snit snat wrote:
> Poor whites do it too. It is nicely detailed in the book _ain't no
> makin' it_. There are plenty of white people who reject schooling and
> education.
Yup.
>
>
> Hell, privileged whites do it too: if my experience teaching at three
> elite liberal arts colleges is telling, they have their own form of
> antipathy to education. "who cares about knowledge? it's who I know,
> not what I know that matters." That attitude means that it's ok to
> cheat my way through everything and anything.
True. But they get the degree. Agreed about the cheating and the attitude.
> some of it has to do with schooling.... and I wouldn't discount the
> issues covered by Kozol in _Savage Inequalitie_ (a very powerful and
> moving book; depressing to teach it to the white elite, though!) The
> entire structure of schooling is pretty much dead set against
> encouraging anyone to want to learn. Compound that with schools that
> are falling apart, located in toxic waste dumps, with textbooks that
> are old, inadequate, and spares, instrcutors who just don't show up
> for work beleaguered, etc....
A great book, and I agree that lots of kids of all colors get turned off to schooling because of the content/form of "schooling."
>
> Well, would you like school? (I just pulled my son out of one. I had
> no idea. He never told me it was so bad. Not as bad as the ones Kozol
> documents, but the bad attitudes of the faculty are similar. So, I
> managed to slide him into fancy pants rich kid school on b-ball
> "scholarship." I have often regretted this when he came home swinging
> back and forth between crying over the racism or wanting to start
> fights with the racists -- because in the 'hood you protect your own.
> In whiteyville: call a lawyer.) 'cept he's blossoming intellectually
> and doing well in school. So...
I did not like school. I did like it a little bit better than staying home with alcoholic/psychotic mother. My parents also conveyed the idea that if I did not do well in school, I would be disowned and I would wind up being nothing, so I stuck to it. I went straight through (tracked) public schools back in the days when a smart woman could only get a job as a teacher, with the result that I had some great teachers and a pretty good basic education. My sister went to elite private schools (on scholarships) and I have to say that I really, really did not like the kids she met there and hung out with during adolescence. What a bunch of narcissistic, neurotic, anorexic/bulimic assholes!!! (Girls' school).
>
> Teen pregnancy? Fuck Cosby. Hard. If he could be bothered to drag
> himself out of Bell air, maybe he'd notice that there's a high teen
> pregnancy rate among poor whites. Not as big as that of blacks, but
> there _are_ cultural issues going on (not culture of poveryt, either).
> He could always take a look at scholarship on that very topic where he
> might catch an errant klew: You can tie changes in social mores and
> rising teen pregnancy rates to the 60s and the fucking over of the
> urban landscape and industrial flight.
Aw -- fuck the mores. Birth control makes a huge difference. I fucked myself blind through high school, college, and graduate school -- and still came out with a Ph.D and no baby. It's not the sex that's the problem; it's the ignorance about birth control, etc.
>
> Sorry. You can see the intra-class warfare happening further down the
> black social, uh, status ladder. It is a bludgeon people use for all
> kinds of reasons but mainly because they buy into the Myth of the
> American Dream. If I just work hard, I'll make it. So, they are super
> hard on their own.
>
I think I mentioned my first husband was black. His brother was one of
the most racist (against blacks) people I've ever known. I've never
heard a white person talk about "n-words" the way he did. But then, I've
led a fairly sheltered life.
Joanna