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This thread is for people to post their answer to a single question: given a bunch of normal children of age eight, and control of their environment until they're around twenty one, what is the best way to forge them into an elite?
By elite, I mean a group of people who are physically better-trained, mentally more equipped, and emotionally more mature than the general population, and the distance between them and the general populace is large enough that at first glance there would appear to be a difference of type between them. The distance should be large enough that a common person must be in awe of the order of men forged by your education/training.
Now there are two possible scenarios:
a) You're a rich businessman with gazillions of dollars. Say, someone like Bill Gates or Warren Buffett. You have the resources to do pretty much whatever the hell you want. If it can be bought, it's yours. Remember that you have to create at least ten centres, and that your proteges have to enter the wider society when they come of age - you cannot just create a city for them and insulate them. What do you do to forge an elite in this case?
b) You're a community with average, or slightly above-average means. You have human talents and skills, but not exceedingly much in the way of resources. You can muster money equivalent to the total funding of a good school in a wealthy district of the USA. Your job is not so much to build the entire elite, but to create a model which can then be replicated by similar-minded people across the country (which is, of course, inevitable once they see its success). What do you do in this case?
The two situations are basically the two cases - resource-intensive and resource-constrained - which are most likely to occur in the real world. I know that it's tempting to answer only one - the one you're more comfortable with - but I request you to answer both.
I know that many people are uncomfortable with the idea of someone sitting down and explicitly planning to create an overclass of people, but this thread isn't meant to discuss that. It's about educational and training methods for creating an elite, not about whether such a creation or such an elite is an ethical thing.
By elite, I mean a group of people who are physically better-trained, mentally more equipped, and emotionally more mature than the general population, and the distance between them and the general populace is large enough that at first glance there would appear to be a difference of type between them. The distance should be large enough that a common person must be in awe of the order of men forged by your education/training.
Now there are two possible scenarios:
a) You're a rich businessman with gazillions of dollars. Say, someone like Bill Gates or Warren Buffett. You have the resources to do pretty much whatever the hell you want. If it can be bought, it's yours. Remember that you have to create at least ten centres, and that your proteges have to enter the wider society when they come of age - you cannot just create a city for them and insulate them. What do you do to forge an elite in this case?
b) You're a community with average, or slightly above-average means. You have human talents and skills, but not exceedingly much in the way of resources. You can muster money equivalent to the total funding of a good school in a wealthy district of the USA. Your job is not so much to build the entire elite, but to create a model which can then be replicated by similar-minded people across the country (which is, of course, inevitable once they see its success). What do you do in this case?
The two situations are basically the two cases - resource-intensive and resource-constrained - which are most likely to occur in the real world. I know that it's tempting to answer only one - the one you're more comfortable with - but I request you to answer both.
I know that many people are uncomfortable with the idea of someone sitting down and explicitly planning to create an overclass of people, but this thread isn't meant to discuss that. It's about educational and training methods for creating an elite, not about whether such a creation or such an elite is an ethical thing.
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