I'm a fan of eugenics. It won't do everything, of course, but having a higher percentage of intelligent people means a larger pool of potential rationality. Yes, there will be more smart crooks but I bet there is data to support the idea that more intelligence in humans is actually better than less, even though it's our intelligence that's responsible for our ecological destructiveness. What we need to do is rise above our current level of consumption/waste/exploitation ideology and that takes more than education. It takes the intelligence to make use of it and improve upon it.
Like communism, eugenics has been horribly misused. Involuntary sterilization, warehousing, and things like that are all unnecessary. Things like encouraging high-IQ people to donate sperm, changing the laws so that such donors who donate privately aren't ripe for child support predators, and many other changes can be helpful. Change the tax code to incentivize sperm donation and parenting by high-IQ men. Do the same for reproduction and egg donation for high-IQ women. Make gifted education mandatory in schools. It's not. It's mandatory to provide educational intervention for stupid kids but not mandated to provide improved educational opportunities for smart ones. (This is, in my view, a way of dumbing-down public education so that privately-educated elites have less competition and so they can grab more tax money with voucher programs.) Stop celebrating sports "heroes" in schools and celebrate smart people instead.
Reduce the working day so people can spend more time tutoring their kids and stimulating their minds. Research has shown that the eldest child tends to have the highest IQ because of more time with parents (and probably improved sperm and egg quality due to the youthfulness of the parents).
Encourage teenage boys with high IQs to donate sperm as well as teenage girls (to donate eggs). Both are at their peak of quality when people are young. Our Puritanical fear of teenage sexuality needs to be put aside in favor of rational policy. Yes, we don't want teenage girls to get pregnant but they should stockpile eggs if they have high IQs for their own use later even if they don't allow others to use them. But it's a good idea to do that as well. The same goes for sperm. The older a man is the more defects his sperm will have, defects that can lead to lower offspring IQ. High-IQ boys should be able to store their sperm for use later in life, particularly since intelligent people tend to put off child-rearing so they can complete a lot of education and career development.
One thing education can do is stop enabling people to erroneously believe in the virtue of "normal" and "average". Little girls who want to be princesses don't yearn to be normal or average so why is it that the first thing people do when faced with something different, like gayness, is to argue in favor of whatever the average is? There is a lot of cognitive dissonance in culture about this. Simultaneously people worship the average and hope that they're better than it (and their kids, too).
De-fund school contact sports like football. Football causes brain damage and is a colossal waste of time and money. Soccer also needs to ban "heading" the ball. Only sports that don't cause brain damage, like tennis and swimming, should be part of school sports programs. I would also require that everyone who is a member of a school sport be the member of an academic team, like the chess team. Ironically, weight lifting is correlated with improved intelligence because exercise increases capillary blood flow. However, one should avoid polluted protein supplements. Chinese whey, for instance, is laden with heavy metals that impair IQ.
Institute prohibition for public college campuses. Binge drinking has no place in higher education. I favor a zero tolerance for alcohol at universities for undergraduates. I've seen my local university. It's deplorable. Sorority chicks vomiting against the sides of buildings, people dying from drinking too much water, and people constantly falling into bushes and passing out... It's not education. It's a farce. This is one thing Mormons have right. It's too bad about the silly religion thing, though.
Legalize genetic engineering for the purpose of enhancing IQ — but in a way that is designed to not legitimize greatly risking things like schizophrenia with experimentation since that is highly unethical. (I say greatly because schizophrenia is already correlated with high IQ, particularly in people who are left-handed and especially in the smaller subset of those who process speech in the opposite side of the brain as 80% of everyone else.)
Anyway, there are a lot of things that can be done to enhance our collective intelligence. Minimize pollution. Minimize people not getting enough sleep. Increase the importance of the extended family (e.g. research shows that kids that spend a lot of time with their grandmothers have higher IQs). Improve nutrition. Improve exercise levels. Reduce commutes. Improve television with things like academia channels (we have C-SPAN but no academia equivalents). Get people involved in educational gaming instead of having most of that be boring or superficial. Stop condemning teachers/education in order to promote policy that takes tax money out of public education and puts it into private pockets. etc.
And, yes, higher education should be free for anyone below an upper-middle class wealth level. All undergraduate programs should be liberal arts, too. People can, and should, specialize in graduate school. Courses in logic, critical thinking, brainstorming/inventiveness/creativity, world history, international ancient-to-present philosophy, psychology/sociology/anthropology, biology... Everyone should take these. However, I would ban double and triple majoring — excessive credit hours. Quality, not quantity, should be the imperative. College students should not have to be sleep-deprived to chase As. I would dump the A-F grading system and make everything pass-fail.
America would also be better-served by having the federal government be broken up. Geographical isolation makes Washington far too insulated from people in places like Oregon. Unless you're rich you can't influence policy by going to stand on Capital Hill to protest, can you? An isolated bureaucratic machine is likely to be out-of-touch with the needs of the general population — more likely to serve itself and a smaller subset of people. We should look at the Scandinavian model — small nations that invest in their people.
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