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What bugs me about this is reading the comments. Instead reading this news and thinking that when large swathes of the population are doing poorly there must be

What bugs me about this is reading the comments. Instead reading this news and thinking that when large swathes of the population are doing poorly there must be something wrong with the system, they turn around and just blame people for being stupid and lazy. There are tons of people in this country that grow up poor, in bad neighborhoods, with bad schools, and no hope of going to college and when things don't turn out well for them, we blame them for it. It may come as a shock to people from other countries but in the US school funding is extremely local. If you're from a rich neighborhood, your school has tons of money and resources. If you grow up in a poor neighborhood, some barely have enough money to keep the roof from leaking. And we've all just accepted this as normal and OK. We have the power to change this but we choose not to.

BBalzagn 7y ago
I also want to add that it can get even more complicated than simply rich vs poor districts. I feel that public education is not the HIGHEST priority in many districts around the nation. One example, Hillsborough county in Florida recently voted to raise taxes to assist with providing public high schools with proper access to air conditioning. Their schools do not have proper public transportation (school buses) or access to proper HVAC across one of the larger counties here in Florida.
- yardie 7y ago
  It gets worse. In a few years they won't even have access to teachers nor a properly functioning classroom. There is an entire demographic of teachers approaching retirement and we don't have enough qualified teachers entering, and staying, in the field to replace them.
  - magduf 7y ago
    >In a few years they won't even have access to teachers nor a properly functioning classroom. There is an entire demographic of teachers approaching retirement and we don't have enough qualified teachers entering, and staying, in the field to replace them. Yeah, for good reason: the career is terrible, so it shouldn't be a big surprise that no quality people want to go into it, and when someone good does get into it, they burn out quickly and leave. But government and society don't want to do anything about that. Teachers in this country face lousy pay, uninterested, disrespectful, and sometimes violent students, occasional school mass shootings, incompetent coworkers and administration, etc. Why would a well-educated person want to go into this field?
Ididntdothis 7y ago
Very true. Planning your life as a kid is a big gamble. How are you supposed to know which industry will be viable for a good career through the next decades? How can you know that other careers that are great today will die tomorrow? Some of us have lucked into the currently hot industries but that’s not because they had great insight when they were 18. We really need a system where people actually get opportunity to change careers and retrain instead of just being thrown away by companies as it’s happening now. I have seen a log n of perfectly capable but maybe older than 40 people being laid off without much advance warning and no opportunity to even try to adapt. Companies throw people away and the whole country throws away whole regions when trends change.
40acres 7y ago
Education is such a winner take all system that people get really crazy about it. Desegregation busing was a huge issue in the 70s, Harvard is getting sued by students and parents for not letting them in. It's an emotional thing.
neogodless 7y ago
I agree with your comment. We tend to see our own achievements as through our own efforts, failing to see any advantages we have, and further failing to see the disadvantages many others have had. (OP has fixed typo, so below snark can be ignored: And English is a really weird language, on top of that. For example, "excepted" means almost the opposite of "accepted," but in most instances will be pronounced roughly the same way.)
- keeganjw 7y ago
  Ha you're right! When I was proofreading my comment, excepted stood out to me but I couldn't figure out why it seemed off. I do that a lot.
xeromal 7y ago
Disclaimer: 100% conjecture and opinion. I understand where you're coming from and I'm going to leave an unpopular opinion as a comment, but I think the society we're growing into one that wants to absolve anyone of personal responsibility. I understand that growing up in poor neighborhoods and shitty family situations makes it immensely more difficult to set yourself up for success, but I just think at some point you're responsible for your own person, not anyone else and not society. I grew up in methland, appalachia and had countless crackhead friends and family. I didn't have any money and had to work starting at age 15. I think I'd be in my right to complain and want education to be fixed and my city to be improved so it'd be easy for me to be more successful. I took an alternative and left home, educated myself, and turned myself into a halfway decent contributor to society. I really think the US still has a lot of ability to reward those who go after it even if that means becoming a carpenter and saving for 30 years to retire early. I understand our society is not ideal, but I just think those problems are going to take generations to fix. Why not take care of yourself and do your best to fix your own shit. As a disclaimer, I'm not writing this towards disabled people or others that need society's help. I'm 100% ok with helping in those situations. I'm talking about the average american who has their health and some direction over their destiny. I just don't get why people sit on their asses and complain instead of getting out and making shit happen or at least trying to. I don't get the barely getting by mentality.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- keeganjw 7y ago
  I can see why many people place feel that way. I agree that there should be some balance between collective and personal responsibility. I just think US society and politics has placed such a heavy emphasis on the individual for so long and that we'd be all better if we weren't so quick to blame each other but help each other out. I don't think anyone deserves to grow up with bad schools and yet that's the only option many people have.
  - xeromal 7y ago
    I agree with your sentiment. I'm just too jaded to believe the government is capable to doing anything. I think I'm my best bet at staying alive and thriving.
basch 7y ago
and even with a good school, how much of receiving a good education is tied to good sleep and good diet? Being well fed and well rested is very important. Coupled with new belief in the effects of epigenetics, bad food and sleep becomes something that can pass down generationly, both in habit and in gene expression. Finally, once you reach a certain age, structured education disappears, and most peoples continuous self improvement comes from newspapers and television news. As journalism has forgotten its duty and role in education and become almost exclusively about capturing attention and feeding lust for entertainment, the nightly news acts under a veil of appearing educational.
- vntx 7y ago
