It's pretty notorious that science fairs are a venue for "achievement laundering", particularly when you see how many winners are professor's kids, upper upper middle class or otherwise privileged.
The U.S. is starting to get as bad as Heian Japan -- where the obsession of aristocrats on maintaining their privilege meant making a mockery of the Confucian institutions they imported from China.
Sounds like classic meritocracy for me: the awards go to those classes who can afford the merits.
I'm also interested in knowing more about Heian era Japan -- my knowledge is limited to reading about the Heian Self Defense Force in Urusei Yatsura and that's probably dodgy.
For what is is worth, women played an early role in Japanese literature, probably because men thought there wasn't any status to be had writing fiction. Funny enough, many Japanese comic creators such as Rumiko Takahashi and Naoko Takeuchi are women too, but nobody in the U.S. compares to male creators such as Wolfman, Lee, Kirby, etc.
> The biggest privilege these kids have is that their parents care about their education. Money does not provide much of an advantage.
Since when did school quality and neighborhood income stop correlating? When did private schools become free? When did after school tutoring and test prep programs become free to attend and provide free transport to and on demand?
All of these things take money, and all of them a positively correlated with achievement, and quite out of reach of poor people.
I wasn't trying to say that private schools are always better, but they do provide an escape hatch if you live in a place with a crappy assigned public school. An escape hatch that is only available if you have the ability to pay, and perhaps pay a lot. I haven't done a lot of shopping for private schools, but BASIS Silicon Valley is $25,000 per student per year. That's a lot. Two kids cost $46,000 per year. That's insane.
What is "achievement laundering"? I have never heard that phrase before. Do you mean the entrenched elite gaming the system to give advantages to their offspring?
That was my impression of Science Fair as a kid - all the good projects were done by the parents, sometimes directly and sometimes using micromanagement.
Which, come to think of it, is due to the drastically increased utility of the "achievement" in the hands of the child.
Something which would be unexceptional from the professional adult professional is laundered into an impressive or even newsworthy item when (supposedly) done by a child.
The U.S. is starting to get as bad as Heian Japan -- where the obsession of aristocrats on maintaining their privilege meant making a mockery of the Confucian institutions they imported from China.