On Education and Realism.

I was listening to a post the other day in which there was Johann Hari, my favourite journalist. There was a brief mention on education which I found interesting. Our system isn't fair and equitable. It is clear that many people don't have the chance to finish high school because their upbringing hasn't put enough importance into it, the same with university. Of course university isn't for everyone, many shouldn't be here and many who don't go lead much happier lives than us under and post-grads will.
My point though is, our system isn't egalitarian because we don't expect everyone to have education. We look at homeless and assume they dropped out at 12 when they started doing drugs; but worse, when we see a middle-aged woman working in a convenience store, we don't expect her kids to go to university, or that she did. So we are almost automatically subjecting the children of this poor hypothetical woman, who is probably working her arse off to provide as good an education as she can to them, to a lack of future in our current society. This is a reality. We tend to make differences in our heads of what constitutes a good job and which one is bad. Even though in the future we won't have as many psychologists as those studying to be one, nor will we have as many english teachers, people still see university as the front door to a well-paid job instead of a personal desire to learn more. I feel this is misguided, many will feel unfulfilled because they won't be able to compete. We should wait to the future though to watch the outcome.

On a point aside and unrelated, I believe political realists are those people who don't believe change is possible, they don't see into the achievements of our past and they cannot accept that we can break out of a so called human nature. On the other hand, idealists are already in the process of changing this world which has so many wrongs. Needless to say I'm an idealist.