(no subject)

[bubosquared]

I started writing this in response to this entry, but it rapidly got off track and out of hand. I make no claims as to originality or coherence--it's mostly stream-of-consciousness, almost--or about the accuracy of my childhood memories, which by now have obviously become romanticised and coloured. I should also warn that I have a tendency to focus a lot on "class" and related concepts. Blame it on being a socialist, I suppose.

As I was reading this, I was reminded of a conversation I once had with an online acquaintance on the subject of generational poverty. I can't even recall how we got on the subject, but I do remember his insistence that there is no such thing as generational poverty, that poor people are poor, and remain poor, because they are, essentially, lazy and unmotivated and happy to stay on welfare, and that if we'd take that welfare money away from them, they'd get up, get jobs, their children would go to college instead of preferring the lazy life of staying home on welfare, they'd get educated, they'd get better jobs, and they'd stop being poor. After all, it worked for his family.

I didn't manage to convince him otherwise, and to be honest, I sort of stopped trying after a while. I could've dug around on the internet for some hard numbers and studies, I could've pointed out that his family was an exception, but someone who bases his opinion on something this important on his own anecdotal experience is likely not going to change his mind for all the hard evidence in the world. Eventually, I just asked him to agree to disagree, and broke off the converation. I don't recall really talking to him much after that.

What I really wanted to do, though, was put him in my shoes for a while. I wanted to take his shoulders and physically shake him and yell at him until he'd listen to my memories of growing up middle-class in a largely poor neighbourhood. I wanted to tell him about the girl in my school, one year younger than I was, who was always an hour late to class because she had to do a paper round because her family desperately needed the money, and ask him how she and her brother, who was in my brother's class at the time, were supposed to get enough of an education to even graduate secondary school, let alone go to uni. (And uni in Belgium is a lot cheaper than in the US or even the UK.)

Unfortunately, you can't force people to walk in someone else's shoes for any distance, or even to see someone walk in their own shoes from someone else's perspective.

This is the part of your entry that rang truest of all to me:

I know that my mother, at the same level of income, did not lose her sense of perspective and didn't fall into the poverty personality. I believe the difference was that she didn't start out her family life at that low level with no hope of climbing upwards.

My parents were pretty poor during the first few years of their marriage, and as I was born ten months after they wed, I think this, in part, has shaped my opinion on these things, at least in part. I was just a child, of course, and even if I remembered any of these years, which I don't, we never went hungry, and we always had decent clothes, even if most of them were hand-my-downs from cousins and neighbours. But I do remember my mother telling me how, the first winter of my life, she and dad would take me into bed with them because the house they lived in didn't have adequate heating, and my sheets were, literally, frozen.

They did "work themselves up", as it were, and they're pretty well-off now, but up until I was in my mid-teens, they both worked in the social sector, and there's not a lot of money to be made there. I never had any delusions of being "working class", but we were definitely on the lower end of the middle class, which was part of why my parents "got out". The other part, as you point out, is that my parents both come from relatively well-off families. Mum's father was a physical therapist and a PE teacher, dad's father was a languages teacher, and his mother was a pharmacist.

Which brings me to my second point: education. My grandmother once, at 13/14, caught up on two years of Latin classes in a single summer, so she could get a Latin degree in secondary school and go on to get the pharmacy degree that would enable her to take over her father's pharmacy. My grandfather spoke at least three languages other than his own, had a passion for history, and even at the end of his life, when he was well into his nineties, remained sharp and intelligent. My mother's parents, likewise, are big readers, and her father, as a teacher, obviously believed in the value of knowledge and education.

I think it's not even so much the education itself that matters, but the perception of value of it, if that makes sense. I mean, I dropped out of uni and my highest diploma right now is a secondary degree in Latin and Mathematics, but I still value knowledge, I read nonfiction and newspapers and I want to go back to uni because I want to learn about things, about the world. My mother, in her mid-twenties and with a full-time job and two small children, went back to school to get a degree in psychology. My father is still gathering all kinds of knowledge and skills through art classes and the likes. Because we grew up in the kind of environment that encouraged learning and reading.

