Education a Self can be Interested In.

I want to propose a revised form of US education that downplays competition by focusing more on the individual’s self-interest while in school. This way, instead of competition being the main motivation behind schoolwork, it becomes the persons own passions. So the person grows up trying to figure out how to modify their passions into something useful to society as a whole. This would be the aim of schooling, rather then the blind memorization of facts- which eventually leads up to college where the person must chose their life path, whereas up to that point the thought never entered their mind in a serious fashion- a real recipe for disaster.

So in essence, I believe that the only way of bridging the gap economic between the poor and the rich is to redesign our educational system, from one of competition (seeing who gets the best grades, scores, etc) to one of discovering, cultivating, and harnessing a persons self-interested passion.

There is a real world example of this kind of self-interest driven educational system. Finland:

I believe it will benefit the US economy greatly if we educate our people (in higher education as well) in this manner. If this would to be the case, my expectation is the wealth gap closing, because more people are educated without the burden of debt. Thus a true open class society can exist, with free and high quality education as the escalator between classes. Rather then throw money at other forms of welfare, we can devote most of it to providing everyone education. This will end up being more helpful then standard welfare. If we educate people, they can support themselves. Rather then the government supporting them without providing education. Education helps people help themselves.