If anyone ever told you that there's no caste system in America, they were lying.

There is, everyone knows it, but I feel a little tactless pointing it out. Even observing it. 

It needs to be observed and pointed out.

The number of out-of-work college grads should be an indicator that you don't have to get a degree to be a worthwhile human being.  I had the chance, intellect, and support, had I decided to utilize them, to have gone to any college or university in the state, but my reasoning for not pursuing a college education had less to do with being too lazy to compete for scholarships, and more to do with the fact that I see myself as more of the upper-lower class than as a member of the middle class.  Moreover, I don't want to be a member of the middle class, and certainly not the upper class.  I lean towards the labor theory of value, and as such, the lowly factory workers and field laborers are more productive members of society than the best performing stock brokers, accountants, or executives.

I had to leave my degree off my application to become a cleaner in order to get that job even! - I'm unemployable otherwise - either overqualified or not the best of the graduates applying.

The workers who have to tolerate the crappy/difficult and unrespected jobs deserve respect, and takes a strong person. A degree is a lot of hard work, and that deserves respect too, but you're right that it doesn't take away the value to what the low end workers have to do, and certainly is no mark of a person - in the end anyone can do it, it just shows determination and opportunity

I believe that human beings are inherently unequal with regard to what they are capable of doing.  Equality under the law, or having equal rights, does not necessarily mean having equal capabilities.  But as a rule of thumb, if I had to pick any one physical criteria by which to judge a human being without knowing anything else, I'd look at their hands.  The thicker the callouses, the harder they work, and experience leads me to the generalization that harder workers are better people.

I believe there is no limit on thinking, or actions, maybe speed though - but that need not matter. I think anyone could've done my degree with determination, good teaching, and patience - just a bit of nurturing - I'm not ashamed to admit I did need time to look over the notes, but I got good grades, it got natural, and as I got into it I thought ahead of what we were learning.

That is as fair a measure as I can think of! Beceause yea, although it is a generalisation, it's true and fairer in a lot more cases than judging people on other first impressions. I also look on fatness as a measure of decadance sometimes

Not everyone is equally capable, but most could accomplish the same things, given enough time and resources.  My mother always says that it's not fair that she worked through her lunch period in high school, taking extra classes and studying like crazy, while I spent my time in class reading novels, drawing, and otherwise goofing off, almost never brought homework home, and spent absolutely no time studying, and pulled off honor roll grades through most of junior/senior high and scored higher than her on the SAT.  I'm simply wired differently than average people.  But it's almost more of a handicap in many areas.  I was often penalized in classes where homework was graded heavily, or where I was supposed to show my work.  I had different teachers for each semester of high school geometry, and with one, I got B's and C's because I didn't show work, and the other praised me for taking to it naturally.  He was also the teacher I had for Calculus my senior year, and I was one of the two people in class that he made sure understood the material, because if we got it, we'd get frustrated with everyone else lagging behind and teach the rest of the class to do it.  I spent as much time at the board as the teacher did in that class.  I loved Calc.  Math has always been as much instinct to me as anything else.

On the other hand, taking to some things so naturally makes it somewhat frustrating when I come across things that I want to learn that require practice.  I've had a half dozen false starts at different programming languages and musical instruments(piano and guitar), simply because they aren't something that I'm wired to just pick up and do.  The former I take to more easily than the latter, but both require persistence and practice to get far with them, and I'm not used to having to practice something to get good at it.  You can hand me the tools, and tell me to take apart or assemble something, and I can figure out how it goes even if I've never seen the machine in question before, or put me at the controls of anything with an engine and I'll be operating it proficiently within the hour, but that's because I'm wired in such a way that those things come naturally to me.

I tend to think of end capability - the end thing of what somebody can do... that's what I think is unlimited (because they teach you stuff that took several hundred years to discover at the time). I admit speed can be different though, but I think that's just a case of the sort of ways that person had been traditionally thinking before (i.e. some are very mechanical, I notice patterns, etc). And I think also sitting in class depends on how switched on you are because those with emotions running through their heads for whatever reason cannot think clearly. And some people do slog at school, but sometimes simply because they've been made to feel like they should, they may study far harder than they actually need to, and even then be gotten on exam day by tiredness and nerves.

