Vixen
Penultimate Amazing
It might be very true that under capitalism (and even communism) workers are exploited. This goes back to the Industrial Revolution and the consequent invention of scientific management (FW Taylor) and 'Taylorism' when output, time and efficiency became an obsession in getting the most out of your work force. From slavery or serfdom, in which people were fed or at least had the means to self-maintain (as in growing their own stuff), suddenly in C19 they're forced into factories and supporting services AND having to use their earnings to feed and clothe themselves and their families. BUT we are all born into a society with the expectation that unless one has a 'get-out clause' we are expected to earn a living as an adult, so yes, education is important. By only allowing the wealthy to have the means to enter well-paid professions or government positions and pretending it's elitism to have selective education for the public in general (only 6.6% go to elite private schools in the UK) you are preventing social mobility. Even Boris Johnson only got well-educated because he got an EU-scholarship and Rishi Sunak a scholarship to Winchester, with his parents having to drive him there as a day boy who couldn't afford boarding, please let's stop pretending IQ testing of children is a dirty word. In fact it is one way out of the low-paid minimum wage poverty trap. Plus, in addition, unlike in the past, anyone with talent and innovation skills can start up their own companies and secure intellectual copyright for their inventions.No, we were talking about the science of IQ tests and g, both of which have disconcertingly little to do with intelligence.
Why do you think that the educational systems of all Western nations meticulously exclude young people from the educations they want but can't get into? Why do you think that is, Vixen?
As for the "children who mostly only can't wait to leave at sixteen or seventeen," they can't wait to get out of school because school has already taught them that education is not for them, the educational selection has already excluded them from access to any and all kinds of higher learning, which they respond to by pretending to hate all kinds of learning – and not least, the people who are blessed by having access to it, the nerds. (A lot of mobbing in school is due to this fact.)
In the USA, in particular, it results in contempt for the 'elites', i.e. people with access to higher education and the prospects it brings, instead of contempt for the actual elite, the Epstein class.
And you don't have to tell me what you think is the reason why TV channels only show educational programmes in the morning when most people are at work and can't watch them. You have already made it clear.
Yes, of course! The (few) students with a working-class background who get into college benefit from their college education. The ones who don't don't.
A similar thing happened in my country in the booming 1960s. The State of Denmark began to notice that an industrialized society would need more people with a higher education than the previous mainly agricultural one. In fact, even farmers now needed to know that there was such a thing as proteins. There was even a new word, very popular back then and one that I haven't heard in decades, intelligensreserven.
It meant that even working-class children could now (realistically!) dream of going to college, and a lot of them did. It lasted until the financial crisis hit the Western world in the mid-1970s when it was all of a sudden decided that far too many young people went to college, which obviously wasn't meant for them, so admission to higher learning was restricted again - with or without IQ tests. So there now was an 'intelligence surplus', although nobody ever came up with a word since it would have made it conspicuous that the reason why many young people are excluded from going to college isn't that they don't have enough 'g'. The reason is that the state and the companies don't want them to get educated beyond what is deemed to be fitting for their class.
That's why "identifying scholastic pupils" works the way it does! The state wants just enough people with university degrees to fill the jobs it needs to fill – and sometimes not even that because importing Polish doctors is cheaper than educating them yourself. Britain seems to think so, too.
As mentioned before, Western societies don't seem to appreciate having populations that are educated beyond the level required for getting the kind of jobs that are available. Much like Trump, they appreciate having working classes that aren't science literate and lack "the skills to see through the lies of, say, antivaxxers, tobacco companies and global warming deniers," as I wrote in post 198. It's the reason why Western countries remain only half civilized and are about to be left behind by China.
It's also the reason why the IQ ideology is still as popular as it is. It's the ideological (= socio-biological) justification of societies where higher education, with a few token exceptions, is for "the Tory councillor's kid and the famous photographer's one."
Yes, of course, in the free market with the constraints of supply and demand, the best jobs will always be limited. It is unavoidable.

