I've been reading a Neil Gaiman book to the youngest kid every now and then which goes like:<p>> Ladies of Light & Ladies of Darkness,<p>> & Ladies of Never-You-Mind,<p>> this is a prayer for a Blueberry Girl.<p>> First, May you ladies be kind.<p>> …<p>> Dull days at forty, false friends at fifteen;<p>> Let her have brave days and truth.<p>> Let her go places that we’ve never been;<p>> Trust and delight in her youth.<p>And then I read stuff like this, or articles about the grim reality of private schools (<a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2021/04/private-schools-are-indefensible/618078/" rel="nofollow">https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2021/04/private...</a>), and I wonder … how did we get here? is this what it means to want your kids to go places we've never been? Is this ... good?<p>From Flanagan's Atlantic article:<p>> Why do these parents need so much reassurance? They “are finding that it’s harder and harder to get their children through the eye of the needle”—admitted into the best programs, all the way from kindergarten to college. But it’s more than that. The parents have a sense that their kids will be emerging into a bleaker landscape than they did. The brutal, winner-take-all economy won’t come for them—they’ve been grandfathered in. But they fear that it’s coming for their children, and that even a good education might not secure them a professional-class career.<p>> …<p>> Daniel Markovits, a professor at Yale Law School, coined the term meritocracy trap—a system that rewards an ever-growing share of society’s riches to an ever-shrinking pool of winners. “Today’s meritocrats still claim to get ahead through talent and effort, using means open to anyone,” he has written in these pages. “In practice, however, meritocracy now excludes everyone outside of a narrow elite.” This is a system that screws the poor, hollows out the middle class, and turns rich kids into exhausted, anxious, and maximally stressed-out adolescents who believe their future depends on getting into one of a very small group of colleges that routinely reject upwards of 90 percent of their applicants.<p>Is that all there is? Is it just, work work work, get the kids into a good school, line up their tutors and extracurricular enrichment, watch them graduate, maybe meet the grandkids, die?<p>Why do so many people want this so much?