Following
is an interview published in the Fall, 2014 issue of The Hedgehog Review. If you are
not familiar with this fine magazine, you might want to give it a look. It
comes out of the Institute for Advanced Studies in Culture at the University of
Virginia and bills itself as offering “critical reflections on contemporary
culture.”
***
The Hedgehog Review: You’ve written very eloquently about the
challenges facing people who live and work at the bottom of our socioeconomic
ladder, and one of the things you’ve noticed—something you claim is greatly
complicating their plight—is how many, if not most, of them are becoming
invisible to the rest of society. What do mean by this? How did it happen, and
is it getting worse?
Mike Rose: Well, they’re not literally invisible, of course—there
are at least forty-five million people in the United States living at or below
the poverty line. But they are close to absent from public and political
discourse, except as an abstraction—an income category low on the socioeconomic
status index—or as a negative generalization: The poor are dependent on the
government, the “takers,” a problem. Consider Congressman Paul Ryan’s recent
comments about generations of men in the inner city “not even thinking about
working.” Neither the abstractions nor the generalizations give us actual
people trying to live their lives as best they can.
Because of the various layers of
segregation in our society—from work to schools to places of worship—those of
us who are relatively socially mobile have few opportunities to live and work
closely with people who are at the bottom of the income ladder. We don’t know
them. And because we don’t know their values and aspirations, the particulars
of their daily decisions, and the economic and psychological boundaries within
which those decisions are made, the poor easily become psychologically one-dimensional—intellectually,
emotionally, and volitionally simplified, not quite like us.
THR: Despite the growing gulf between the poor and “the rest,”
you’ve been pretty successful in staying in touch with what might be called the
invisible class. What’s given you this access, this connection?
MR: Well, I wouldn’t want to claim any exceptional access or
broad-scale knowledge. There are many poor communities—most, really—that I
don’t know much about at all. I grew up poor—my father was chronically ill and
my mother worked long hours as a waitress—so I have a personal, intimate sense
of economic hardship and insecurity. And a significant amount of work I’ve done
over the years, both my own teaching and mentoring and my research, has
involved people who are behind the economic eight ball. That work has taught me
a lot. It has also enabled me to develop some relationships in which people
have opened up parts of their lives to me. And I suspect the knowledge I gained
from my family’s own difficulties helps foster those relationships.
THR: How do we almost reflexively diminish the capacities,
ambition, imagination, and determination of the poor—and thereby add to the
distance that separates the well-off from the less well-off?
MR: It’s a complicated business, to be sure, but I think our
separation, our increasing economic segregation contributes to the
diminishment. With segregation comes ignorance and apprehension. Part of the
way we establish our shared humanity is by what we imagine goes on inside the head
and the heart of others. If we are separated from a group not only physically
but psychologically, then it becomes all the easier to attribute to them
motives, beliefs, thoughts—an entire interior life—that might be deeply
inaccurate and inadequate. And it’s from those attributions we develop both our
personal and public-policy responses to poverty.
THR: How do we even begin to break down barriers, or bridge the
gulf, between the poor and the rest of society?
MR: There are so many structural impediments, from residential
patterns that have developed partly out of housing policy to income inequality
and the shredding of the social safety net. So, for starters, if we want to
address the isolation I’m talking about, we need to do things that simply help poor
people live a decent life: a higher minimum wage, tax credits, jobs programs,
childcare, housing and transportation assistance. It’s hard to participate in
society when you’re scrambling for your next meal or being booted out of your
apartment. I’m not optimistic, given the focus on austerity and the terribly
ungenerous cast to so many public policy deliberations.
We also need opportunities for
people to develop and grow: educational and cultural programs, apprenticeships
and job training, civic organizations. I’m thinking about places or occasions
where poor people become more fully present actors on the societal stage, where
their thoughts and feelings play out in ways that can have a positive effect on
the direction of their lives. Social movements for civil rights or economic
justice provide such a space. Cultural projects do as well—in churches and
community centers, women’s shelters, prison art programs. And, in my
experience, second-chance educational programs and institutions—literacy
centers, adult schools, many community colleges—can also play this role.
But these are complex institutions.
Given the intricate relation in our country among social class, educational
resources, and academic achievement, the adult school and community college
reflect educational inequality and can contribute to it. A lot of students
never complete a certificate or degree. Some institutions do better than others
with similar populations, so the quality of governance, services, and teaching
matters. These institutions are among the few places in mainstream society
where poor people can become more publicly visible and display to their
advantage multiple dimensions of their lives.
THR: Can you tell us how some of your own experiences in these
places led to new understandings of the poor and their various plights?
MR: Let me give you a recent one. I spent several years studying a
community college that serves one of the poorest populations in Southern
California. Many of the students are older, coming back to school once their
children are grown, or after a series of dead-end jobs, or having spent time in
prison. Those coming straight from high school typically went to
underperforming schools. Most students have to take remedial English or math.
The majority of students are on financial aid and are burdened with health,
housing, or transportation problems. They’ve got a lot on their shoulders.
