What If Policymakers Stopped Condemning Poor People and Considered their Real Needs and Circumstances? | janresseger

What If Policymakers Stopped Condemning Poor People and Considered their Real Needs and Circumstances? | janresseger

What If Policymakers Stopped Condemning Poor People and Considered their Real Needs and Circumstances?

  Merry Christmas and Good Wishes for the Season!   This blog will take a holiday break.  Look for a new post early in the new year.

In 2012, Mike Rose published Back to School: Why Everyone Deserves a Second Chance at Education, a book about the potential of community colleges to help people discover their interests, widen their experiences, and perhaps change the direction of their lives.  He begins: “This is a book about people in tough circumstances who find their way, who get a second… or third.. or fourth chance, who in some cases feel like they are reinventing themselves.  Education can play a powerful role in creating that second chance…  One of the defining characteristics of the United States is its promise of a second chance; this promise is central to our vision of ourselves and to our economic and civic dynamism. When we are at our best as a society, our citizens are not trapped by their histories.” (Back to School, p. xiii)

But we live in an age when work requirements—and participation in sometimes endless workplace training programs—have been added as conditions to qualify for Temporary Assistance for Needy Families, and when some states have made eligibility for Medicaid and even SNAP (food stamps) contingent on working or participating in basic and overly generalized training programs.  What does it mean when education ceases to be seen as a second chance and is instead conceptualized as a punishment for the those we disdain as dependent.  What if our society were to recover our belief in second chances?  What if we were to begin to consider in human terms the people who care for our grandparents or our children or pour our coffee or change the beds after we leave our hotel rooms—people whose employers may not regularly assign them enough hours to qualify for social program work requirements—people who never know their work schedules in advance—people working at minimum wage?  And how does our opinion of the people struggling to find jobs that pay so little affect the programs we design supposedly to provide that second chance?

To consider this question, in 2013, Rose published a piece in Dissent Magazine, The Inner Life of the Poor, an article he later added as a new chapter in the revised and expanded 2014 edition of his extraordinary Why School?   Rose republished the article last month on his personal blog.  Here’s why: “I reprint it now, for I think it is especially relevant in these times of brutal social policy and the day-to-day dehumanization of vulnerable people both within and at our borders.”

Here is what Rose asks us to consider as he profiles the woman who served as the primary CONTINUE READING: What If Policymakers Stopped Condemning Poor People and Considered their Real Needs and Circumstances? | janresseger