it’s cold comfort for an impoverished, intelligent student who wants to pursue a career that requires university level training to point to other career paths that do not align with his/her abilities or interests as viable alternatives, simply because they don’t require the table stakes of university tuition. That shouldn’t happen. Given what we know about gifted underachievement and outsized high school drop-out rates among the gifted, this is a reality for many students that shouldn’t be.
Agreed. However:
1)
Wants are different than
needs.
2)
Wants are different than
rights.
3) For many families it has taken generations of coordinated effort and sacrifice to become upwardly mobile.
4) Gifted underachievement and outsized high school drop-out rates among the gifted are not necessarily solved at the college level... but rather earlier in one's educational career.
Indigo, I’m going to ask two personal questions, and I want to preface them by saying that, in no way is it intended as an insult or derogation. I ask simply for my own edification to understand assumptions behind our perspectives. If you prefer not to answer, I’ll respect that, but please at least think these over privately.
Are you working? Have you personally experienced poverty (the kind that means you’re afraid the power will be shut off, you regularly forego meals to ensure your children eat, you’re afraid to take a day off work sick because you won’t have enough money to cover housing costs, etc.) And, in some circumstances, imagine being a child (or adult) who is afraid of coming home, because it means being subjected to a beating, sexual abuse, exposure to alcoholism/drugs in a family member, or psychological
torment.
I ask this because my perspective on “pulling oneself up by the bootstraps” and wants vs needs changed dramatically when I experienced hardship like what I describe above; thankfully only briefly. Many of the implicit institutions we value (family, friends, not worrying about being raped while walking home from a late night shift after bus service finishes, access to fresh food, physical and mental health) in our lives are a gift, and their absence can destroy an individual or family unit.
A large proporation of the poor aren’t poor simply because they are lazy or frivolous money managers. It isn’t because they refuse work. It’s because the family circumstances into which we’re born are a lottery—a tremendously influential one—that influences not just starting conditions, but the trajectory of our development.
Once upon a time, elementary and secondary education were considered a want, not a need or right. We now recognize differently. In Canada, where I live, separated or divorced parents are legally responsible for financial support for a first post-secondary certification for their children, subject to their financial means. Although there is a recognized right to access a post-secondary education enshrined in family law, it is mostly useless for low SES students. The weight of recognition of that right is almost wholly contingent on parental financial means. Talk about a way to enshrine inter-generational poverty. (Thankfully, tuition is more affordable here, and student debt is dischargeable.)
Do students in these conditions surmount their poverty and achieve university success? Yes, a small minority do, but it is at tremendous personal cost—likely far more than most of us on this forum have faced to get where we are. As I get older, I am growing to appreciate Rawlsian philosophy (the view that seeks to maximize the welfare of the least well off.) I have great difficulty, knowing that much of my current “success” arose from a lucky break in lineage, in asking someone genuinely hard working but poor to accept a life path I wouldn’t want for myself or my child, especially of there is a ready and long-term (not to mention societally beneficial) solution at hand.
