&gt;The sooner we shift
from labor to education as our
source of social dignity the better.<p>Twin studies suggest educational achievement is highly (over 50%) heritable. If you succeeded at replacing labor with education as a source of human dignity it would be surprising if the relative amount of dignity with which one was imparted  did not depend on one&#x27;s educational achievement. Combined with the first point it would lead to the formation of a kind of  hereditary estates of the realm; you&#x27;d have the clergy (the academics), the nobles (the highly educated) and the commoners (everybody else). Would you find such an outcome acceptable? (Just to be clear, I mean this as a genuine, not rhetorical, question.)