I refuse to feel guilty for investing in my children. The answer to inequality is to teach those mired in poverty to mimic those who have been successful, not to have those who have been successful to mimic those who aren’t. We should be looking to lift up, not push down.
It’s funny how many of the comments here focus on the Italian deli anecdote (which I found trite and not very helpful) and less on this passage, which is more worthy of discussion:
The UMC will, consciously or not, erect barriers to keep out the “others”, whether it’s trough zoning, tax rates or legacy admissions to elite colleges. I think Brooks makes a lot of good points and I see it every day where I live.
Brooks seemed to be suggesting that going to college makes one selfish, and that college graduates come up with schemes to purposefully keep the poorer classes in their place. I generally like Brooks, but I think that’s nonsense. The college-educated general public tends to be the greatest supporter of education because they know first-hand how it plays a role in creating opportunities for people.
There are plenty of structural impediments to social mobility these days. People getting college degrees isn’t one of them.
@simba9 :
I believe most college-educated elites believe this in theory but don’t actually practice it. How many college-educated UMC folks actually go and live in poorer neighborhoods? Not many. They’d rather live on the upper east side with people who look and act like them.
I find this hilarious, because in the boroughs, people do know what these things are, and the pronunciation of the final syllable of all these words will tell everything one needs to know about a person’s ethnicity and social class.
Right? I live in a middle-class historically Italian town. Most people here do not have college degrees, but they sure know, and can pronounce, those items.
Top 200 is probably an exaggeration, but so what? There are ~thousands of colleges. Only cc and the NYT (NE elite?) is focused on the top xx. The local kids in my community are more than happy to attend the local Cal State, as well as a UC (top 50, but good enough).
But more importantly, that top xx private colleges only have a relative of handful of spots relative to the instate flagship. Let 'em keep their legacies, athletic, and donor admits.
I secretly (!) often wonder if David Brooks makes stuff up as he goes along.
Talking of making things up, I seriously doubt that Brooks has a friend with only a high school degree.
My mother and step-dad, both engineers with Master’s degrees, both solidly upper middle class, both voracious readers with highly intellectual tastes (their hobbies included astronomy, they would make their own telescopes and travel the world for best with star gazing) –
– they wouldn’t have known what any of those Italian meats were. And they would have shuddered at being offered Mexican food instead. David Brooks is a tool.
If all of your friends have college degrees, you’re living in a bubble, since only 1/3 of Americans (age 25+) have completed a 4 year degree. If all of your friends have doctoral degree (1.5% of Americans), you’re living in a tiny little bubble…so small…
The immigration system is a filter which can bring in non-representative samples of people with respect to their countries of origin. When skilled worker and PhD student visas cause 70% of Indian and 50% of Chinese immigrants to come with bachelor’s degrees (far higher than in India, China, or the US generally), and the number of such immigrants is large compared to the pre-existing number of Americans of those ancestries, it should not be surprising to find high educational achievement among them and their kids (who have both nature and nurture advantages relative to kids from less educated parents). Of course, people always look toward race and ethnicity first for whatever reason, leading to conclusions about race and ethnicity that may be unfounded.
Unfortunately, some other state’s public colleges and universities are poorer and less financially accessible options for their residents than those in California. For example, Pennsylvania residents see:
- In-state financial aid is worse.
- PASSHE schools have fewer academic programs and worse reputation than CSUs (e.g. no engineering in any PASSHE school)
- Transfer pathways to the flagship (Penn State) start through the expensive branch campuses, rather than cheap community colleges.
- The CSHE schools consider legacy in admissions.
So, this explains kale. Nobody really likes it, but some eat it to keep us iceberg lettuce eating riff-raff out of your neighborhood delis.
With the exceptions of Cal State LA, Cal State Dominguez Hills, and Cal State Bakersfield, every Cal State has a disproportionate fraction of students from the top 40%.