One of the things that struck
me—and it happened in stages, as I saw one example, then another, then
another—was the powerful desire being at the college unleashed in these
students. Parents wanted to improve their economic prospects and do better by
their kids. People who hadn’t been in a classroom in decades spoke passionately
about wanting to learn math this time or to become better readers and writers.
Burly, trash-talking guys in a welding class were complimenting each other on
welds being “beautiful” or “pretty,” and, in their math class, were arguing
about the correct solution to a problem. From physics to fashion design, students
were beginning to redefine themselves, to envision a future of possibility. As
one young woman said, “You will grow in a way that you never in your mind would
imagine.”
Of course, not all students at the
college are affected so powerfully, and too many leave out of discouragement or
because of financial burdens. But to witness repeatedly the mental vitality,
the hope, the redefining of one’s sense of self, makes you realize what is
possible when the conditions are right.
THR: So, in addition to its practical economic value, college for
these students yields other benefits as well?
MR: Absolutely. Even for the most occupationally oriented students.
One of the things that concerns me about current education policy aimed at
students like these is its strict economic focus. We need to get more people
into college to enhance their economic prospects and to secure the nation’s
economic future. Fine and true enough. The students want an economic boost,
too. As one guy said bluntly in an orientation session, “I’m here because I
don’t want to work a crappy job all my life.”
But so much else typically happens
along the way. Students comment on how good it feels to learn new things, or to
overcome old insecurities, or to have new intellectual and social as well as
occupational avenues open up to them. If we don’t acknowledge and try to foster
this rich dimension of their education, then we’re just repeating a long and
troubling tendency in American education policy. Working-class students get a
strictly functional education, heavy on job training and thin on everything
else.
THR: Could you say something about another important, but often
overlooked, institution that is important to people with relatively few
resources? I mean the public library.
MR: When I was visiting public schools in small rural communities,
I was struck by the role played by the local library. In addition to housing
books and some films and music, it’s an information resource, a meeting place,
an Internet outlet. And in places where the population is sparse and widely
distributed, the traveling library is a godsend. I spent a week at a one-room
schoolhouse in Montana’s Beaverhead National Forest , and there was a tiny
library attached to the school, the only library around. It was the place kids
got their books—and there were several intense readers in the class of fifteen,
always hunched over a book. What a resource!
Rural or urban, libraries are a
national treasure, and it’s easy in these days of connectivity and constantly
streaming media to forget how important they are to so many who can’t afford
all the technological bells and whistles. It’s shocking, I think, that
libraries are being forced to reduce hours and staff and close local branches.
And this is at a time when two-thirds of the nation’s libraries provide the
only free Internet access in their communities—and when government and
employment information and forms are increasingly going online.
THR: There’ve been many debates over the touchy subject of
intelligence, what it is, how we measure it, and how such conceptions and
measurements affect life chances and opportunities. How does what you call “a reductive view of
intelligence” stand in the way of appreciating the inner lives of individuals
who are often dismissed as society’s less able or less gifted—and who are
undercompensated as a result?
MR: As a country, we seem to be obsessed with intelligence, with
measuring it, with boosting our kids’ intelligence through products like Baby
Einstein, with getting “smarter” workers into the new “smart” workplace. But
the odd thing is that we tend to rely on a fairly narrow way of determining
intelligence: We identify it with a score on a standard intelligence test and
with the traditional school-based task.
If one does well on an intelligence
test or in school, that clearly indicates some kind of cognitive competence.
But if one doesn’t do well—and, historically, poor performers include many
low-income people—then the meaning of the score is much less clear. To do well
tells us something about intelligence—and, usually, schooling—but not to do
well provides much less information about intellectual capacity… though that
poor performance may speak volumes about educational opportunity.
What struck me as I did the
research for The Mind at Work was the number of instances of reasoning,
of problem solving, of learning and applying that learning, that fell outside
what gets assessed in an intelligence test or the traditional school
curriculum. There is the waitress at rush hour prioritizing on the fly a number
of demands from customers, the kitchen, and the manager. And the plumber
diagnosing a problem by feeling with his hands the pipes he can’t see behind an
old wall. And the hair stylist figuring out the style a customer wants through
talk and gesture. This kind of brainwork surrounds us, yet might not be
considered when we talk about intelligence.
THR: You’ve talked about some of the ways the lives of the poor are
made harder by their growing “invisibility,” but how is the rest of society,
including the better off, made worse—and even impoverished—by the
“disappearance of the poor”?
MR: Poverty represents a society’s moral and civic failure. It also
constricts our collective intelligence and creativity as so many people’s
potential is squelched. Thank goodness the notion of an “opportunity gap” is
finally making its way into public discussion. That gap hurts all of us.
One more thing. The marginalization
poverty begets keeps from the mainstream entire categories of experience and
points of view that can enrich our culture and the way we understand and try to
solve a whole range of problems. I don’t want to romanticize the kinds of
students I spent time with at that community college or claim that as a group
they have superior gifts or insights. But some of them, because of their
backgrounds, ask different kinds of questions, draw on fresh illustrations,
come at problems in unusual ways. Nurturing that kind of intellectual and
social diversity benefits us all.
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