this post was submitted on 24 Jul 2025
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If you had the top schools in the nation in the 90s, what happened to the students of those schools afterwards?
Well that's me and my generation. Many of my friends left for other states, and I'm only waiting till my kid is old enough to move up to high school to move. I only have one friend left that has a kid and didn't move out of state. Everyone else is long gone.
There were a lot of Republicans listening to Rush Limbaugh and reaching their kids back then, so I'm sure those are the ones cheering our drain-circling now.
They get into a good college in a blue state and never come back. Academically successful people tend to move towards bigger markets for bigger salaries.
Right. So if having good schools doesn’t help them, what’s to be done?
Doesn't help them? Who do you think it's not helping? It helped the children. They got good educations and went on to live successful lives and make more money elsewhere. Isn't that the goal? Is education not the Silver Bullet? Isn't the goal of Education to provide a better life for the children? Isn't the goal of Education to serve the children? It's a service. It achieved its goals.
It's fair to say it's not helping the communities that provided those schools and raised those kids to be successful adults. I think it would be nice if more people were able to use their success to give back to the communities that gave them so much.
Society as a whole doesn't really benefit much from concentrating wealth, education, and marketable skill into a few places. But if I were graduating Harvard Law I wouldn't be looking to move back to some rural community where the best steakhouse in town is a Chili's.
You think the parents of those children are upset that their children were well educated which resulted in better opportunities and loftier careers? I don't think that upsets the communities at all. You do have to remember communities are made up of people. In this case parents. Who want the best for their children. That's their goal in life. Which good education helps to accomplish. So it seems that accomplished its goals perfectly.
I'm just not sure what you're trying to hover around here. It feels like you're trying to make the argument that communities should purposely not educate their children well so their children will be trapped in said community. Stuck in a permanent cycle of poverty . Now that's obviously ludicrous so I hope you're not trying to say that. Maybe your orbit is just so extremely wide I'm not sure what you are circling here.
Parents... No.
Communities (which are more than just parents). It's a little more complicated. It's really common to see communities celebrate a home town boy who made good.
But are they happy that in a broader sense they aren't good enough? Do they like being someplace you leave behind? This whole discussion stemmed from a place that had great education and is now circling the drain. I don't think communities enjoy that kind of thing.
A boomer who provided a great education for their kids in 90s probably wasn't expecting to grow old in a community with 3rd world healthcare and lunch ladies teaching their grandkids classes because the school won't hire woke teachers.
I think you missed my point. By “them” I meant the communities.
They educate the children. The children grow up and leave and never come back.
Meanwhile everyone left behind is still voting for Trump and living in shit. Even though they spent this money on educating their children.
How do we fix THAT?
That’s my question.
I’m not attacking you here. Go back and read my previous reply. How do we fix that? I don’t have an answer. I wish I did.
Clearly it sounds like they jumped ship the moment they could.
If that’s true, then education doesn’t seem to help there either.