  These are very salient questions. Context cannot be ignored. I’ve experienced these toxic environments where good sleep and healthy food was almost impossible to obtain and it can be crippling. I got a full-ride to university, but could not take full advantage of because of a toxic domestic environment and impoverished family. I got to learn from smart professors and supportive friend which greatly improved my life because they helped me develop better learning and social skills. I’m using everything I learned to better my family and the immediate environment. Good education is a powerful force for betterment. It’s troubling that access to opportunities like the I had one was based on luck. Fortunately, educational opportunity has increased. Resources like Khan Academy and other MOOC platforms can help you get a top-notch education cheaply. Our society just need to make sure it’s accessible to those who need it most.
dang 7y ago
This thread has been hit by the contrarian dynamic: an initial wave of comments making objections, followed by a wave of objections to the objections, which the community upvotes to the top of the thread. Pointing this out is off topic, but I'd like the community to get aware that this is what typically happens. Otherwise it feels bad to read the comments, and the mind starts to overgeneralize about it, e.g. "I can't believe that HN thinks X." HN doesn't "think" X; it is just the universal tendency to make objections and it's the same in both cases. One could even call it the contrarian dialectic, but I suppose that's pretentious. https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&query=%20%22contrarian%20dynamic%22&sort=byDate&type=comment https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...
- Mouse47 7y ago
  ...isn't that just what we call 'debate'?
  - dang 7y ago
    I think that's a bit too simplistic. There are many conversations going on at the same time, and this is a property of how they emerge. Seeing something to object to activates enough energy to make a post— like a swimmer needing something to push off against. The interesting thing is how obvious it is once you know what to look for, yet also how poorly understood it is. If it were understood, we wouldn't see so many comments of the form "I can't believe the comments here". Someone who's aware of the mechanics of objection wouldn't express themselves that way, because they'd know that their objection-to-the-objections is the same thing. I don't think this is bad, by the way; it's just that it comes from the structure of the forum and not from any of the specific topics people think it has to do with. The medium truly is the message. https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&query=by%3Adang%20medium%20message&sort=byDate&type=comment https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...
Ogopogostick 7y ago
The same concept is present in most posts about the poor and working class, tech people just don't like accepting that maybe they're actually elitist and not actually average joes who makes six figure salaries. Look at the post on truck drivers from a day or two ago, most of the comments are people explaining how the workers don't actually know what's best for themselves and so their complaints can be ignored.
dadarepublic 7y ago
This. A 1000x this. There are hurdles for people that are systemic, some of those being racially, gender, and/or purely economically based. The "personal responsibility" line get touted around these conversations quite a bit. It's not so dissimilar from the "pull yourself up by your own bootstraps" line. Quite often by racists/racialists or wealthy classists. Yes, people should be personally responsible and held responsible for their actions. And also yes, systemic problems are also problems that cannot be ignored or absolved by saying people should take personal responsibility for their actions. Take crime, when the poor and disadvantaged find themselves in the US court system, oftentimes their crimes are punished more harshly than those from more well-to-do situations. That's not the fault of the poorer person, that's systemic. You can say neither the rich nor poor person should have committed the crime (personal responsibility is a "good" thing) , but the fact that the rich person might get off or have a lighter sentence such as probation, isn't the fault of the poorer individual - that's where the systemic failures start to rear their ugly head. Please note: I don't discount personal responsibility (quite the opposite) here at all - however I'm sure my comment will be met with criticism by those that beat the drum for "personal responsibility" as being the primary mitigating factor in all things around these types of topics.
- dadarepublic 7y ago
  I love how my non-argumentative, acknowledgement of both sides was still downvoted - exactly reinforcing my note. Thank you
umvi 7y ago
> If you're from a rich neighborhood, your school has tons of money and resources. If you grow up in a poor neighborhood, some barely have enough money to keep the roof from leaking. And we've all just accepted this as normal and OK. We have the power to change this but we choose not to. I would suggest that the reason kids in rich neighborhoods turn out ok is not because their schools have more money but because their parents have set them up for success. I can say this confidently because my dad is in the military, and I've attended several years at a poor high school in Alabama where cheating and truancy was rampant. See, here's the thing. People often greatly underestimate the role good parents have in producing good, contributing members of society. We like to pretend that everyone is born equal and that the reason some kids fail and other don't is because the public infrastructure they had access to was good or bad. But I would wager that's only 10% of the issue. The other 90% of the issue is that all parents are on a spectrum. And it turns out that poor parents are at the end of the spectrum that sets up their kids for failure. I totally get that it's not intentional; Nevertheless, they set bad examples to their kids (smoking, drinking, lotto), often times one parent (usually the male) is missing, they might not enforce school attendance/homework/chores, etc. Kids follow the example of their parents. If the parent is a single mom, pregnant at 14, smokes and drinks excessively, etc. chances are the kids are going to be the same way. I am not convinced throwing money at schools is the solution. I think there needs to be some kind of mentorship between the poor and middle classes that essentially causes there to be better parents with each generation. Like temporary foster homes where poor kids can learn and observe how middle and upper class people do things. Basically, I believe the ultimate solution to poverty is love - personal relationships with the poor. Actually making friends with poor people as a middle or upper class individual and helping lift them up a little. Money is part of the problem, yes, but my argument is that the importance of money is greatly overestimated in the poverty problem.
- vosper 7y ago
  > I can say this confidently because my dad is in the military, and I've attended several years at a poor high school in Alabama where cheating and truancy was rampant. I'm not disputing your personal experience, but this is an anecdote :)

