Here’s an interesting column about successful people and why they tend to fall within certain ethnic groups.
But articles like this – and the blog comments following – drive me crazy.
Here’s why. Yes, education is the key to success. But what exactly does that mean? How do we get to that in impoverished communities? Your chances of success are not about the ethnic group to which you belong or the region of the world your immigrant parents came from. It’s not about IQ or genetics. It’s not about newer school buildings or better training for teachers, though of course that helps.
And it’s only about where you live insofar as, in the snoburbs, success is in the water, in the air around you.
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From what I’ve observed from my time in snoburbia, and, before that, from the crummy neighborhood in which I grew up in Appalachia, success is all about the parents. [Cue helicopter sound…bub, bub, bub, bub…] Parents who know they should talk to their babies, and teach colors and the alphabet to their toddlers. Parents who know to push, push, push their kids from preschool on – in school (he made the principal’s list!), in sports (he’s on a U-10 travel team!), and activities (she made the county chorus!) – until, finally, the kids internalize it and push themselves.
In places like my old neighborhood, and virtually my entire home state, parents don’t hear of the absolute necessity of those activities, if at all, until it is years too late. Or they just can’t afford them. They can’t possibly catch up with kids from Winnetka or Potomac or New Canaan. So instead, they are judged to be without merit, in a culture that values merit.
In snoburbia, most of the kids are pushed virtually from birth, so they think of heightened performance as the norm. And by the time they are in high school, many believe they are intrinsically smarter and more motivated than those who don’t have their credentials. And it does appear that way. They test higher and have more successes earlier. Yet their parents have the funds and the time to drive even young elementary kids to thrice-weekly classes and practices and tutoring. In snoburban school systems, parents advocate for gifted programs, volunteer many hours in the classroom, and coach their children’s ice hockey teams.
Success, as we define it, is almost entirely about who your parents are and what their parenting training is. Most snoburban parents know what they received from their own parents, and it is a subconscious part of who they are rather than the huge, conscious effort (such as that of Geoffrey Canada in Harlem, who teaches parenting along with math and reading) that would be required to raise up those parents in less successful communities.
Unfortunately, most of the people writing about these issues – and commenting on the blogs – were born into a different social class from the people on which they comment.
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