Once poor, always poor?

I'm one of those people living in poverty that distrusts school institutions. My main philosophical gripe is that it doesn't seem to really matter what your major is. "Oh, you got a bachelors in Biology? Well, I guess that's fine. Come work at my tech company in a way that is completely unrelated to Biology." In this particular situation, it seems like the only purpose of college is to create arbitrary classist hurdles for poor people to jump through.

Now, obviously, that's not the case with all education, but my next gripe with it is the seemingly insurmountable debt that said education brings. Literally, all of my friends that have gone to college are no where near paying their debt off and I'm in my late 30s.

Finally, that in of itself, ya know, maybe that's like the licks you gotta take when you're trying to rise up in the world, but the fact that educational debt in America can never be voided through bankruptcy seems like a conscious systemic decision to create debt slaves.

And, while my parents, have been relatively ambivalent about education, almost everyone else in my family has gone out of their way to emphasize the importance of education. I just can't get over the previously mentioned hurdles.

I don't get this attitude. Sounds pretty great, these institutions you talk about! What happens to children these institutions care for 100%? Oh wait ...

https://www.kansascity.com/news/special-reports/article23820...

You're assuming blanket good intentions on part of institutions and schools. Does it really need to be said this is exceptional, rather than the norm? Here is a study that quantitatively compares really bad home situations to many forms of institutional care.

https://www.aeaweb.org/articles?id=10.1257/aer.97.5.1583

Here is a study that correlates the "help" given by institutions like schools with betterment or worsening of symptoms. And again, we see: beyond giving information to children ALL institutional help is worse than no help at all. So I wonder how you justify these good intentions? More institutional involvement makes lives of children worse, not better. (And yes, I get it, some problems evolve in dramatic fashion, and tend to worsen, such as anorexia. However, again, no institutional help has better outcomes. It's just no help results in a slowly worsening situation, institutional help results in a fast, dramatic worsening of the situation).

Therefore, I question why you criticize children and parents for refusing help. For the large majority of help provided this is the best choice for the child. Do people overreact? Yes, absolutely. Especially CPS is famous for "one wrong move, one second of trusting the wrong social worker, locked up for years" situations. It's almost funny, but these institutions are a recurring theme IN HORROR MOVIES.

I realize it's only one aspect of the problem you're identifying, but institutions, especially schools, really aren't good for children. Otherwise we'd see a lot of effort preventing this situation (and therefore a lot of tolerance for suboptimal home situations). Yet we see the reverse: defunding institutional care, defunding actual help, taking away information (talking with any social worker as a child can result in getting locked up for up to 27 years in New York, yes, really), fund 1000 new efforts for getting more kids into institutional care, because the kids never want to, not even when they are deep in abusive situations, and force everyone and everything to "report" kids for institutional care. I recently found an article that hairdressers are to watch for signs of child abuse.

Obviously that article never once mentioned just how bad the institutional alternative to "child abuse" situations is.

The arguments are that it's about "justice" (the many suggestions for punishing families, by "helping" the children (because criminal law makes touching the parents very hard) for example, for not vaccinating. Or for "disturbances". Or ...). Systematically we see the effects of this: youth crime is dropping like a stone. Crimes against children are dropping like a stone. And ever more kids are forced into institutional care.

Schools are a big part of that.

> As an adult I watch my local schools reach out to provide services, help of all kinds and struggle to find more than a handful of takers or folks who want to try…

As illustrated above, most social help programs at school are meant to trap kids and force them into institutional care. And if 1 school program has this intention, nobody will trust other efforts.

Besides, I don't get this attitude. In low primary school, perhaps this is true. But starting at something like 2nd-3rd grade the teachers, in my experience, are not sufficiently competent to effectively help children learn. And there's too many kids in a class to do it even if you do have the odd teacher that really does make a difference.

At home, kids can be taught by parents, and by a great many people on the internet. Pedagogical studies have always shown that parental teaching produces far better results (to the tune that some studies claim 1h of teaching by parents is roughly equivalent to ~14h of school, or 1h daily work by a parent makes kids advance far faster than in school). And, essentially all parents aren't incompetent and really care about their children.

And yes, there are bad and abusive parents. You know what is MUCH more common? Bad and abusive teachers (look up how many gym teachers are convicted for sexual assault yearly ...). Bad and abusive classmates is more common still (one UN study claimed 70% of kids have been victims of violence from classmates, done under teacher supervision. And whilst I'm not claiming teachers often cause or supervise violence, they are still failing to care for these children). And yet ... never is anything done about those teachers or schools.

> My main philosophical gripe is that it doesn't seem to really matter what your major is

That's because (starting in high school) teachers are "assigned" a subject. If they change subjects, they essentially have to restart their career, there is a great personal cost (mostly going back to part-time teaching) for doing that. Plus for a whole bunch of things, from sick days to yard supervision there's a "pecking order". Changing subjects means you go to the back of the pecking order.

So if a biology teacher gets hired to emergency fill a math teacher's position, if they're smart they will never give up that math position.

IMO it has not much to do with how every social class are taught but rather the Mathew effect.

Put aside those exceptionally smart or dumb ones, most people are more to less with the same capabilities and the class they were born to almost define who they will become. The reason is simple: upper class have maybe 10 times the resource a middle class have and in turn a middle class may have 10 times the resource a poor people have. So the upper class can easily have enough resource to develop themselves, and provision for the risks and still have lots to invest. For middle class, they have enough to develop themselves, a little bit surplus to insure themselves and/or to invest. For the poor people, what they have is barely enough to make ends meet, little or none for personal development or invest.

So if everything goes well, the upper classes can get decent investment returns even if they do nothing actively. For the middle classes, it's not too bad, they can still get a piece of the cake, though not much. For poor people, they might be able to save a couple of bucks but nothing much.

If things go side ways, the cut of the cake for the upper class at worst is slightly smaller as they are impacted but as there are already provisions for that so they don't really lose much. Sometimes their portfolios actually grows a lot because central banks print lots of money and the inflation skyrockets. For the middle class it really depends on how lucky they are. Lucky ones' asset grows, average ones are not impacted or lose little bit. If they made wrong decisions, they might become poor people. For the poor people, the best case would be their savings eaten by inflations. If other bad things happen, they might become homeless.

Just take a look at statistics around the world, almost exactly the same story.