The wrong problem: Kindergarten places for the poor

I know the most important nugget from Sandra Davie piece is just this: the teachers made trips to the children's homes to make sure mom created a supportive learning environment at home. For my parents then it was buying two study tables for my brother and I where there was hardly any place for them in our small flat.

At great cost, we can fix the schools which the under privileged go to but what is decisive happen in the homes. The task will demand iron will and sheer determination no less to overcome. Against this, the perennial problems of our SMEs would look easy.

The type of advice and exposure our kids get because we had succeededed in graduating from university and landed good professional jobs, the working class are completely clueless. Just as the office cleaner is clueless about the sort of work and thinking that goes on in the corner office he/she cleans every day, he/she has no idea how to advise much less create the environment for his/her kids back home. In a situation like this, even if opportunities were offered to the kids of the working class, many do not even recognize them as such. How do you then give them a leg up?

Actually we have always had this problem but it was as good as absent before. In my time the big difference from today was the ranks of the privileged were small and the opportunities that were opening up were much more numerous. After the well schooled kids of the privileged class have grabbed all the opportunities they cared to have, there were still too many left for us to even count. This resulted in phenomenal social mobility. It was like the Americans moving west, the sky is the limit. Now the west is fully populated and new frontiers of opportunities had turned into many zero sum games. No wonder competition is so intense.

Therefore meritocracy is essentially a means to an end, which is social mobility. This is not possible unless there are new opportunities. Who creates such opportunities? In our circumstances, it is the government right strategic foresight and to a lesser extent enterprising entrepreneurs. As the government become less able at seeing what is beyond the horizon, we have become less able at creating opportunities for our people. To be fair, this is a problem that is rarely solved by most governments. Perhaps at this stage of development we should even ask if the government should not abdicate this to the entrepreneurs.

Yes, this government by concentrating on schooling isn't solving the real problems that need to be solved. It is not meritocracy but creating opportunities because we are already working hard enough to be meritorious (not completely correct).

Update: 6:00pm

I think I better move forward "Start Up Nation" from my ton of books to go through. I am just impressed and feel the urgency after quickly perusing its Introduction....some input for my girl before she gets ready for university. In reading about Venice, I was informed of the limits, may be futility of heavy investment in engineering/manufacturing...but Venice built an armada of ships! Yesterday we were going over what she had learnt about that place from school. Sigh! It is an uneven playing field. How many working class parents can discuss and think through such issues with their kids? You see these kids in school but they really compete against each other from home and perhaps enrichment/tuition classes.

We must lift all boats or there is no future. This is not possible when an increasing number of games are turning zero sums. In the last few years, the government tried but it went badly wrong turning many games into negative sum for locals when foreigners were hired over us.