the back burner

Sorry. Wasn't trying to advocate a utopia. From experience it has been hard to deal with feeling as if I am in viscious circle that is leading to downward spiral. It was only because I had other resources that were outside of myself that I was able to get out of it. Many people do not know where to look to in order to get proper guidance. Who knows maybe the Church and Jesus are the answer after all.

The "environmental stuff" you reference sounds to me more like they want to be able to work good paying jobs with security and full benefits without actually having any "skills/tools/etc." that are worth paying for. When I lived in New York, there were posters up for employment opportunities: the city was hiring both bus mechanics and police officers. Why do you think they needed to put up posters in the subway? Because they weren't getting enough qualified applicants. It takes education, practice, and a clean police record to qualify, and people just don't have them. It doesn't take networking, it doesn't take friendly legistlation: the city is trying to hire people and making it abundently clear how to apply. You show me a well-documented pattern of employers turning away qualified minority applicants and then I'll start considering the need for "environmental" changes.

It's long past time this country realized that unpaid labor isn't worth jack, especially if there isn't any geographic inherency to the job in question. People want low-skill high-pay jobs. Well there aren't any, and there won't be any.

Right now, the Hershey Medical Center has open positions for 142 nurses. Some of the positions are full time, some part time. They've got positions for 67 physicians. If you meet the qualifications and manage not to offend anyone during the application process, do you think they'd send you away? Of course not. They'd hire you on the spot. And you'd be making from $30k (for some of the part time nurses, I'd imagine) to well over $250k (they're hiring neurosurgeons).

The Harrisburg paper has dozens of trade-level positions for people who possess skills: welding, forklift operation, brazing, soldering, telecommunications installation, accounting, HVAC, auto repair, construction, concrete finishing, carpentry, plumbing, electrical work, etc. But there isn't much of a need for people who can just show up to a job and use their hands for a few hours. We don't need that kind of labor much anymore, and there certainly isn't any reason to pay well for it.

Education and/or skills training is the only way to break out of the "vicious" cycle. I think the Europeans are right: if you aren't planning on going to college, there just isn't any reason to send you to high school. Just to go vo-tech and learn to do something useful. Anything, really. Operate a forklift. Learn to weld. Fix a car. You won't be rich, but you'll have a job, and you won't get to be 18 with a useless diploma which you didn't earn and no skills to boot.

Ryan, you make some excellent points. There is a blue-collar labor shortage in America. (My dad works for a city utilities, and he was telling us this summer how there's a shortage of new young linemen to replace the retiring linemen. The linemen are the people who climb power poles to take care of the power lines.)

My question, though, is this: should we institute a system that copies the European system, and end up locking people into a career based on their aptitudes and skills at AGE 14? How many of us knew what we wanted when we were 14? And even if we did, what if some new, latent talent (or call) comes to the fore when you're, say, 21 and in college? It just doesn't seem fair to lock people into a career path in 7th/8th grade.

I am not for that idea. China does that to their citizens. Its not good. That idea seems to defeat what the United States stands for.

Currently, the US seems to "stand for" the largest poverty-bound population of any major industrial/post-industrial power.

I think we've bought into the lie that everyone can be white-collar and middle-class. So we give kids a pseudo-academic education track which the vast majority of kids have no use for, as evidenced by our massively high drop-out and illiteracy rate. I think 14 is plenty old enough to start discriminating between kids who will benefit from further education and kids who would benefit from some solid, technical training. It's time we started dealing with people's actual potential, not what we think they should be.

Carrie, I know you weren't trying to solve big problems. I didn't mean to sound as if you were. You were sharing from your experiences and I really appreciate that. I just get cynical and fed up with some organizations that enter communities with a pre-packaged plan for bequeathing poor people with the skills the organization thinks they need to get jobs and be happy. Sometimes they miss the structural causes of poverty.

And Ryan, you're absolutely right to mention the practical realities of the domestic job market. I'm not in favor of having "good paying jobs with security and full benefits without actually having any skills/tools/etc." What I am in favor of is concerned people working together to rebuild their community. That means challenging one another to work hard, but it also means looking carefully at why a community is behaving disfunctionally. To get an accurate answer to that question, we have to be able to identify the factors of poverty and trace them to their roots, whether those roots be found in individuals, in wrong-headed worldviews, in corporations, or in government institutions.

It a lot easier to see structural causes of poverty overseas -- at least, it is for me, since that's what I studied. For domestic poverty advice, turn to Rebekah Brightbill. But I do want to point out that after making some good points for the importance of individual responsibility, you actually mentioned some structural problems in our education system.

So while I agree with you that identifying structural elements doesn't negate the realities of individual responsibility, I don't think people are just being picky. As you mentioned, our educational system has a few opportunities for improvement. I wonder if perhaps the people who design curriculum and school requirements aren't usually familiar with urban and minority cultures? How does that affect the way we learn and the way we form life expectations? And what about single mothers who can get more money off of welfare than they can at McDonalds? Or who realize that in order to work as a lineman for the electric company, they must leave their children alone in a sub-standard apartment for most of the day? Or who find that getting a job will not offset the costs of childcare? Surely there are some structural elements coming into play in these scenarios. I'm thinking about the way men perceive women, about government's responsibility to care for the poor without institutionalizing harmful patterns, and about the convergence of shoddy construction companies, ignorant urban planners, and soaring housing costs.

Again, you've got a good point. I just don't want you to misunderstand that I think poor people automatically deserve great benefits and wages on a silver platter. But I do think throwing them a bone might be nice.

Incidentally, I tend to agree with Ryan about education. I think it would be possible to serve our students better in a way that would resemble neither China nor Europe. Not being an educational specialist (Krista chime in anytime, here), I think I can at least say that our educational system doesn't serve all of its current charges equally. Why are we surprised that so many inner-city students drop out and don't finish high school, when we've based our entire educational ethos around the mantra of "You can be anything you want to be!" These kids are smart enough to know that while this might be true in the suburbs, it isn't in their day-to-day experience. They know that some people have potential for college and high-paying jobs, and some don't. Is it right to keep on celebrating and glorifying the first group and villanizing the second?

On the one hand, college is a neccessary stepping stone for kids who want to compete in white-collar ways in a shrinking and increasingly technologically-savvy world. AND there's no reason in my mind that any child who would benefit from this opportunity should be categorically refused it. On the other hand, college can be an unneccessary waste of time, money, and expectation for those who are more inclined learn a trade. What if someone wanted to cut hair or build cabinets of till the soil? Of course there are specialized sets of education that attend to each of these areas, but couldn't a person learn these things as apprentices in a like-minded community better than they could in a college classroom? Possibly. Probably.

Of course, the really sticky question is who gets to decide whether a 14 year old student is fit for a certain option? The child? The parents? The teachers? (The parish minister? Yes, let's have a church-run oligarchy, please.) No quotas, like China. And no strict boxes, like Europe. Why can't they change their mind, later on? It would be more difficult, of course. But it might be unneccessary, anyway. I seriously think lots of students would be able to make rational decisions at this point, especially if it was a normal decision that they and their parents had been anticipating for years.

OK, I think I've written the longest comment of my life. Congratulations to me, even though most of it was probably wrong.