I think I get the downvotes, although there is some truth. If everybody is exceptional, nobody is. For better or worse, we still live in system where parents are responsible for their kids wellbeing. You can't just outsource good parenting to school teachers. Just because somebody has this high paying job and doesn't have time for your kids at all, the reality won't reshuffle itself to make them feel like success. Do your god damn job as a parent, and don't just throw money at the problem.

On the other side, we all would benefit from good quality education for everybody. I mean proper benefit for whole mankind for generations, golden age and whatnot.

Currently, in many places which prefer predatory mindset (looking at you too, US), its everybody for themselves, fuck the rest, the higher I am above everybody else the better I am off. Well, not really if you actually want to live in society. Otherwise you end up walled in your luxury home like in South Africa, with private security, but afraid to go out after dark, carrying guns everywhere, high crime rate etc.

Depends; you can could consider the mean to that of the whole world, or the whole of History, and seek exceptionalism relative to that.

In case, we would seek to have a macro-scale program delivering exceptional results to all of our current participants.

If every kid had an equally advantaged upbringing, the world would be a better place. The metaphorical pie would grow rather than just be subdivided more. Furthermore, the gains would be somewhat non-linear. There are many benefits to having a larger network of people on the same psycho-intellectual wavelength. Contributions from the marginal additions to the network would propagate back and forth across the network, adding value along the way in a manner that transcends the self. That is a strong case for greater state involvement and expenditure in setting our youth up for success, especially disadvantaged youth. It’s also a strong case for easing off of our property tax-based system for allocating school revenues, which naturally results in very different school quality. Even if you’re cynical about how much the government can do, let’s say that 20% of disadvantaged youth that otherwise would have led terrible lives instead become productive citizens and parents as a result of stringent, uncompromising education reform. That 20% will break the cycle for their kids, and after a few generations, the baseline level of parenting in this country will be improved by a good amount.

> It is worth noting that a world where children from broken, impoverished (etc.) homes are not disadvantaged is a world where one cannot advantage one's own kids

This is such an uncreative, broken, zero-sum, awful line of reasoning. One can shift up both the bottom and top rungs of a scale simultaneously, so that there would still be advantaged kids despite there being fewer children from broken/impoverished homes.

In fact, such a thing has been done but not necessarily for morally good reasons either. This uplift is exactly what was seen when schools were desegregated in the South and the bottom (black schools) were uplifted: the emergence of private expensive religious schools that were effectively white-only, raising the uppermost advantaged bar as well.

Well, maybe one's own kids aren't really anything to write home about, hence they really could do with that kind of advantage over more talented yet poorer ones. But then what's the "societal" point in perpetuating such state of affairs?

The broken families in impoverished homes are far less toxic to society than the broken families in privileged homes.

See recent US and UK politics for examples. Although perhaps like attracts like, so if there's enough dysfunction around at all levels you get a politics of brokenness with dysfunctional broken leaders appealing to broken supporters.