In coming posts, I’ll examine more of Our Kids in digestible chunks, offer critique, and attempt to expound upon connections I see to education and schooling, education reform, and my own experiences. I see this book as central to understanding contemporary exigencies regarding education policy and essential to building and actualizing an egalitarian social justice agenda.
Chapter One: “The American Dream: Myths and Realities”
Robert Putman’s Our
Kids: The American Dream in Crisis begins in epigraph with a line from a
Chrissie Hynde *song*: “I went back to
Ohio, but my city was gone.” Putnam his team of researchers visited with
residents or one-time residents of Putnam’s childhood hometown, Port Clinton,
Ohio, in attempts to see how opportunities had changed for its young people over
time. In the 1950s, Putman says, “My hometown was… a passable embodiment of the
American Dream” (1). Research suggests, he says, that the 1950s were boom times
for those seeking socioeconomic upward mobility, even for those in marginalized
groups.
But times have changed. Amid profiling several residents who were able
to take advantages of the economic affordances of yesteryear and contrasting
them with more-recent residents of the city in a county “once among the most
egalitarian in the country,” Putnam posits his claim: We are experiencing a
“nationwide increase in class inequity….[T]he class-based opportunity gap among
young people has widened in recent decades” (19).
Today, young people in poverty are “in much worse shape”
(29) than their well-off counterparts, Putman asserts. The confounding
complication is not that rich families are able to pull ever-ahead so much as
it is that poorer families are falling further behind. For any number of
reasons, if bootstrapping is a sort of race, we have some running it with
jet packs and roller skates while others, despite their best efforts, walk
backwards.
 |
| Despite efforts to the contrary, poor Americans are moving further away from economic stability and upward mobility as their more affluent counterparts move ever forward and away from them. |
Rugged individualism and a belief that through hard work and
enterprise one can accomplish great things, aspects of the “rags to riches”
narrative, are so ingrained in the American psyche that a shrinking empathy might
accompany the growing opportunity gap as people on one economic strata see less
of people in others. Americans may be so sure that socioeconomic upwards
mobility is such a reality that they feel those who do not obtain it have only
themselves to blame (33).
As someone who grew up in a working class family which
always seemed one step away from financial disaster but who was able to become
the first member of his family to attend college and who, briefly, was able to
live a specter of a middle class lifestyle before falling back into the
one-step-from-ruination status so many of us experience currently, I connect
with much in Putnam’s assertions and accounts.
Indeed, often I remark to
people when I travel that “I left my small town to see the big wide world, but
I did so at a time the big wide world was becoming more like my small town.” By
this I mean many things, but among them are parallels to Our Kids’ introductory points.
In coming posts, I’ll examine more of Our Kids in digestible
chunks, offer critique, and attempt to expound upon connections I see to
education and schooling, education reform, and my own experiences.
Next time: "Conflating Equalities"
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