BBalzagn 7y ago

I also want to add that it can get even more complicated than simply rich vs poor districts. I feel that public education is not the HIGHEST priority in many districts around the nation. One example, Hillsborough county in Florida recently voted to raise taxes to assist with providing public high schools with proper access to air conditioning. Their schools do not have proper public transportation (school buses) or access to proper HVAC across one of the larger counties here in Florida.

yardie 7y ago
It gets worse. In a few years they won't even have access to teachers nor a properly functioning classroom. There is an entire demographic of teachers approaching retirement and we don't have enough qualified teachers entering, and staying, in the field to replace them.
- magduf 7y ago
  >In a few years they won't even have access to teachers nor a properly functioning classroom. There is an entire demographic of teachers approaching retirement and we don't have enough qualified teachers entering, and staying, in the field to replace them. Yeah, for good reason: the career is terrible, so it shouldn't be a big surprise that no quality people want to go into it, and when someone good does get into it, they burn out quickly and leave. But government and society don't want to do anything about that. Teachers in this country face lousy pay, uninterested, disrespectful, and sometimes violent students, occasional school mass shootings, incompetent coworkers and administration, etc. Why would a well-educated person want to go into this field?

Ididntdothis 7y ago

Very true. Planning your life as a kid is a big gamble. How are you supposed to know which industry will be viable for a good career through the next decades? How can you know that other careers that are great today will die tomorrow? Some of us have lucked into the currently hot industries but that’s not because they had great insight when they were 18. We really need a system where people actually get opportunity to change careers and retrain instead of just being thrown away by companies as it’s happening now. I have seen a log n of perfectly capable but maybe older than 40 people being laid off without much advance warning and no opportunity to even try to adapt. Companies throw people away and the whole country throws away whole regions when trends change.

