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Poverty Is an Attitude
It’s been a difficult year for me in the classroom. I teach middle school in a rural district best known for having the highest rate of death by heroin overdose in the nation. I know that sounds grim, but the statistics are more suggestive than they are definitive. Drug addiction is a symptom rather than a cause of the community’s many problems. I’ve been forced to conclude by experience that poverty is an attitude.
Parental attitudes are unintentionally revealed by their progeny. Children have a distinct tendency to blurt out the truth because they lack an adult sense of discretion. When I hear one of my students say “I don’t care” when faced with disciplinary proceedings, I know the attitude comes from home. Such a statement is one part bravado and another part fatalism. I find it baffling, but some people simply cannot connect actions with consequences. When confronted after the fact, the usual explanation is “it seemed like a good idea at the time.” I can distill the condition down to one word: impulsiveness. Such people lack a mechanism for self-regulation.
More troubling yet is the statement “I’m not afraid of jail.” I know a few children who, at 15, are already wearing an ankle bracelet. Such kids tend to have a family member in jail (or worse). The attitude is counterintuitive, or should be, insofar as “I can do whatever I want” is a lifestyle rather difficult to enjoy from inside a cellblock. I conducted an anonymous survey last week in which 40% of my student responded in the affirmative to the statement “It’s not a crime unless you get caught.” The obvious conclusion is that some people do not consider themselves bound by the rule of law. You can imagine what that means in the classroom.
Discipline at my school has been a constant problem from day one. I will generally have at least two or three students on suspension in any given week. Punishment does not seem to have any deterrent affect. And why would it, given the attitudes displayed above? A law-abiding society doesn’t require lots of rules and regulations because the populace is cooperative by nature and self-regulating by habit. The opposite attitude requires police enforcement, magistrates, and the loss of liberty. Government policies that expand the underclass will eventually and naturally lead to a police state and the loss of liberty for everyone. That is the way of the future should trends persist.
My students will remain “disadvantaged” by their attitudes. Moral poverty is the true scourge of the underclass, which is something that our government fails to appreciate. Poverty is an attitude passed down from one generation to the next. We, as a nation, must break the cycle in order to create citizens capable of enjoying genuine liberty. My students next year will find their liberties curtailed. I can see the necessity now for a more regulated and disciplined school culture. Better they should get used to it now than under harsher conditions later. Rights, after all, should belong to the righteous.
Published in General
Sobering observations, ~P. Who needs dystopian fiction when all one has to do is walk into a classroom, or into the inner city, or into forgotten hamlets on the outskirts of town? I agree it is all too real, and government efforts to establish progressive utopia manifests in the opposite.
I submit though that moral poverty is not the exclusive domain of the underclass. This scourge as you call it extends much further, much “higher” than that. It is just better masked.
Breaking the cycle will require epiphany amplified to the level of movement, but it starts with a beachhead – the individual and the family.
I see such complete alienation here. Neither the children nor their parents see the future. And their sense that there is nothing brighter up ahead is confirmed by the messages they get from the media and culture all around them.
I spent most of my adult life as a volunteer–I’m self-employed so I could follow my kids–in middle schools. They needed me there. I was from the outside. Middle school–even in bright sunny Cape Cod–is a very depressed environment. And the kids just get swallowed up in it. My goal initially was to help, but the more time I spent there, the more I realized what they really needed was a smile from me.
I could write books on this subject. I found it fascinating. We had a beautiful gorgeous middle school building on an idyllic piece of the planet. There was no reason for what I saw in the kids and teachers and administrators.
In a word, group depression. I do not think people realize how the depressed adult world affects kids. They give up and engage in all these self-destructive behaviors ranging from drinking to not doing their schoolwork.
How can you make a difference? How can you show them that there is an alternate context – a different way to look at the world? Who will tell them about it?
I happen to be one of the fools who lives in the alternate context. I have lived a serendipitous life and believe every one else can too. I raised my kids with the optimism once shared by all Americans, the context which made the immigrants who came here money less, hungry and starving but head full of dreams. The belief that every one can succeed, especially in America.
Talk to me about the Essay Contest – we can custom design the topics to suit your kids needs. I want to reach out to them. I want them to see that there is another way to think, to live. I want to bring them the attitude of success. But I can only do it with your help.
I have always wished someone would spend time in the world of our children today. The liberals have crushed, destroyed, and obliterated the spirit in our children. Every day in every message, song, book, movie, everywhere a child goes starting in nursery school the child hears about how terrible everything is and how he or she is to blame.
I’m not making this up: My own children felt guilty for their existence because we were harming the beautiful whales.
Every day I got out of bed to fight the culture around my kids so they would not get sucked in to this. I never got away from it with them. It was everywhere. I take that back. There was one exception: Music. I devoted my volunteer life for twenty years to school music programs, and I don’t play an instrument or read music. It was the only place the kids came alive.
I wish we would go back to all skills. Give the kids something back in exchange for the work they do and their attention.
I will think on this, Barkha. Thank you for your concern. The problem with an essay contest is that my kids simply can’t articulate either verbally or in writing. It’s baffling. The tendency of kids living in poverty is to react emotionally rather than rationally. I guess that’s another part of the problem I need to explore. Their thoughts usually manifest as a string of profanities. It’s what they know from home.
My youngest started middle school this year. If her experience is anything like mine, then she’ll need a lot of church and possibly some counseling to recover from it.
As to the attitude of poverty, the schools my children attend are also attended by one of the local tribes. The attitude comes off them like an aura. The striking thing is the aura of entitlement that accompanies it.
