On higher education: before that, Prof. Tooze mentioned how the earliest moments of a person life are the ones that produce a better "return to investment". That is correct and it's not only from the financial point of view but - and most importantly - from a pedagogical point of view. Pre-natal care and tranquility for the parents during pregnancy are fundamental. The care will produce a healthy child and the tranquility will produce not only a healthier child but also a more resilient (psychologically and in other social aspects) child *and* family. Now the child is born - tranquility and healthcare are still important but a tiny bit less critical. There's now a new preocupation: education! Caretakers and kindergarten teachers must be well trained and to attract people with the background¹ needed their wages must also be high. It's from 0 to 5-7 that we develop the unconscious ideas that we'll use later when we "think" or "reason". Those are called "gestalts" and the Romanian born Israeli psychologist Reuven Feuerstein argues - and have shown - that the cognitive ability of a child is related to how rich the set of gestalts that child has. Feuerstein also argues that we can improve an older person's set of gestalts and for this he developed a method called Mediated Pedagogy that has been successfully used on children that experienced a refugee situation, children born with some cognitive difficulty, gifted children and even adults who had some brain injury. I love education and teaching. My grandfather was a college professor and both my parents worked as teachers. I could be an excellent high-school teacher; I could be a junior high teacher; I'm not sure if I have the patience to be a primary school teacher - I could never be a kindergarten teacher or caretaker² because I have none of the abilities nor the training required for that. To teach a person that can speak and listen is easy - to teach an person that cries all the time, doesn't speak and can't understand what we say is a Herculean task! Once the educational system is reformed - starting at the early stages of education - a college degree becomes irrelevant because every healthy indigidual will finish high school with the ability to learn by itself and already capable of seizing its citizenship in full. Notes: 1) background refers to the history of an individual and that history, since the education of small children is the most important, can't be blamed on the individual nor on his family because the child has no agency and the parents were children not long before becoming parents. We, who have the tranquility and background, should bear the responsibility. 2) by caretaker I want to mean the person that takes care of babies in places like daycare centers.
1:03:00 The State of São Paulo under governor Mário Covas (Brazil) created a housing program that gave housing to women (the mothers) via lotery. It worked expectacularly! It's not philantropy but in the end it's the same thiog.
