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<p>Hey, nobody is saying that life is fair. If you want to talk about unfairness, you can talk about my friend’s missing family members who almost certainly died at the hands of the North Vietnamese Army. Life was CLEARLY unfair to them. Not to sound trite, but whatever unfairness may exist, at least you and your family members are alive and accounted for. Not everybody in the world can say that. </p>
<p>Look, life is unfair. Nobody disputes that. But just because life is unfair doesn’t mean that people should just give up. You can talk about how rich people have SAT prep courses and other such advantages, but the fact of the matter is, there are poor and underprivileged people who still manage to get into Harvard and other top schools. Being born poor is not an excuse for not putting in a proper effort to succeed. </p>
<p>Hence, I stand by what I said before - it is poor people that ideally should want to succeed academically if, for no other reason, because they need to be hunting for a full ride. There are many full rides out there. Like I said, I believe any academically strong student can get a full-ride from at least a no-name school. Now of course we don’t live in an ideal world and it is obviously true that many poor kids don’t value academic success. But this tends to get down to cultural attitudes - that their own family doesn’t value academic success, that their peer group doesn’t value academic success, so as a result they internalize these attitudes so that they don’t achieve. They have the POTENTIAL to achieve, but not the desire. </p>
<p>Note, I am not blaming them for not having the desire. There’s nobody to “blame” here. But it does mean that these attitudes have to change. The biggest obstacle to achieving higher academic success rates is simply changing people’s attitudes regarding academics. </p>
<p>It’s not simple socioeconomics at play, nor is it a matter of looking only at isolated data points. Poor Asian immigrants have shown remarkably higher academic success rates whether these Asians are in the US, Canada, the UK, Australia, or most other countries. Back when Hong Kong was still a British colony, Chinese students in Hong Kong have tended to perform better historically in standardized math tests compared to white British students in Hong Kong despite the average white student in Hong Kong being significantly wealthier than the average Chinese student. Jewish-Americans have also historically performed extremely well academically despite having historically lived in the depths of poverty. The Lower East Side of Manhattan of the early 1900’s, for example, was one of the poorest and crime-ridden ghettos in the Western world at the time, packed with poverty-stricken Eastern European Jewish immigrants fleeing Russian pogroms, yet the educational accomplishments of these immigrants was nothing short of remarkable. </p>
<p>Here is a link in which Thomas Sowell talks about the remarkable history of Dunbar High School, the only public black high school for blacks in Washington DC for many years. Blacks have obviously suffered from a long history of poverty and discrimination, yet Dunbar students enjoyed unusual success.</p>
<p><a href=“http://www.tsowell.com/speducat.html[/url]”>http://www.tsowell.com/speducat.html</a></p>
<p>The point of all this is that attitudes toward education matter. That’s not to say that you (sweetny007) have a bad attitude, as you probably don’t, but it is to say that there are a lot of poor people out there with bad attitudes towards education, and that goes a long way to explaining why they don’t succeed academically, but poverty-stricken immigrants do succeed academically. In the case of my Vietnamese friend, his family had no money but they had something more important - a deep respect for education as well as an excellent work ethic. </p>
<p>In fact, I think that is the greatest ‘unfairness’ of all when it comes to academic success - that some kids are raised with attitudes that value academic success (regardless of how monetarily rich or poor they are), and other kids are not. But that just makes it all the more important to change the attitudes of those people who don’t value education.</p>