Words Like Locusts Flew From Her Fingers

Staying Poor

Eugene Robinson – Tattered Dream – washingtonpost.com
Even more troubling is that our notion of America as the land of opportunity gets little support from the data. Americans move fairly easily up and down the middle rungs of the ladder, but there is “stickiness at the ends” — four out of 10 children who are born poor will remain poor, and four out of 10 children who are born rich will stay rich.

This is not particularly surprising. The explanation, though — at least what I believe the explanation to be — isn’t one a lot of people like to hear.

Poor people of all races and religions tend to remain poor [in the United States] because they’re stuck in a “culture of ignorance”. It doesn’t matter if they’re living in Mississippi or North Dakota.

A friend of mine who teaches high school in northern Minnesota sees it all the time. Many of the kids in his district come from relatively poor families. Their parents never did well in school — they didn’t “need to” because there were plenty of jobs in the iron mines — so the kids don’t feel any pressure to do well either. When my friend (cautiously) broaches the subject with the parents during parent-teacher conferences, he almost invariably hears something to the effect of “Why should my kid learn about math and chemistry? I didn’t learn it and I did fine.” Yeah, they did fine alright. When the mines started closing down they got a part-time job checking groceries at the local Piggly Wiggly and went on food stamps. Learn to read books? Why? They’ve got television. No need for reading.

There’s a failure of imagination at work here — and it’s born of ignorance. When you can’t picture yourself doing anything better, you don’t teach your kids to think any differently about their lives either.

Likewise, families where education and professional “attainment” have been valued are families with kids who grow up passing those same values on to their own offspring.

None of this is meant to downplay the fact that simply having enough money to pay for a good education makes a difference — but growing up in a family where education is valued is critical and, for the most part, you’ve got to already have a good education to realize how it important it is. So I guess, in a way, being ignorant (and consequently poor) is a sort of inherited disorder.