Terrible news: poor children still have hopes, dreams

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Disadvantaged kids dream big but fail

CHILDREN living in disadvantage are unaware of the harsh realities awaiting them, with a new poll indicating all students share the same ambitions and dreams.

Those silly children! Wanting to be doctors when they should realistically be aiming no higher than McDonald's manager! Clearly this is terrible, we should educate them on how they are doomed to lives of drudgery and despair, that way they'll be saved the disappointment later.

WHAT.

I grew up in a working class area. It's arguable that I was never entirely disadvantaged since my parents may have been poor but I got a lot more educational opportunities and general middle class...stuff than most kids in my class. But I was still ensconced in the culture. And let me tell you: those children's souls were already plenty crushed, their dreams sufficiently small, their hopes and aspirations sufficiently modest. We all "knew" we were going nowhere. God how we knew. Just sometimes we had hopes and dreams. How horribly ignorant of us.

Comments

[ardhra]

Well, in a lot of ways I think that "building aspiration" in low-SES students is worth critiquing, since it's the cornerstone of the federal government's higher education "equity" strategy. Essentially, this involves showing students from low-SES schools a university and involving them in programs within the university so they'll feel like they can apply to it in the future. However, as soon as tertiary admissions scores are released -- which are heavily scaled based on school rankings -- it'll become clear that those students won't get the marks to get into one of the more elite universities, simply because of their educational & socio-economic disadvantage.

It's a way for the government to appear to be doing something without actually doing anything, and it ultimately blames the victim by identifying "lack of aspiration" as the problem rather than restrictions on access to income support, accommodation and student learning support (which have all been cut by the same government).

http://www.deewr.gov.au/Ministers/Gillard/Media/Releases/Pages/Article_100519_155708.aspx

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Oh yes, giving kids "better self esteem" or whatever won't magically make the barriers to higher education go away, though I can see some aspects of that program being helpful (the financial assistance for example).

On the whole what we need to do is not focus on the student's attitudes either way and instead actually fix the education system.