> But then she goes on to predict that the brightest kids will come from rural areas because they have "good schools". No idea where she got that idea from
She is speaking from the perspective of someone leading a team of people that volunteered for the Navy and were then selected to do technical work for her team.
I think that given the years in which she lived, she would have certainly be seeing the side effect effects of the growing divide in opportunity between the urban and rural areas. A smart, hardworking kid in the city or suburbs is going to have a fulfilling job or go off to college at a higher rate than the equivalently talented and hardworking kid from farm country, where joining the military is probably the best chance at advancement that they're going to get.
Something like that --- my going to Stanford was torpedoed by my rural high school not being able to find a teacher for calculus my senior year, so, having aced the ASVAB, EDPT, and DLPT, I enlisted.
That rural school system was a marked change from the one near Columbus AFB I had previously attended --- most students were from the base and the school received a generous amount of DoD funding to offset that, so all of the teachers had Masters degrees, and a number of them were accredited as faculty at a nearby college --- classes were strongly divided between social such as homeroom, P.E., social studies, &c. (attended at one's grade level) and academic (attended at one's grade level with a cap on 4 years ahead if in grade 8 or lower --- said cap was removed at 8th grade and students could begin taking college courses --- many graduated high school and were simultaneously awarded a 4 year college degree).
Seconding this: even in the 90s, the central California high school I went to had most of the top students looking at the military if they didn’t love FFA – the costs were already high enough thanks to Reagan’s cuts that they couldn’t afford tuition at the state schools without significant loans, weren’t from families where taking on that kind of debt was something you did, and the military benefits looked great in an era where you were unlikely to deploy at all or if you did it’d be something like peacekeeping in Bosnia. One of the guys I was in a few classes with ended up deploying into Afghanistan early on. I didn’t see his name in the news after that so I hope he’s okay.
I grew up in a very blue collar rust belt type of area, and if you were a smart kid that showed an interest in the military, the school guidance staff would try to keep you away from the standard military recruiters and point you towards ROTC while studying engineering at State U. A person taking that route would never have been assigned to Hopper’s team.
And again, the wealthy area where I live now, if you are a bright kid that shows an interest in the military they are going to try to get you to do ROTC at the top engineering school possible, or setting up interviews with the Congressman or Senator to try to get a nomination into one of the academies.
So by percentages, the best enlisted men and women are likely to be from more rural areas.
She is speaking from the perspective of someone leading a team of people that volunteered for the Navy and were then selected to do technical work for her team.
I think that given the years in which she lived, she would have certainly be seeing the side effect effects of the growing divide in opportunity between the urban and rural areas. A smart, hardworking kid in the city or suburbs is going to have a fulfilling job or go off to college at a higher rate than the equivalently talented and hardworking kid from farm country, where joining the military is probably the best chance at advancement that they're going to get.