Education is the process through which we all acquire our most defining characters as humans: the ability to think logically, elaborate sustainable arguments and cultivate extensive knowledge about the social, natural and historical world that is ours to improve. Moreover, Evolutionary Psychology studies have shown that our intellectual potential can only be truly unleashed through repeated intellectual stimuli. That is, it is only through constant exposure to intellectually stimulating tasks that our cognitive abilities will reflect our inherent abilities. There is therefore no such a concept as "less smart" people: all we are referring to is the unfortunate fact that some people just haven't been intellectually stimulated the way others have throughout their childhood, thus leading to different capacities on the long run.
Acknowledging the incontestable importance of education in light of its role in both one's understanding of the world and one's ability to purge into his or her deepest cognitive resources to potentially create or discover extraordinary things and move the entire human community forward, how could we possibly accept the modern educational system as it is? How could we tolerate the aberrant gaps that are more than evident between large, ineffective public schools and luxury, elitist private or boarding schools? Within the formers, thousands of kids are fed with the lightest work load conceivable by teachers that are paid miserable amounts and thus provide a performance that is too often on par with this price range. Within the latter, to which only the wealthiest can attempt to access and claim to be able to pay a tuition that would put universities to shame, PhD level professors are nourishing their pupils with first-rate knowledge, pushing them to their intellectual boundaries and preparing them for careers in academia, law or medicine.
For every boarding school attendee that will naturally pursue his or her educational path by attending a prestigious, top 20 college or university, hundreds of public school students will get out of their establishment with no next step in mind, having received poor counseling support and having cultivated a negative, inevitably misled view of education based on the mediocre experience that is unfortunately the only one they ever had. The problem is blatant, affecting the very roots of society as a whole, yet it is far from fixed.
Some say that top-tiers education has to be financed somehow, and that it certainly could not be rendered accessible to all. Others might argue that the very people who received this privileged, exclusive education are now in command of the nation's educational engine, and see no viable alternative other than maintaining it the way it currently is. But no matter what one will argue in defense of private education, the evidence supporting the status of education as one of the strongest foundational pillars of our species should make it clear that the most drastic measures should be undertaken in order to fix the current situation.
If all human beings are born free and equal in rights, maybe it is time to let them grow up free and equal in access to the most fundamental right a person could ask for: that to be given the opportunity to become human, fully human.
