Responding to Brink Lindsey's op-ed attributing poverty to "a lack of elementary self-discipline," a Wall Street Journal reader tries to explain what it's like to grow up in poverty:
Imagine you, or one of your own children, are born into a "family" where the adults who are supposed to protect you belittle you and beat you on a regular basis. You experience hunger even as a toddler. You babysit yourself beginning as early as four years of age for up to 20 hours per day. You are surrounded by filth, ignorance, drug abuse, alcoholism, disease and violence. You watch your siblings suffer the same torture and by your early teens you are filled with shame and rage.
In his op-ed, Lindsey wrote that serious do-gooders would be well-advised to focus on "education reform," where "real improvements will come from challenging the moribund state-school monopoly with greater competition." Responding to that sort of despair by trying to break the teacher's unions is truly an astonishingly narrow and inadequate solution -- and all evidence suggests it will be far less effective than more serious interventions like universal preschool. At this point, I'm half ready to break the teacher's unions just to prove, once and for all, that this isn't the answer, and we need to move the conversation beyond such comforting bromides. As another reader writes to Lindsey:
It is unfortunate that Mr. Lindsey concludes his otherwise excellent piece with an attack on educators. As a New York City public school teacher who has read and, like Mr. Lindsey, endorses Annette Lareau's studies of child-rearing differences between social classes, I was very surprised to see Mr. Lindsey change course from admonishing the parents and children who exemplify and encourage the "lack of elementary self-discipline" he describes to place the blame squarely on teachers.
It is absurd to believe that teachers who spend approximately 50 minutes with their high school students each day can have as much personal impact on troubled children's lives as the peers, parents and pop-culture figures influencing these children nearly every other hour throughout the day.
