What You Do When You Are Seven::Education and Equal Opportunity

Wow, this really hit home,  part of me at least accepts that a big part of who I am now is till because of things that happened as far back as 7 years old.  Hope the society I grew up in is much worse than the society that people growing up now is going to be exposed to.

Second, it is very difficult to have a great deal of power in this society if you are not exquisitely well-prepared to compete when you are 25–which requires that you have or be able to rapidly acquire patrons and that you went to and took advantage of a good college or did something else functionally equivalent, which requires that you applied yourself in high school, which is very hard to do unless you got a solid foundation in terms of basic skills and study habits in elementary school. This means that i people who are scared off from going to college because of the debt it incurs have a very small shot at large amounts of upward mobility, and ii the decisions people make when they are seven about how to spend their time shape their lives for the next seventy years. In even a half-good society, one should not be able–it should not be the rule–that one can greatly narrow the possibilities for one’s life by what one does or fails to do at seven.
via Education and Equal Opportunity.