My high school counselor told me I was not high school material, but that has zero to do with kids in Richmond today. It was a different world, and she was looking solely at my grades, and the fact that I had been cutting most classes my first two years of high school (and then got straight A's the next two.) Unlike most ghetto kids, though, I had an enormous vocabulary, and had been raised by bizarre, but educated, parents, and had had enormous advantages.
You had a factory to work in. The kids today don't have that option. You had a dad who you, presumably, saw go off to work. Kids in Richmond don't have that.
The kids in Richmond are so dysfunctional that to remediate them they need to be completely reeducated, for the most part. I don't know how we do that with the teens- they are so anti-social it's unbelievable. If we started with the smallest children, and made sure they heard more than the limited vocabularies of their mothers, and that they were properly fed, and that they were decently cared for, we could make a start- and I'm actually for that. I've even proposed that in the past.
But treating the deadly dysfunction of the older children seems to me a waste of money. We'd do better to start with the young, and just realize that the older generation is, for the most part, lost. I say we still have programs for them, but don't be surprised if they don't work, for most. The way to cure the problem is starting as young as possible.
But where is the will? With all the talk of deficits, I see no real will to do anything, much less the large social engineering experiments that would result in a cure. |
