Kort Explores conundrums of the human condition

ABC News recently did a segment on the results of "Project Choice". 14 years ago a multimillionaire put up his own money to guarantee a fully paid college education to 1400 poor minority 9th graders in Kansas City. The only requirements were that the students graduate from high school, and not mess up their lives with drug abuse.

These are hardly onerous conditions. In the rural Midwest HS I attended, where class sizes averaged 30 students per teacher, a couple hours of homework (mostly math and English) every night was the norm, books were only replaced when they were physically worn out after many years of hard use, and it was still considered a point of honor that teaching was hard work for low pay, all but two of the 100+ kids in my freshman class graduated four years later. But then my graduating class fully expected to have to earn their own way in life, and a high school diploma was a widely recognized minimum requirement for pretty much any job that would provide a regular paycheck.

In addition to the guarantee of a fully paid college education, the students were provided with special courses, individual tutors and other "educational assistance" in an effort to "overcome" the expected disadvantages of attending a "poor" minority dominated urban high school - a school with an annual per/student budget that even adjusted for inflation was many times what my rural high school spent to educate me.

In essence, these 1400 "underprivileged" individuals were handed guaranteed success in life if only they were willing to make use of it. Only a little more than half of the Project Choice students graduated from high school, and only 16% graduated from college. 84% of the "underprivileged" students offered this incredible opportunity were unwilling to cooperate in becoming successful productive citizens - even when provided with advantages that would arguably have returned an 84% success rate if offered to a "traditionally success oriented" population sector. 84% of the Project Choice students remained in poverty because they were either unwilling or incapable of becoming productive citizens even when their favorite excuses of poverty and minority status were eliminated as factors.

The ABC talking heads tried hard to make the case that the failure of Project Choice was due to not providing enough special privileges and advantages to these "victims of poverty". The predictable "analysis" of this privately funded welfare project's failure to achieve equality of outcome, was that a free college education and 4 years of individual tutoring in preparation wasn't enough to overcome the "legacy of growing up in poverty". The "approved" perspective, served up with the well practiced earnest certainty that is so popular with uncritical viewers, was that it would now be "necessary" to vastly expand the project using "public funding"

The "news" coverage carefully avoided venturing into such forbidden areas as questioning whether the goal of artificially imposed equality of outcomes is worth the ever growing socioeconomic costs - or is even a desirable objective within a society of free individuals.

No mention was made of the fact that "public funding" really means tax money extracted by force from those who didn't waste their opportunities, and didn't consistently make the worst possible life choices in spite of extensive efforts to save them from themselves.

There was also no consideration of the harm suffered by those who were deprived of opportunities in order to provide those unwilling to appreciate what has been set before them with opportunities to waste.