40acres 7y ago

Education is such a winner take all system that people get really crazy about it. Desegregation busing was a huge issue in the 70s, Harvard is getting sued by students and parents for not letting them in. It's an emotional thing.

neogodless 7y ago

I agree with your comment. We tend to see our own achievements as through our own efforts, failing to see any advantages we have, and further failing to see the disadvantages many others have had. (OP has fixed typo, so below snark can be ignored: And English is a really weird language, on top of that. For example, "excepted" means almost the opposite of "accepted," but in most instances will be pronounced roughly the same way.)

keeganjw 7y ago
Ha you're right! When I was proofreading my comment, excepted stood out to me but I couldn't figure out why it seemed off. I do that a lot.

xeromal 7y ago

Disclaimer: 100% conjecture and opinion. I understand where you're coming from and I'm going to leave an unpopular opinion as a comment, but I think the society we're growing into one that wants to absolve anyone of personal responsibility. I understand that growing up in poor neighborhoods and shitty family situations makes it immensely more difficult to set yourself up for success, but I just think at some point you're responsible for your own person, not anyone else and not society. I grew up in methland, appalachia and had countless crackhead friends and family. I didn't have any money and had to work starting at age 15. I think I'd be in my right to complain and want education to be fixed and my city to be improved so it'd be easy for me to be more successful. I took an alternative and left home, educated myself, and turned myself into a halfway decent contributor to society. I really think the US still has a lot of ability to reward those who go after it even if that means becoming a carpenter and saving for 30 years to retire early. I understand our society is not ideal, but I just think those problems are going to take generations to fix. Why not take care of yourself and do your best to fix your own shit. As a disclaimer, I'm not writing this towards disabled people or others that need society's help. I'm 100% ok with helping in those situations. I'm talking about the average american who has their health and some direction over their destiny. I just don't get why people sit on their asses and complain instead of getting out and making shit happen or at least trying to. I don't get the barely getting by mentality.

deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
keeganjw 7y ago
I can see why many people place feel that way. I agree that there should be some balance between collective and personal responsibility. I just think US society and politics has placed such a heavy emphasis on the individual for so long and that we'd be all better if we weren't so quick to blame each other but help each other out. I don't think anyone deserves to grow up with bad schools and yet that's the only option many people have.
- xeromal 7y ago
  I agree with your sentiment. I'm just too jaded to believe the government is capable to doing anything. I think I'm my best bet at staying alive and thriving.

basch 7y ago

and even with a good school, how much of receiving a good education is tied to good sleep and good diet? Being well fed and well rested is very important. Coupled with new belief in the effects of epigenetics, bad food and sleep becomes something that can pass down generationly, both in habit and in gene expression. Finally, once you reach a certain age, structured education disappears, and most peoples continuous self improvement comes from newspapers and television news. As journalism has forgotten its duty and role in education and become almost exclusively about capturing attention and feeding lust for entertainment, the nightly news acts under a veil of appearing educational.

vntx 7y ago
These are very salient questions. Context cannot be ignored. I’ve experienced these toxic environments where good sleep and healthy food was almost impossible to obtain and it can be crippling. I got a full-ride to university, but could not take full advantage of because of a toxic domestic environment and impoverished family. I got to learn from smart professors and supportive friend which greatly improved my life because they helped me develop better learning and social skills. I’m using everything I learned to better my family and the immediate environment. Good education is a powerful force for betterment. It’s troubling that access to opportunities like the I had one was based on luck. Fortunately, educational opportunity has increased. Resources like Khan Academy and other MOOC platforms can help you get a top-notch education cheaply. Our society just need to make sure it’s accessible to those who need it most.

dang 7y ago

This thread has been hit by the contrarian dynamic: an initial wave of comments making objections, followed by a wave of objections to the objections, which the community upvotes to the top of the thread. Pointing this out is off topic, but I'd like the community to get aware that this is what typically happens. Otherwise it feels bad to read the comments, and the mind starts to overgeneralize about it, e.g. "I can't believe that HN thinks X." HN doesn't "think" X; it is just the universal tendency to make objections and it's the same in both cases. One could even call it the contrarian dialectic, but I suppose that's pretentious. https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&query=%20%22contrarian%20dynamic%22&sort=byDate&type=comment https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...

