in fact. Which, again, is a disadvantage to poorer people who don't have the advantage of having well-resourced, well-educated parents to make up for lacking school curriculum. 3) The teachers of the teachers are the biggest fuck ups; the set of ideals they have about children make it difficult to properly prepare teachers to actually teach students material. There's a lot of detail to this and I'm not going to summarize the entire book(s), but the focus of our education is more on not "harming" children by teaching them certain things too early or in teaching them things in a "boring" way (not talking about complex stuff here; basic stuff, like how to read). There's a focus on letting children develop naturally, rather than teaching them facts.

So... those are my understandings of what is wrong with the education system. I actually have no doubt that attitudes towards education are an issue, but they're clearly not the only issue. Feel free to provide me with some information, studies, or books I can read up on to give me a more broad understanding of why you think attitude is the only issue. I'm totally open to the idea that everything I've read is bias and uncomprehensive.

EDIT: Added links to the books I mentioned to give context.