Education

Which is just another way of saying that it serves an end.

We keep hearing about solutions. The meal program was a big part of the solution. Except it wasn't. It did serve the goal, however. The goal was worthy--it's just not the goal that was needed to sell the program.

EC program were a big part of the solution. Except that while they have a significant effect on things like high school graduation and college attendance, they have a trivial effect on high school graduation and colelge attendance. "Significant" doesn't mean "important." Yet the EC programs served the desired goal, however. It wasn't an unworthy goal--just not the goal that was the selling point of the program.

This is round three. And again we keep hearing about significant effects in the research journals, where "significant" =/= "important". But as soon as it's in the newspaper, we see "significant" = "important". Worthsmiths have trouble wrapping their heads around polysemy when it suits them. Again, it's not an unworthy goal that people have in mind, but they are using kids to sell a social program. Twice is enough.

In fact, this time around it's going to bite people in the butt. So one study was widely touted as showing that kids in poverty (which immediately became "low income&quot had irreversible changes to part of their pre-frontal cortex and amygdala, specifically the executive function portion of the PFC. Meaning that over time the lack of executive control would lead to lower academic success and, at age 24, reduced control over their emotions and actions. This immediately means that somehow the effects have to be remedied, right?

Now, while interesting in and of itself, if reproducible, it also means that those who grew up in poverty are at that point intrinsically at a disadvantage because lack of control over actions and emotions at university and in the workplace will be a disadvantage because those are things that are very, very difficult to "level". Fortunately, again "significant" =/= "important".

The main problem I have with this kind of study is that causation stops where it's convenient. People are poor because they're poor or non-white. There's no logic in being poor, it's just accident or imposed from without because as we all know prosperity is the natural state of man. Even Rousseau couldn't hold that particular line.