| RATING: | 80% |
| FORMAT: | Book |
Apart from its academic nature, that makes wading through statistical tables onerous, this is a fascinating look at self-fulfilling prophecy - as such - and, particularly, at negative self-fulfilling prophecies.
The fully-evidenced idea is that children defined as disadvantaged are expected by teachers to be unable to learn; that the label Underprivilege is largely responsible for the so-called underprivilege.
Thus, poverty alleviation programs can only work if it is accepted that all students can perform well, educationally, despite their socio-economic circumstances. A tall order, indeed, given the entrenched vested-interests such a call-to-arms involves confronting - especially the intransigence and laziness of the teaching profession, itself.
Clearly, such prophecies have implications in politics - especially with regard to White supremacy, sexism and social class. Someone who is told from an early age that Black people or women are intellectually-inferior; that the poor are congenitally-unable to be anything but poor and/or that they possess poor personal hygiene, is likely to come to actually believe such claims - regardless of the evidence - and spend their adult lives treating such people as inferior. It is also likely, in such circumstances, for the three example groups to start behaving in relation to their treatment rather than in terms of their actual abilities and character.
The refusal to treat people (including oneself) as an individual - rather than as an exemplar of a social group - leads to the inevitable conclusion that many people define themselves by their treatment as children, even after they have become adult, and not by their actual innate abilities and interests. Children told they are stupid are far more likely to become stupid adults.
Politically, self-fulfilling prophecy can become a simple method of social control and engineering, with the downside that when a technologically-advanced culture upgrades its technology, entire groups of people are unfit for the new employment possibilities so created because they have been told that change, for them, is impossible.
That the solution to this well-known social phenomenon is as obvious and as easy-to-implement as it is uncommon, means people cling to such beliefs out of malice. For example, in education, there are really no good students only good teachers; the quality of ones education having less to do with ones own intellectual abilities, than those of the teacher.
Thus, studies suggesting the genetic inferiority of either the poor or Blacks are nothing more than self-fulfilling - especially as such studies are never conducted by either the poor or the Black, themselves.
Terms like “Disadvantaged” and “Underprivileged” are the real problems people so labeled experience, not the social circumstances such designations allege they point out. Scholastic improvement is much more closely-related to teacher attitudes and aptitudes than it is to the socio-economic origins of scholars; meaning it is better to learn alone than in bad company.
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