Where economic uncertainly ends,
urban poverty begins.
Not exact matches
The foreign debt continues to be an issue and new voices have
began to sound the need to look for ways to face it; (ii) At the national level two questions are concentrating increasing attention: one is the reassessment of the necessary role of the state to correct the distortions of a runaway market (currently discussed in Europe and in the discussions about the role the initiatives of «an active state has played in the economic development of Asian countries); the other is the need for a «participative democracy over against a purely representative formal democracy: in this sense the need to strengthen civil society with its intermediate organizations becomes an important concern; (iii) the struggle for collective and personal identity in a society in which forced immigration, dehumanizing conditions in
urban marginal situations, and foreign cultural aggression and massification in many forms produce a degrading type of
poverty where communal, family and personal identity are eroded and even destroyed.
After a month or so of being here at HGSE, I want to
begin examining the external factors —
poverty, unemployment, and crime — that impact
urban neighborhoods.
The dysfunctional nature of how
urban schools teach students to relate to authority
begins in kindergarten and continues through the primary grades.With young children, authoritarian, directive teaching that relies on simplistic external rewards still works to control students.But as children mature and grow in size they become more aware that the school's coercive measures are not really hurtful (as compared to what they deal with outside of school) and the directive, behavior modification methods practiced in primary grades lose their power to control.Indeed, school authority becomes counterproductive.From upper elementary grades upward students know very well that it is beyond the power of school authorities to inflict any real hurt.External controls do not teach students to want to learn; they teach the reverse.The net effect of this situation is that
urban schools teach
poverty students that relating to authority is a kind of game.And the deepest, most pervasive learnings that result from this game are that school authority is toothless and out of touch with their lives.What school authority represents to
urban youth is «what they think they need to do to keep their school running.»