Very few things have ever been natural to me - driving wasn't, chemistry wasn't, the jobs I do now weren't, and making music certainly wouldn't be for me either, but I've become as good as anyone at what I have tried, I had to earn nearly everything, but that practise has made me somebody who's capable of doing that.... and I don't expect others to just pick up new things they don't have any background in, I try to explain. I think capabilities are an earned thing sometimes.

because I think you probably developed that wiring yourself throughout your life in how you were looking at things as a child... it's natural because you've already done the groundwork, already earned it - although it may be the first time you're introduced to a machine, it'sthe same old mechanical concepts and way of thinking, that's why you can work with them- it's like you could show me a chemical I'd never seen before, and I could pick out different sections of it and make some prediction of what it might be like and what it might react with, or even if it's stable

Science has shown that genetic factors give us predispositions to different styles of learning, and different overall mental capacities.  While nurture has significant influence on what we learn, how we learn is mostly predetermined.  Likewise, learning becomes more difficult with age, at varying degrees from individual to individual.  Yes, those predispositions can be overcome, but more by working around our deficiencies than eliminating them.

But we all have different potential.  There are some of us who will always simply be better.  Almost everyone can learn to play the guitar or piano proficiently with sufficient effort, but there are only a few people like Jimi Hendrix or Beethoven.  Most of us could attain officer status in the military, but history has very few great military leaders, compared to the total number of people who have ever led men into battle.  Almost anyone can get a driver's license, and with sufficient money and training, could get into stock car racing on some level, but there will only ever be a handful of people who can handle a car like Dale Earnhardt could.  Even out of talented musicians, who are a sort of artistic elite in and of themselves, a select few have been great entertainers.  Garth Brooks and Michael Jackson, while being almost entirely different in every other respect, could entertain a crowd while performing in ways that few artists could ever hope to compete with.

Perhaps we could all master some things to an equal potential, but to someone who has lower-than-optimal mental capacity, both in terms of acquisition and of retention of information, or for whom a certain type of activity doesn't come naturally, it could take them more than one lifetime to reach the same proficiency that a natural would acquire in mere months.

Since lifespan and mental growth form an ultimate limit, we cannot all reach the same potential.

In simpler terms...

How we learn is certainly individual, I'm different to anyone I know, parents included. Style I guess just redistributes where the weights are in a person's mind.

I still don't buy it really... I think potential is unlimited in the end, for all. I've never seen anyone hit their limit. I have a theory that all people are just souls in a body, all cut of the same cloth, and the whole concept of intelligence is just a populist idea that's been conjoured as a way of seperating and judging people - it's gained so much momentum and people take any reason for inability as evidence, that any research could've easily been tainted by personal beliefs of what people thought it meant. I got suspicious because it's so difficult to measure, and so vague - something like IQ will measure different on different days and different times of a person's life, and won't measure all ways of thinking, and even then it's dubious as to whether there's any consistency at all.

The famous people are just the ones who got handed all the right cards - opportunity, support, appreciation, motivation, determination, being born at the right period of time. It's like you said - calculus was natural to you - if you were born before Newton/Leibniz, it could've been your name people cite, if it matterred enough (that's the thing - there could've been plenty of people who could've discovered something remarkable, but opted not to bother... what's smart about sacrificing life for a lifetime of study?)
It's true that one lifetime often isn't enough to bring everyone to the same level, but who said it's necessarily limited to one lifetime?

That reminds me of how weird I feel when I go to the cafeteria. I see all the workers and think "how depressing must it be to be stuck at this horrible job where you serve people who are receiving the education you don't have" and then I feel sort of guilty and go eat a brownie.

Yeah. YEAH.

Someone has to be a lunch lady..

It makes me feel better about my life in a twisted sort of way

Haha. Ahhhh it's true..

I love that I pay so much money to work 5x harder than the job that currently pays me.. Thats some cruel irony if I ever saw it.

There's a lot of irony in a lot of things, but that one is really annoying.

Agree.