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If nothing else, the question posed in this thread proves that bad education isn't restricted to the poor.
The writer apparently hasn't noticed that our society is pyramidal in structure and that it is competitive in nature. Thus every time someone carves himself a slightly larger piece of cake, someone else's slice gets smaller.
But then, the original post didn't attempt to answer the thread's question anyway. It was just an excuse to trot out a generalized stereotype and at that, one which doesn't apply only to the poor. I don't recall the poor ever complaining that the rich make them eat junk food and watch TV all day.
I guess the point was supposed to be that the poor could do more to help themselves and that is true to a very limited extent. The flaw is that the dynamics of our economy, particularly over the past 30-some years, have been such that wealth increasingly moves towards the already wealthy, the middle class are more likely to slip down the economic ladder than climb it, and the poor will stay poor. And unless you find a way to create more jobs, the result of an unemployed person finding work is that someone else becomes unemployed.
As to free, equal opportunity education: that is a myth. Even within the public education system, standards vary widely to the extent that straight A's at schools in deprived urban areas are not enough for consideration for many colleges. Still, so long as we don't have national standards we can ignore that kind of issue.
On the face of it, you don't have to care about the people our society lets down: that's between you and your conscience. And not everyone believes that a country should be judged by how it cares for those least able to look after themselves: the young, elderly, sick and poor. But if things continue as they are, then eventually gated communities will not merely be a vanity. As more and more people wake up to the reality that society has nothing to offer them, they will also realize that they owe nothing to it.
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