Quote:
Originally Posted by Ixtellor";p="
I am suggesting, some poor, not all, are NOT being taught this behavior.
|
Oh... you're not suggesting anything contraversial at all. Socialresearch has shown pretty strongly that there is a big difference between the way middle class and working class people raise their kids (not to get into the super-rich who basically live in a parellel world completely alien to ours) and it's based almost entirely on what the parents learned over their time.
1. Poor people are more likely to embrace the unhealthy authoritarian parenting technique, which tends to make the kids less self-reliant, less self-disciplined, and more likely to duck confrontation and find deceitful ways to accomplish what they do.
This parenting technique is intuitively the smart way to go for the poorly educated because they think discipline and setting the kids on the straight-and-narrow is what matters... Of course in doing so they leave the kids unable to self-discipline and far better at taking orders than at thinking. They tend to rebel in adolescence and do so in an extreme and deceitful manner so that their parents will never catch them.
But aside from its intuitive value, poor people are likely to use it:
because their parents were also authoritarian...
and because they are used to jobs that require obedience and discipline rather than innovation or creativity... %#%@ jobs, in other words.
What it comes down to is that they are training their kids for $%@% jobs.
2. They don't know much about achieving in school. In most cases, if people did well in school and prepared for the future... they got good jobs. Most poor people who don't have good jobs... you can infer they were not big achievers.
So the question comes up... Even if they want their kids to do better, which they undoubtedly do, how is someone who doesn't know the first thing about success going to teach it?
What it comes down to is that they teach what they've learned... as explained above... but they add in a "Do good in school ethic". But unless that kid gets some outside help or is a prodigy... the kid's probably not going to do well in school... and even less likely to prepare for college or a middle class job.
It really comes down to something very simple:
How do you teach what you don't know?
How do you learn what no one around you can teach?
Attitude is important... but it's not everything and it's not immutable.
Without the proper knowledge, persistence is a crap-shoot. You might win. You might not (and being that it's luck at that point, what you learn is pretty flawed).
And enough failures will change anyone's attitude for the worse... just as a high ratio of success might make someone blindly optimistic. We think of attitude as a static item... but it's a work in progress.
The biggest problem in America today (oay, well, one of the biggest anyway)is that despite what we say, our culture is not one that values education. We value success but not the road to get there. That's why criminality is so tempting to the urban poor, why some poor end up in a trap, and why the well-off are largely unsympathetic to anyone who isn't successful (I won't get into the super-rich because, like I said... I don't think most of us even understand them).
If we valued education, we'd value more than just giving our kids an advantage. We'd value elevating all of society by helping to educate every child in America to the fullest extent possible... and as much talk as we have about this, I've seen little in the way of actual concern.
People are more concerned about tax rates and whether gay people can get married, whether social security will provide them with a retirement they don't save for (no real cares about the disabled and elderly) and whether it's okay for black or white people to say the n-word. People put more effort into those things.