320 Years of History
Gold Member
- Thread starter
- #61
As I've said, I think mentoring is great and we need more of it. Unfortunately I don't think we're going to get it. NYC executives didn't fail to turn around failing schools, they failed to try. The ads were ineffective. Expecting retired people,...[given] the enormous effort required, to try to teach in a ... school is reflective of an overestimation of human nature. We're not that good. The golf course or an inner city hellhole school? Hmmmn. Fore!
I don't want to appear cynical, but... I am. They're out there, in the millions, those kids who need and would benefit from outreach. Again, when assigning scarce resources to the problem, practicality is a major consideration. First you'd have to prove that a sufficient number of people would be willing to do what a mentor would need to do in order to be effective. Going into "bad" neighborhoods? A deal breaker for most. Taking on the problems of troubled youths?
If you can prove there's enough people willing to commit to a process from which they cannot casually withdraw, then you face the mountain of institutionalizing the process. The rules you now create for yourself will have to be subject to the rules of the new institution, and as you say, thereby have their effectiveness blunted. I am not qualified to do a cost/benefit analysis of all this, but I would be skeptical of its practicality.
I have not suggested that money is an effective measure of success or happiness. We seem to have a very different perspective on poverty. That's too large a subject, however. You have to particularize. What I'm talking about is Black poverty in America.
Parenting is the most important of human activities. It's many things, but one of them is birthright. This consists of both family and cultural ties. It is the anchor for parenting. It's the village of which you speak. It is literally priceless. What happens when you rob people of their birthright? When you deny them cultural continuity of any kind, while at the same time denying them any opportunity to learn your culture and assimilate? When you make it a crime to teach them to read and write? When you suppress and concentrate them at every turn? When you deny them the right to form families? When you sell their children?
We didn't "free" the slaves, we brutally put down a rebellion. We broke the last major slave network on the earth. Millions of former slaves were now free to fend for themselves in the disaster zone of the defeated South. Free of pesky skills, money, culture, education. Yes, it would have been serendipitous indeed if the freed slaves could have encountered people who would teach them about culture and traditions and parenting. It happened to Louis Armstrong, for one. Father, absent. Mother, prostitute. He knew abuse and crushing poverty. He was taken in by a family who mentored him. The results speak for themselves. So do the results of the vast majority who don't enjoy this great good fortune. They cannot pass along parenting skills they themselves do not possess. Such skills are not instinctive, they are the cultural and family birthright. There is no way to overstate the importance of this birthright, or the damage caused by destroying it. I called it cultural genocide and that is exactly what I think it is. The effects of such an occurrence do not disappear quickly. Frankly, they have disappeared faster than I would ever have expected them to, with 75% of the black population above the poverty line. With a black president.
But the 25% are a problem. A big problem. A problem that I'm not sure you have seen in its entirety. I'm curious about your reaction to my statement about nothing being the same in these high poverty areas. You mentioned the schools doing "whatever it is they do". The failed school is a perfect example of just how different, how inverted things become when they are attempted in a high poverty area. It's Dickensian. Literally. An institution designed to educate turned into a tool of suppression. There are no expectations. There is only a meat grinder of failure for fragile young psyches. I call them "penitentiaries lite". They're places we lock up young people, so they're not out roaming the streets.
The word gap is the measure of what a child has been exposed to. Poverty traps children in limited environments. The earlier you can expand their worlds, the better.
CONTINUED FROM MY PREVIOUS POST....(sorry I couldn't finish this yesterday)
Lavender:
Not seen by me in it's entirety? Has anyone seen it in it's entirety? Does anyone need to? Is not having seen (lived) it in the entirety a reason to resign oneself to doing nothing instead of at least doing what one can?
Seriously though, I haven't lived it, but I think you'd be surprised over what I've seen. I may have been born and live on "the right side of the tracks," but there's no wall that stops me from seeing and going to the other side. Surely, too, you don't think the folk who "cross the tracks" to work in my firm's offices, or in my or folks' home, do so and don't discuss the state of things and their circumstances with me?
I'm now wondering if you perceive that the basis from which I mentioned mentoring in the first place is a tacit believe on my part that mentoring can offer a complete or substantively complete solution to the issues we've been talking about? For the record, I don't think that at all. Mentoring is merely the entirety of what I am willing and able to do as my contribution to being part of the solution rather than being part of the groups that are either doing nothing (effective) to help matters, or who are doing things to make it worse.
Pale Blue:
I don't know that I have a reaction to that statement specifically.
Day-glow Green:
Things are different in, that's a fact, and for the people living in high poverty areas. Is "nothing" the same? I don't think I'd go that far, but enough is different that I don't feel obliged to take exception with the remark. I know that sometimes, and some, the inherent differences in things, people, and situations make a difference in how one can effectively address them, and sometimes they don't. When it comes to the delivery of education, I don't see that there is any reason to handle it differently due to the student body's wealth status; I do see a reason to handle behavior management differently.
"A tool of suppression?" Saying something is a tool implies there's a deliberacy to how it's being used. Saying the schools and the way they are run, managed, and so on is ineffective, or ineffective for one or several groups is one thing. I find it very hard to believe that anyone, or any group for that matter, deliberately uses the school system as a tool in their effort(s) to oppress or suppress poor folks.
Olive green:
Unlike you, and perhaps we'll need to agree to differ on this, I do not see poverty as the cause of anything. Poverty is, IMO, an outcome of a variety of behaviors and circumstances. Poverty also is not an abyss from which there is no return. It's more like a pit that's hard to climb out of. It's also like a maze that if one doesn't take the correct course of action, one cannot exit, and if one refuses to heed the input of folks outside the maze hollering instructions for how to get out, one also will not make it to the exit.