your perspective is great. thanks for sharing it. you are exactly right. we talk about a lot of issues in the abstract...and then pretend we have the answers. we all do that on a variety of subjects. i know i certainly do. getting people to see themselves, from a very young age, as immeasurably valuable is my solution in the abstract. and i think that resonates with what you're saying here, as well. education is part of it...but, as you say, it isn't the whole thing.
Yeah, it is all black people's fault. Society did lead to bad schools where the majority of these students end up stuck. I went to bad (but not terrible) majority black midlle and high schools. I was in the advanced honor classes and even there we had horrible teachers who didn't want to be there or know how to teach or punished the smart kids. The administration was even worse. Most teachers in these environments don't care about the students and having them drop out (as over 50% of my class did) makes their lives easier. Some teachers would literally spend the whole time taking roll and wasting time talking about non class related things. Why would a kid whose parents experienced somehting similar or didn't push education care themselves about trying hard or what goes on at school? Every study has shown that prisoners (murderers, drug dealers, the very bottom of the barrel) who are allowed to pursue education while incarcerated generally lead better lives when they get out. Obviously, the results would be greater if our whole society cared about educating all of our kids well. No, instead we should jump all over Rocket River for trying to address this issue as anything other than an outraged or patronizing white man. Blah blah blah. PS - The truth is "America" is losing a generation of boys, period. Boys are falling behind in just about all aspects in the formative years. Our system is so wonderful, though, that they will still be rewarded in the working world over the girls/women who outperformed them...unless, of course, they are black.
I never said it was all their (blacks) fault. Way to take it to the extreme. I just said that their own poor personal decision making plays a big part in the problem, but I guess I'm wrong. It must be nice to go through life and blame all your problems and bad decisions on someone else. Not really surprising that it takes a prison sentence to make someone value education. Yes our school system is in horrible shape and desperately needs to be fixed. No arguement there.
The problem is that he will not let anyone criticize or accept any criticism of the black community, even from black people. That I can not respect.
I know, I was merging your comments with those of others in this thread and every race thread that exists on this board. Sorry for that. Of course personal decisions play a role but you cannot ignore environment. Someone who has bad role models or people who do not care all around them do not have as good a chance of making good decisions. Further, I would venture that most of these people making these bad decisions do not blame it on other people as much becaue generally their world is too small to care about that. It is people in the larger community or with personal experience (but still educated) who generally make such observations. That wasn't the point. First of all, not all dropouts do so because they don't want an education. Many have to much a different choice (financial, for example - I had friends who dropped out so they could work more to help the family). Second, the point was that education (usually we are talking about college programs in prison) is an amazing rehabilitation tool for even the hardest criminals. Show them how to learn and they will do so and become better citizens. Imagine if everyone was shown that love from the beginning, before "going bad". Obviously, there would still be plenty of bad, but this seems obvious. Yep, better schools = better spelling on a basketball bbs, etc..
Yes I caught that after I posted it. I hate it when work gets in the way of my play time, but thanks for the correction.
Not far. I was blessed to have two great parents that I truly admire. I wish that more parents took the time to teach their kids about values and give them the love that a child needs. I understand that there are a lot of kids living in horrible conditions, but I will always feel that a persons foundation starts at home. Absolutely we need to improve our schools, our neighborhoods, etc, but it should always start with the home. There is so much that we have to teach our kids that they will not learn anywhere else but at home.
How did you turn out? Are you posting from prison? How many kids do you have outside of committed relationships?
I think you are missing the point here. Nobody is saying that societal conditions necessarily prevent an individual from succeeding. Rather, societal conditions can and do prevent certain groups from succeeding as a whole. The distinction is this: individuals are solely responsible for their own decisions, while society is responsible for the frequencies of various individuals' decisions.
For poor, lesser-educated blacks in homogenous environments maybe, for emotionally stable, practical and even marginally ambitious blacks, no way. Whites are still 65-75 % of the population, and even the most meritocratic societies still reward social networking, so if you, me and the other 35-40 million want the best of what Western society has to offer we more than likely have to interact with, accommodate, and learn from whites. Vernon Jordan has a great anecdote somewhere near the beginning of his autobiography about applying, interviewing for and being given a terrific banking internship in the South, then showing up on the first day of work and being flatly told "you can't work here, it's as simple as that." It probably would have been more poignant for me to just list all of the blacks CEOs and compile some statistics about Southern black college graduates (such as me, my older brother and my mom for her 3rd bachelors), or about Southern blacks' income since the Civil Rights era (like both my parents ending their careers with six-figure salaries in non-managerial jobs), but whatever.
So if I turned out decent my position is destroyed? I was always smart enough to know that my situation was way different than the majority at my school(s). Not only did my parents go to college (unlike many), they actually had five degrees between them. So, being able to "play" at the library at Rice or go on trips to Europe with a bunch of grad students put me into a category of one. Hell, even growing up in my 1600 square foot house made me one of the "rich" ones at my school. I have always been academically lazy, though, and my experiences contributed to that. I also was involved in criminal (but nothing major) activities from 7th-early 10th grade. Fortunately, I broke away from that group of friends as my former best friend would later have his house shot up in a drive-by.
Please Do. Also I think somewhere you mentioned your parents are both from third world countries. . . . just making sure I read that correctly. Rocket River
Not destroyed, but weakened. You went to a bad school, yet were able to turn out fine. Now consider your post here alongside some of the earlier posts in this thread. You choose to break away from a group of people that you thought would lead to trouble (personal responsibility and choosing associations), you had two parents in your life, since you played at a library at Rice, I assume that means your parents were at least someone involved in your education (you weren't sneaking out at night to go to the library, I'm guessing). Those are some of the same arguments that other people have been making. Those things allowed you to succeed even though you went to a bad school. Maybe if those factors were present for all of the people at the bad school, they would succeed as well. If that is the case, then the bad school is not THE reason for the failure of those who don't succeed, and perhaps not even an all that important reason.
So . . . Bad Schools are irrelevent to the conversation because some people succeeded out of bad schools I guess single parent households are not relevent because some folx succeeded out it Drug use is not relevent because some folx succeeded out of it etc and so on Rocket River
Yeah, you are missing the point. 1. My home life was different than every other peson at my school. I was the only son of a professor and had other advantages and teaching at home that others did not. I cannot be compared to those living in poverty with uneducated parents and my little story was certainly not meant to cover all aspects of life. Obviously I was going to turn out just fine as I was privileged from birth. 2. The point to which I was responding was about education and kids not learning because they had no personal responsibility. I really learned nothing in school and everything at home. That was my point - how can these kids learn if they don't have parents who facilitate it? Certainly not from the schools. As I said, I went to a bad school but there are certainly worse to a lot worse ones all over the country. How can a kid who had a natural ability in the sciences ever discover that if he/she, like me, literally did not have high school chemistry or had a biology teacher who only took roll during class? 3. I never said schools were THE reason for life failure, but someone specifically brought up education and schools are certainly a major reason why so many kids are not learning anything (the other being their home life...which would improve if their parents had had good educations). This is a vicous cycle - those who are not given education will grow into parents who do not value education and who end up sending their kids to the same kind of crappy school. It will never end unless one generation is improved.
