- Dec 2022
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The magic bullet of education and skillseliminating poverty is an alluring one, but without a substantial increase in thenumber and quality of opportunities available, it is only a mirage.
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However, there is fatal flaw to this argument—as an overall macro strategyfor reducing poverty, it will be ineffective unless we also increase the overallquantity and quality of opportunities, particularly job opportunities, in society.In other words, by providing an individual with greater education, we havemade them more competitive in the job market, but only at the expense ofsomeone else. In this sense, the strategy is played as a zero-sum game.
initally creaded: 2022-10-10
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The critical mistake that has been made in the past is that we have equatedthe question of who loses the game with the question of why the game produceslosers in the first place. They are, in fact, distinct and separate questions.
Rather than focusing on education as the magic bullet for improving poverty, we should be focusing on the structural problems of the economy itself. It shouldn't be a zero sum game as that will always result in losers and thus poverty. The choices we make with that fallacy simply decide who will face poverty and will never fix the root issues.
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- Sep 2022
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The need for students to participate in the larger conversations around subject mattershelps writers creating more intellectual prose, but this becomes difficult in a “culture
prone to naming winners and losers, rights and wrongs. You are in or out, hot or not, on the bus or off it. But academics seldom write in an all-or- nothing mode” (p. 26).
Our culture is overly based on the framing of winners or losers and we don't leave any room for things which aren't a zero sum game. (See: Donald J. Trump's framing of his presidency.) We shouldn't approach academic writing or even schooling or pedagogy in general as a zero sum game. We need more space and variety for neurodiversity as teaching to the middle or even to the higher end is going to destroy the entire enterprise.
Politics is not a zero sum game. Even the losers have human rights and deserve the ability to live their lives.
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