@zoosermom I don’t doubt that in some work situations there are greater barriers to BFing for women with lower paiid jobs. However, your point doesn’t explain why mothers on welfare rarely BF. And in other settings, where there are no such distinctions, e.g., government employees who get the same amount of maternity leave whether they are a GS 2 or a GS 16, the discrepency still exists.
The article @OHMomof2 posted, especially the experience of Hispanic women supports my argument. Yes, working conditions cause some barriers to BFing. But…the barriers to BFing aren’t all about economics. I doubt very much that in the aggregate Hispanic women get or take more time off after giving birth or are more likely to have private offices. Their culture supports BFing.
There was a study done a few years ago which blamed inner city hospitals. So, there was a huge push, especially at teaching hospitals, to encourage new moms to BF. My understanding is that these programs have achieved vey limited success.
And free books? The argument was poor people can’t afford books and in these days of budget cut backs, the libraries are open fewer hours, so working parents couldn’t go. There were people who argued that libraries were inaccessible to people who don’t own cars and rely on public transportation. So, mail kids free books.It’s a wonderful program, especially for parents who aren’t familiar with English language preschool books. And, yes, many poor families have taken advantage of it. Still, there are lots of poor families who haven’t joined. Meanwhile, I have yet to meet an UMC couple with kids living in a community offering the program who haven’t enrolled.I can’t think of a reason not to, except that some parents just don’t value books. (This is the program I’m talking about: Thank you Dolly Parton! https://imaginationlibrary.com/)
Now, as I said before, on the school front, I agree with Brooks. Too often being poor means being forced to attend a lousy school where children may not even feel physically safe. And part of the reason for that is that most schools are funded by property taxes, so poor communities have less money to spend, especially poor child.
In Japan, BTW, schools are funded by the national government. Schools in rich communities are better because the children come from families that value education more and also spend more money on private tutoring. But the worst performing schools get more money per child than the best performing schools.
So, I agree that there are things that can be done to make it easier for poor people to move into the middle class. But no matter what we do, there will be some families who remain stuck in poverty generation after generation. I am NOT saying that the government and the UMC should just shrug their shoulders and say “Nothng can be done” or “It’s not my problem.” However, neither should we think that “if only” we can get poor people to live alongside more affluent people that problems will magically disappear.
I didn’t know what those things were in the sandwich shop but that may be because I have little interest in spiffy sandwiches. Nevertheless, instead of bailing and eating somewhere else, why didn’t he just tell her what they were? That’s what I would do if a guest were unfamiliar with an offering. And there wouldn’t be a value judgement attached to it.
Did the Mexican place serve lengua, tripitas, and other things that they might not be familiar with?
I wasn’t trying to explain everything. I was just mentioning to you something that I didn’t think you were aware of. I’m a member of the receptionists/file clerks caste, albeit promoted above my education, and I can tell you as far as pink collar jobs are concerned, being a receptionist is the job least conducive to breastfeeding.
As an LLL leader for a long time, one (certainly not the only) barrier to breastfeeding in some groups is the response of the men in the mothers’ lives. It is very common to see women who are informed and interested pressured to make different choices because the men are very bothered by breastfeeding. This is one of the two social issues about which I am deeply passionate and have spent gazillions of hours supporting over the years.
Both of those things are true. As I’ve said countless times before, I’ve been a literacy volunteer for decades. There is a lot of good that can be and is done with regard to education. It is also true that there are some people coming from a culture completely lacking in literacy. It’s almost impossible for those people to assimilate if they are immigrants, or to move up if they aren’t. The sad truth is that there is a lot that can be done, but it’s also true that there will always be an underclass. Which is why I choose the ways to give back that I do - because the help that I give to one new mother (I’m not doing LLL now, but I did for a long time) or to one person learning to read, is the best way for me to help.
As far as David Brooks, I think he was sending a little signal to the kids at the lunch table he wants to join.
When I was growing up, those particular foods were the marks of lower-class, uneducated Italian Americans.