JohnRoberts said:
Capitalism provides the most opportunity for the most people... you have to work to win...
I see comments like this, John, and I honestly wonder about your experience and empathy.
I agree with the others who state that "the game is rigged." (That it's considered a "game" is appalling, but I digress.) And, I think, worse than that, too many people aren't able to step up to the plate, for a variety of Really Good Reasons. Many are not even aware that there's a game to be played. Some who know about the game choose to not play.
Some of you might know that I have a nine-year-old son. He just finished second grade at a Tucson public school. The following might be described as "walking the walk." The school is a magnet school, which in this case it was given magnet status to achieve desegregation goals. It's on the south side of Tucson, in a neighborhood that is almost completely poor Latino. Most of us who are a certain age remember the controversial desegregation program of busing poor inner-city black kids to majority suburban white school districts. The magnet program here turns that on its head -- rather than busing the poor kids to the rich neighborhoods, it aims to bring the more-affluent people to the schools in the poorer areas. It does that by funding programs in those schools which will attract those more-affluent families. The result is that the school has a majority population of the neighborhood kids, with a significant number of magnet students, whose families are like mine -- the parents are college-educated (many with terminal degrees) and are professionals in fields from engineering (hello) to public health (my wife) to biology and psychology and medical and you name it. We choose to be part of the solution, not to look for the "easy outs" that might be offered by charter schools or by private schools. You can't change and improve something from the outside.
I'll say right off the bat that funding is always a problem, which means the schools still don't have the best computers, and there's no full-time music teacher and librarian and a bunch of other perks that the kids in the Tucson Foothills schools take for granted. But to the extent that attractive programs exist, it's actually fine. Perks are nice, but the real differences are made by the teachers.
So to my point. My son is a very bright kid. That, in and of itself, is really not unusual. A lot of kids in his school are very bright. I'm there most mornings, and I see it. But my son has had advantages that the neighborhood kids don't have. My son went to a well-run preschool from the age of two. The tuition alone is out of the question for most of these kids. So he started kindergarten having already learned a lot, and that put him well ahead of the kids whose first day of any kind of school was the first day of kindergarten. Those kids usually stayed home with their
abuelita, because the parents have to work, and preschool isn't any kind of option, and the kids end up spending most of the day parked in front of the TV set.
That's not at all the kids' fault, that's not even the parents' fault or the grandmothers' fault. It's the reality of the situation they're in.
My kid has two parents who work well-paying jobs with flexible work hours, so we can be there when we need to. We make enough money so that he's never wanting. (That's not to say that we spoil him, and we're clear about what things cost, and he even understands the difference between cost and value.) Parents of the poor kids? They can't be at the school in the morning because they have to work. They can't pick the kids up at school because they have to work. Teachers have to schedule and reschedule parent-teacher conferences because some parents just can't carve out the time to do it. Sick kids go to school anyway, because there's nobody home to watch them.
And it just gets more unequal from there. From access to technology to access to books, there are great disparities. For some of the kids, the lunch (and if they get in early enough, breakfast) is the
only meal of the day. Think about that. (I will state for the record: school lunch should be free and of high quality. The people who shame kids when parents cannot pay the meal bills oughta be taken out back and whipped. I am serious. What heartless fucks, to shame kids for something that is beyond their control.) Did you know a reason why some kids in junior high school and high school will skip class? Because they don't have access to laundry facilities and they're ashamed of coming to school in dirty clothes. Schools in these districts are recognizing this issue, and are getting laundry machines donated from whomever they can.
Kids in that situation -- they're not in "the game." They don't know there's a "game" they can play, or if they do, they know they won't even get a try-out. They can work harder than any of us posting here have ever worked in our entire lives, and it won't matter. They won't get the good jobs, because they don't even know what those jobs are. They won't get into those colleges, because they're unaffordable. Not even the local highly-rated land-grant research university is affordable, despite the State's constitution requiring (yes, requiring) that a public-school education be "as nearly free as possible." These bright kids, very smart, eager to learn, ready to take on the world and do good things, well, they're screwed. (And you shouldn't wonder why so many poor families gamble on the chance to earn a sports scholarship and then hope the kid wins the lottery and goes pro -- because that's what they see. Right there in front of them, every day, on the television.)
So tell me that they're "not working hard enough" and I'll call you a liar.
The aim of the magnet program is desegregation, but it provides a valuable real-world lesson in diversity that goes both ways. My kid and the other magnet kids see the local kids as just kids, and the local kids see the same. The best way to combat racial and social issues is to start young and let the kids see that nobody is really different. (Make no mistake, though, as this seems like utopia, but it requires vigilance on everyone's part, the parents, the teachers, and the kids, to put a stop to problems before they erupt.)
And the part of this that the magnet families give is this. How does a poor kid even learn about "engineering," as a concept, forget as a possible career? How does she learn about different sciences, or, hell, even what it really means to be a musician (and not a "pop star")? The answer is glaringly obvious: people who work in those fields can come to the school and talk about it. The kids know us, because we are always at the school in the morning during their outside assembly. I've spent quite a few hours in the classrooms, talking to kids about "what it means to be an engineer." I always start by pulling out my iPhone, pointing to it, and saying, "This thing was designed by engineers. And you know what? Look around. Pretty much everything you can think of was designed by engineers. Your TV, your computer, your electronic games, your refrigerator, your car, airplanes, trains, all designed by engineers. The sprinkler system that comes on if there's a fire in the room? Designed by engineers. Engineers designed the building we're in so it wouldn't fall down. Engineers designed the city water and sewer systems, and engineers designed the electrical grid that makes sure we have power to keep the lights and air conditioning on." And I've noticed that as I give examples like these, the kids get it. I see light bulbs turning on over heads. They've never considered this, but of course why would they? It's more than opening doors for the kids. It's showing them that these doors even exist.
Naturally, they ask, "So how do you become an engineer?" And I say, "Generally, you have to want to 'make' things. You have to want to know how things work. And you'll want to go to a university with an engineering program." (And that's when I point out to the kids who are always wearing University of Arizona shirts that the school is more than just a basketball team.) And I say, "And you'll have to work hard. When an engineer makes something, it has to work. People who use what we make expect them to just work. And that's hard. As one of my professors told a student, 'You build bridge, bridge fall down, no partial credit!'" (And then I explain what "partial credit" means.)
But I always finish by saying, "There is nothing more rewarding to the engineer than to create something and see it working, and then to see other people using what you've created."
If my talks inspire even just one kid to go to that land-grant research university, and get the same degree I got nearly 30 years ago, and go out there and create something cool, then I've "made the world a better place," as those tech bros like to say while begging for money.
-a
![Electronics Soldering Iron Kit, [Upgraded] Soldering Iron 110V 90W LCD Digital Portable Soldering Kit 180-480℃(356-896℉), Welding Tool with ON/OFF Switch, Auto-sleep, Thermostatic Design](https://m.media-amazon.com/images/I/41gRDnlyfJS._SL500_.jpg)
