Education, Quotas, Scholarships, Nootropics, Mentoring

Social Mobility, Social Justice, and Social Equity

‘Social mobility’, social justice, and social equity are ends in themselves, and are direly needed in the acutely classist and racist¹ global late capitalist mode of production; insidious inequality exists between nations and between individuals within nations. Below consists of some strategies in social justice and social equity practice and/or reforms.

Tertiary Education

Tertiary education should be made free to all adults. This is because it is only fair to grant equal opportunity — an anti-class effect, and education in general has enormous personal benefits as well as great and manifold positive externalities². An externality is “a cost [negative] or benefit [positive] to a third party as a result of someone else’s actions”³.

Gender Quotas

For equity on gender, I propose the exigency for extensive and comprehensive gender quotas to be deployed across industry, vocation, profession, and academic study and specialisation. This is to eschew gender competition between men⁴ and women⁵and equitably better equalise gender roles.

Scholarships

We should especially grant tertiary scholarships, to peoples from economically disadvantaged demographics, into university courses that have high-demand, competitive or limited student enrollment placings. Race, ethnicity and class, are all factors in which these DEI (Diversity, Equity and Inclusion) scholarships should be granted. Informing of granting these scholarships should be myriad sociological theories such as class and racial exploitation. Thus, neo-Marxist and CRT (Critical Race Theory), should help inform the granting of tertiary scholarships, but not as totalising theories, as truth is predicated and premised on individual difference.

Cognitive Development

Other ways to foster better scholarly inclusion are distributing and prescribing high-grade pharmaceutical cognitive enhancer nootropics to under-privileged adults⁶ and state-funded academic mentoring. Great care must be taken not to abuse nootropics, and we should note that they do not expedite a greater intelligence from consumption; rather, they only enhance mental focus and vigilance over longer periods of time, in study and reading⁷.

1. The racist realities of global capitalist exclusion, can be conceived of as under the umbrella of class(ism). Neoliberal, so-called ‘political correctness’ and identity politics, gives proliferating ideology of racial, but not class, forms of decolonisation (some anti-racist objective gains and some illusory gains). However, without tackling class, we will never disentangle racism from its reproduction under capitalism, and thus we need to be in the position to exorcise racism, (more) ‘structurally’, through genuinely progressing towards achieving post-capitalist democratic and participatory socialism. ↩︎
2. My conception of an externality is a cost or a benefit that affects someone [or ‘society’] other than [perhaps reductionist reason(s)] of a person’s choice and/or action or from the action and mutual consideration of the parties to a contract. ↩︎
3. ‘The A to Z of economics’, The Economist, last viewed 21st March 2023, https://www.economist.com/economics-a-to-z ↩︎
4. This is conceptually including both cisgender and transgender men. ↩︎
5. This is conceptually including both cisgender and transgender women. ↩︎
6. See Saniotis, A 2013, ‘Remaking Homo: ethical issues on future human enhancement’, Ethics in Science and Environmental Politics, Vol. 13, No.s 15-21, pp. 17 and 18. ↩︎
7. See Finding Genius Podcast, 20 May 2022, ‘Exploring The Mind-Boggling History Of Human Evolution With Arthur Saniotis’, YouTube, 3:16-26:32 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TaQzvzXUYxM ↩︎