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It appears that the factors uniting people who manage to be successful via academics despite poverty and being surrounded by other poor people is having a parent, relative or other mentor who cared about the child and encouraged, taught and guided him/her to consider education important, provided an environment that enabled the child to learn to concentrate and work on their studies, and an expectation that the child will succeed. This may be easier in a two parent household, but that is not a requirement. It does require someone who is caring and stable enough to invest the required time and energy.
The reality is that not every child is that lucky. That is a fact that schools must address, Ideally, schools should provide the required guidance and environment for students to succeed even when they don't get much help at home. I agree that children need to be pushed and encouraged to be successful, that does not mean that labelling them as losers or treating them harshly is likely to be effective. Yes, a parent angry about bad grades motivates some kids to do better, but when it is excessive and it isn't backed up with encouragement and an environment that facilitates concentration and work, it just creates hostility and rebellion. In general, poor kids are exposed to plenty of anger, violence, and insults at home. There are many good reasons why informed educators are trying to eliminate old fashioned hostility, anger, abuse, rote learning, and stereotyping from the education system, one is that those tactics never actually worked that well.
The first paragraph is spot on. The key for both Dr. Carson and me was that our mothers both did an excellent job of teaching us the value of education, despite neither of them being well-educated themselves. If you look at the average GPA and unemployment, it's not so hard to identify that this is the major difference in cultures. Asian parents are much more likely to push their kids academically than black parents, which is something that should be addressed.
So, my follow-on question is why in the heck is this so hard for people to see and/or apply? By the time you're old enough to create a child, you should be able to look back and analyze what your parents did right and wrong in raising you. Moreover, if you honestly love your kids, you'll do what's necessary to guide them into a better life than your own.
This is where I get into Americans becoming wussies. We've been continually taking away the power of the school system to push for academic performance and proper behavior, especially when the kids do have sorry *** parents. The disciplinary actions for misbehaving are a joke, especially at inner city schools. Unfortunately, this is where you have plenty of hoodlums who, IMO, need a boot camp approach to learn how to respect and be responsible. We need to quit tolerating parents not teaching this to their kids. In particular, the black community is by far the worst on average at teaching respect and responsibility to the next generation. This is where political correctness, especially the stupid automated racism accusations, need to be ignored.