Mouse47 7y ago
...isn't that just what we call 'debate'?
- dang 7y ago
  I think that's a bit too simplistic. There are many conversations going on at the same time, and this is a property of how they emerge. Seeing something to object to activates enough energy to make a post— like a swimmer needing something to push off against. The interesting thing is how obvious it is once you know what to look for, yet also how poorly understood it is. If it were understood, we wouldn't see so many comments of the form "I can't believe the comments here". Someone who's aware of the mechanics of objection wouldn't express themselves that way, because they'd know that their objection-to-the-objections is the same thing. I don't think this is bad, by the way; it's just that it comes from the structure of the forum and not from any of the specific topics people think it has to do with. The medium truly is the message. https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&query=by%3Adang%20medium%20message&sort=byDate&type=comment https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...

Ogopogostick 7y ago

The same concept is present in most posts about the poor and working class, tech people just don't like accepting that maybe they're actually elitist and not actually average joes who makes six figure salaries. Look at the post on truck drivers from a day or two ago, most of the comments are people explaining how the workers don't actually know what's best for themselves and so their complaints can be ignored.

dadarepublic 7y ago

This. A 1000x this. There are hurdles for people that are systemic, some of those being racially, gender, and/or purely economically based. The "personal responsibility" line get touted around these conversations quite a bit. It's not so dissimilar from the "pull yourself up by your own bootstraps" line. Quite often by racists/racialists or wealthy classists. Yes, people should be personally responsible and held responsible for their actions. And also yes, systemic problems are also problems that cannot be ignored or absolved by saying people should take personal responsibility for their actions. Take crime, when the poor and disadvantaged find themselves in the US court system, oftentimes their crimes are punished more harshly than those from more well-to-do situations. That's not the fault of the poorer person, that's systemic. You can say neither the rich nor poor person should have committed the crime (personal responsibility is a "good" thing) , but the fact that the rich person might get off or have a lighter sentence such as probation, isn't the fault of the poorer individual - that's where the systemic failures start to rear their ugly head. Please note: I don't discount personal responsibility (quite the opposite) here at all - however I'm sure my comment will be met with criticism by those that beat the drum for "personal responsibility" as being the primary mitigating factor in all things around these types of topics.

dadarepublic 7y ago
I love how my non-argumentative, acknowledgement of both sides was still downvoted - exactly reinforcing my note. Thank you

umvi 7y ago

> If you're from a rich neighborhood, your school has tons of money and resources. If you grow up in a poor neighborhood, some barely have enough money to keep the roof from leaking. And we've all just accepted this as normal and OK. We have the power to change this but we choose not to. I would suggest that the reason kids in rich neighborhoods turn out ok is not because their schools have more money but because their parents have set them up for success. I can say this confidently because my dad is in the military, and I've attended several years at a poor high school in Alabama where cheating and truancy was rampant. See, here's the thing. People often greatly underestimate the role good parents have in producing good, contributing members of society. We like to pretend that everyone is born equal and that the reason some kids fail and other don't is because the public infrastructure they had access to was good or bad. But I would wager that's only 10% of the issue. The other 90% of the issue is that all parents are on a spectrum. And it turns out that poor parents are at the end of the spectrum that sets up their kids for failure. I totally get that it's not intentional; Nevertheless, they set bad examples to their kids (smoking, drinking, lotto), often times one parent (usually the male) is missing, they might not enforce school attendance/homework/chores, etc. Kids follow the example of their parents. If the parent is a single mom, pregnant at 14, smokes and drinks excessively, etc. chances are the kids are going to be the same way. I am not convinced throwing money at schools is the solution. I think there needs to be some kind of mentorship between the poor and middle classes that essentially causes there to be better parents with each generation. Like temporary foster homes where poor kids can learn and observe how middle and upper class people do things. Basically, I believe the ultimate solution to poverty is love - personal relationships with the poor. Actually making friends with poor people as a middle or upper class individual and helping lift them up a little. Money is part of the problem, yes, but my argument is that the importance of money is greatly overestimated in the poverty problem.

vosper 7y ago
> I can say this confidently because my dad is in the military, and I've attended several years at a poor high school in Alabama where cheating and truancy was rampant. I'm not disputing your personal experience, but this is an anecdote :)