I went to high school in a pretty rough area (delivery drivers being executed as part of a gang initiation, NYPD narcotics task force would cruise by a lot, crackheads hanging out by the deli and bus stops, that type of stuff).
The issue isn’t that society stacks the odds against these people - the issue is their culture. When kids are stuck coming to school early and staying late because going home with books was akin to acting white and would lead to them getting their asses kicked - that’s a problem. We had some really intelligent guys who outside of campus were completely different because they had to fit in. The language changed, the manner of dress changed, it was as if they underwent a transformation. What was interesting (and not surprising) was that the students who had parents who were involved in their lives/academic journey were all top performers. They were well rounded.
My mother worked in the NYC public school system for 40 years before retiring, she witnessed the same thing. She worked with the sped kids and there were students lumped into that category who had nothing wrong with them mentally, however they were not given the chance in their own community to grow intellectually. Those same students had parents who were always absent from parent-teacher conferences and showed zero interest in their children’s lives. My mother would go out of her way to find how to work with these students, and it paid off. When you have the rougher students pick the lock to the classroom (to let you in because you forgot your key) or escort you to the subway because “there are some bad guys out there, ma’am,” that shows what can happen when you actually show that you give a damn about them (something they didn’t have at home).
This starts at home and it isn’t locked to race or creed, it boils down to parental involvement in their children’s academic experience. When the parents don’t give a fuck, by and large, those students don’t care either. There are of course the few outliers who push themselves to get out of that situation, but overall many of those students just resign to accept that they aren’t good enough. Do I agree with FOB Asian parents forcing their kids from a very young age to devote their lives to education? Maybe not the methods they use, however it pays off when a good number of those students end up attending schools like Stuyvesant and Staten Island or Brooklyn Tech.
It's actually genetics, not culture. Our last common ancestor was 50,000 years ago, and we know that the rate of brain evolution increased 100 fold in populations outside of Africa due to the discovery of agriculture, starting around 10,000 years ago. We are nothing more than talking apes, subject to the same types of evolutionary force every other creature on this planet is. There is no such thing as magic dirt, culture is a reflection of genetics (not an overlay on top of it), and you are not a "blank slate" when you are born.
I went to high school in a pretty rough area (delivery drivers being executed as part of a gang initiation, NYPD narcotics task force would cruise by a lot, crackheads hanging out by the deli and bus stops, that type of stuff).
The issue isn’t that society stacks the odds against these people - the issue is their culture. When kids are stuck coming to school early and staying late because going home with books was akin to acting white and would lead to them getting their asses kicked - that’s a problem. We had some really intelligent guys who outside of campus were completely different because they had to fit in. The language changed, the manner of dress changed, it was as if they underwent a transformation. What was interesting (and not surprising) was that the students who had parents who were involved in their lives/academic journey were all top performers. They were well rounded.
My mother worked in the NYC public school system for 40 years before retiring, she witnessed the same thing. She worked with the sped kids and there were students lumped into that category who had nothing wrong with them mentally, however they were not given the chance in their own community to grow intellectually. Those same students had parents who were always absent from parent-teacher conferences and showed zero interest in their children’s lives. My mother would go out of her way to find how to work with these students, and it paid off. When you have the rougher students pick the lock to the classroom (to let you in because you forgot your key) or escort you to the subway because “there are some bad guys out there, ma’am,” that shows what can happen when you actually show that you give a damn about them (something they didn’t have at home).
This starts at home and it isn’t locked to race or creed, it boils down to parental involvement in their children’s academic experience. When the parents don’t give a fuck, by and large, those students don’t care either. There are of course the few outliers who push themselves to get out of that situation, but overall many of those students just resign to accept that they aren’t good enough. Do I agree with FOB Asian parents forcing their kids from a very young age to devote their lives to education? Maybe not the methods they use, however it pays off when a good number of those students end up attending schools like Stuyvesant and Staten Island or Brooklyn Tech.
It's actually genetics, not culture. Our last common ancestor was 50,000 years ago, and we know that the rate of brain evolution increased 100 fold in populations outside of Africa due to the discovery of agriculture, starting around 10,000 years ago. We are nothing more than talking apes, subject to the same types of evolutionary force every other creature on this planet is. There is no such thing as magic dirt, culture is a reflection of genetics (not an overlay on top of it), and you are not a "blank slate" when you are born.