By contrast, in the school where I spent my primary school years, and half of my secondary school ones, roughly half of the students came from backgrounds of, if not generations of poverty, then at least generations of somewhat-above-the-poverty-line working class. Even as a (often fairly unperceptive even considering my age) child, I noticed how in my friends' families, books were often a rarity, and ASO¹ and university were the exception rather than the norm: TSO and especially BSO, and getting a job as soon as you could. For many of them, writing in "proper Dutch" was almost like writing in another language, and if writing letters or notes for personal use, they'd write down phonetic renditions of dialect².

The exceptions were rare. In that school, none of my classmates in Latin class were anything but firmly middle class, and in the school I transferred to (which, ironically, was a lot more middle class in general), there was only one guy from a more working class background. My mother sometimes runs into one of my best friends from primary school, whose family was one of those just-over-the-poverty-line ones. She's my age, and she's married, with two children and a third on the way, and it seems that she's pretty much repeating what I remember her telling me about her mother's life, with the exception that she didn't drop out of school at 13.

From what I remember, most of these kids just didn't see the point of doing all that studying in secondary school, and then going on to do another four years at university. It made much more sense to them (and their families, and often the school administrators³) to learn practical things that would enable them to get a job as soon as they could, because they needed money now, not in four years once they had a degree.

All of which is an elaborate and rambling way of saying that yeah, a lot of poor families stay poor because they simply can't see that there's any other way to be, and while, yes, they could conceivably get themselves out of poverty, that possibility starts diminishing before they're old enough to get this "free money" the guy I mentioned spoke of. If you're never encouraged to read, to learn, if you see your parents living pretty much from paycheck to paycheck with no chance to save anything, ever, then by the time you're twelve and have to start making choices about your future⁴, you're going to want to start earning money as soon as you can, because the future is, as far as you can see, already set in the same stone as your parents' life.

There's more factors to generational poverty, of course, including the fact that, if your parents have never done anything but live from paycheck to paycheck, you're not going to have the coping skills to budget or save even if you do make more money than you strictly need to get by, but it's the education aspect that I always get back to. (And none of this is assuming there's decent education available at all, for free, as it is in Belgium. The stories I hear about public schools in poor (and even not so poor) areas in the US are chilling, and make me despair even more at the people who say these people are "just lazy". But that's another subject, really, and I've gone on quite long enough.

Footnotes

1. 1. ASO: "Algemeen Secundair Onderwijs" -- "General Secondary Education", what I believe would be the equivalent to A and O levels in the UK. Lots of maths and general subjects, geared towards preparing students for higher education. The other two are what I think is called "shop" in the US? Basically, things like woodworking, metalworking, etc. Also general classes, but less than in ASO.
   
2. 2. I always had problems with this, as I really didn't speak any dialect, and often had to strain to understand it. It's better now, especially once my parents realised that this was a problem, and started speaking more dialect to me at home, instead of "general Dutch", but I'm still not very good at it.
   
3. . Coincidentally or not, the one working class guy in my class got blamed for a vandalism incident that happened on my last day of secondary school. I'll spare you the story, but the administration of the school basically assumed that he was the one who did it, and could barely be convinced otherwise despite overwhelming evidence. As far as I know, they may have just jumped to conclusions because he wore heavy metal t-shirts (which is still ridiculous, but you know), but I've often wondered just how much people are actually allowed, let alone encouraged, to "rise above their station," so to speak.
   
4. 4. And I could go into a whole rant here about how stupid it is to expect a twelve-year old to make these sorts of decisions, but I won't. Besides, most of us didn't even decide ourselves, our parents did. It's worth pointing out that a lot of parents either wanted their kid to do TSO or BSO and learn something practical, even though the kid wanted to, and was capable of, taking Latin or Maths or whatever. A lot of parents also insisted their child do ASO because they should "start as high as possible" (my parents were among these), even though the child would be a lot better off in TSO, and as a result a lot of people kind of "cascaded down" into TSO and BSO by the tie they're fifteen, and then they're so thoroughly discouraged they just want to get out. I've seen school authorities with the same mindset, too, which is even more annoying and discouraging sometimes.