I hope I don't get down voted, but unless you're being schooled in a hovel and/or lack decent living conditions, it's up to you. No one is a self-made man, every successful man has been supported in some way by society, but there is a certain threshold at which you can't blame circumstances. I support public education from kindergarten to PhD level, but I don't think everyone needs to have the best education possible. Everyone should have access to proper conditions for learning, then it's up to the students to learn or not to learn.
Inner city living is the emotional equivalent of a hovel: single parent never home or addicted, mother has different abusive boyfriend each month, a walk to school is an invitation to join a gang - living in the inner city is about surviving to see tomorrow. One cannot study if the basic needs are absent.
You don't define 'proper conditions for learning'.
How about a space of your own? An environment that isn't disturbed by noise?
Easy access to books and study aids? A laptop? Fast broadband? All the Amazon vouchers you can eat? Parents who aren't worried about basic financial security?
Where is the threshold?
I guess you mean 'good enough schooling', but that's hardly enough if the rest of the environment does its damndest to devalue what 'good enough schooling' is trying to do.
And a point no one has mentioned is that schools homogenise try to homogenise education.
A good education would try to find individual talents and nurture them on top of a baseline of general competence.
The industrial production line approach to education is the opposite of this. Now, as it happens we have plenty of students who need training, and we have plenty of adults who need jobs.
I doubt everyone can be a teacher, but there could be a lot more talent-based education than there is, without having to turn it into the 'personal extra tutoring for my snowflake' model that richer parents pay for.
The point of the article was not that "everyone needs to have the best education possible". Go read it again. The primary message is that personal touch is crucial, and can often make a difference in the value you extract out of an education.
The problem is you have to go to school (or have a parent home-school you) by law which robs you of much of the time and motivation to improve yourself. The more time and discipline you expend doing rote memorization so you can graduate and pass the standardized test, the less time you can spend learning something useful.