I grew up affluent, with caring parents who instilled values and morality in me, and I was active in church, and I never drank, and I never did drugs, and I rarely got in trouble, etc, etc, etc.
However, I was still known to utter “I don’t care” to teachers, because often they were trying to impose on me utter nonsense which I genuinely didn’t care about.
I was one of those exasperatingly intelligent C-students who simply couldn’t bring himself to do pointless busywork.
I ain’t saying that’s why the kids in your community “don’t care”. I’m just saying that “not caring” can be a symptom of something else.
Now, not being afraid of jail, that is a pretty big red flag.
The problem is so well seen in the post on Girl Scouts:
http://ricochet.com/girl-scouts-usa-goodbye-none-too-soon/
Our kids are giving up, and no one is noticing. They don’t think there is anything to look forward to.
How about a Youtube contest? I am open to ideas. The prep involves DVDs of individuals ranging from communist to third world countries overcoming hardships. Even f they merely watch some of the videos and read some of the books I recommend, it’s a step.
You are on the front lines of this. You can help us design the correct program. The essay contest is just a path. The path can be altered. The destination is relevant.
This topic is saddening. I recently finished “Coming Apart” by Charles Murray and he sounded somewhat hopeful at the end, but with a lot of “ifs” built in. I still hope that trends can be reversed, but at the moment I fail to see how.
Ross Douthat had a recent post related to this as well-
http://douthat.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/04/01/on-coates-v-chait/?_php=true&_type=blogs&_r=0
Maybe there isn’t.
In hindsight, it seems simple to me. They took God out of the classroom and now everyone wonders why students have no sense of morality. My children attend Catholic schools and while there are always a few bad apples in any school, the majority of the students are respectful and do have a good sense of right and wrong. I wish more states would follow Indiana’s lead and allow school vouchers to be used at Christian schools.
My brother, T, is a teacher, too. I think one of his saddest stories was of a 17 year old who had left school approaching him and telling him that he wanted to “learn the reading”. T told him that he could return to school, and that T would help him with this. The kid remonstrated a little, until it finally clicked with him; the classes that he had rarely attended were intended to teach reading. Reading wasn’t something that one somehow learned separately, but in some manner connected with the school. It was the specific thing that he hadn’t been learning in classes.
That heroic level of lack of interest in school, even in a kid who at some level did want to learn what the classes were teaching, struck me as something that is very close to impossible to overcome. I have enormous respect for those who try, and who may be able to lift some of their charges out of the morass.
I have concluded that poverty is caused by low intelligence for the most part. The reason it is passed from generation to generation is that for the most part so is intelligence. There are as always many exceptions as to poverty and as to intelligence. The unfortunate aspect is that the poor are out breeding the more affluent and intelligent by many orders of magnitude. Life is not preordained in my opinion, but it sure helps to have smart parents. I also think that as individuals we need to help the poor as best as we can. The state’s role is a basic safety net. The poor are part of our family of humanity and will always be with us. I give thanks every day for the richness of my life and am profoundly glad that I was born an American.
Genetics suffer a problem with history. How do you account for groups rising and falling in economic terms? Are the Chinese smarter than Europeans? Why, then, are they poorer? Are the Japanese smarter than Indians? Why, then, were they poorer for so much of their history? Relative wealth changes too significantly and often for genetics to predominate.
There might be a correlation between intelligence and poverty, but correlation is not causation. My students exhibit a standard bell curve as far as I can tell. The difference in my class between passing and failing is largely a matter of effort. I will admit, however, that we do below average students a disservice by forcing them through an academic curriculum. Some are simply better suited for trade school, and there’s no shame in that.
Rather than compare whole nations to others compare them to their peers. Intelligent Chinese with not so intelligent Chinese and determine the poverty ratio. I would suggest a read of The Bell Curve by Charles Murray. I would suggest the actual read rather than one of the many caustic liberal reviews.
Uh, no “We” don’t. Nations shouldn’t be creating Citizens, but Parents.
If the attitude of poverty is passed down from one generation to the next, there’d be no wealth.
The whole “cycle” trope is bs.
It’s impossible to do that over long stretches of time. It’s been a long time since I read The Bell Curve, but I don’t believe that Murray suggested that he was able to trace intra-racial IQ patterns over great periods.
He did think, though, that genetic differences between races were non-trivial. This suggests that different races ought to display different levels of wealth over time if your position were accurate.
While we cannot measure IQ clearly over great periods, we can trace income mobility for families, and the famously stupid and poor families of the 19th century (eg. Irish immigrants) became middle class in the early 20th, and are above average in America today, with many, many individual families following that pattern.
Giving IQ its weight and attributing a genetic component is well within scientific norms. Attributing decisive and determinative impact is not.
There are negative and positive feedback loops. While liberals are wrong to claim that income mobility has been strongly decreasing, Americans are today, as they always have been, more likely to fall within their parents’ income quintile than in other quintiles. You can be successful despite coming from a terrible background, but it’s easier if you come from a great background.
Obviously, parents are primarily responsible for their kids, but kids also benefit from the rule of law, free markets, school choice, and a bunch of other things that are determined by people who are not their parents.
Strange I never mentioned race.
No, but you mentioned The Bell Curve, which does, and you talked about the impact of genetics. If you want to study genetics on a large scale over lengthy periods of time, race is what you end up with.
It doesn’t have to be black/ white. I could have used, for instance, the fact that the North/ Angle portion of England was the wealthy part until William harrowed it a thousand years back, and has been the poorer part since. Or the differences between the current inhabitants of Italian cities Barbarossa subdued in the 12th century and those he did not. Any kind of genetic segregation will do.