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Poverty and its impact on education
Poverty and its impact on education
Life during the great depression era
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Stanislovas and his siblings didn’t have a choice for an education and ended up working just like their parents. The children were forced to work in low paying jobs and would waste away. For example, when The Rudkus family first arrived in Packingtown, they would find that many kids were working in holes filled trash looking for some loose change or how the family struggles to stay above all their payments for the house. However, the taxes brings stress to some people to the point where they would give up and leave the residence like Jonas did when he chose to run away instead of suffering with the family, and in the end the family would have to sacrifice the education of the children.“So it was finally decided that two more of the children
For the first time in history children were an important factor of the economic system, but at a terrible price. The master of the factories employed children for two reasons. One, because of their small body which can get inside the machines to clean it and use their nimble fingers. Second, the masters use to pay low wages to the children who could be easily manipulated. The average age for the parents to send their children to work was ten. Although, Conventional wisdom dictates that the age at which children started work was connected to the poverty of the family. Griffith presents two autobiographies to put across her point. Autobiography of Edward Davis who lacked even the basic necessities of life because of his father’s heavy drinking habit and was forced to join work at a small age of six, whereas the memoir of Richard Boswell tells the opposite. He was raised up in an affluent family who studied in a boarding school. He was taken out of school at the age of thirteen to become a draper’s apprentice. The author goes further and places child employees into three groups, according to the kind of jobs that were available in their neighbourhood. First group composed of children living in rural areas with no domestic industry to work in. Therefore, the average of a child to work in rural area was ten. Before that, farmers use to assign small jobs to the children such as scaring birds, keeping sheep
The Smolinsky family was living in the time of the Great Depression. They had left Russia in order to escape the poverty and harshness only to reach America and find themselves in a similar situation. The Great Depression engulfed many families, drowning them in poverty and forcing them to become desperate enough to beg for food. The Smolinsky family was no exception. The depression was difficult enough for the original American citizens much less the immigrants with nothing but the shirts on their backs. The Smolinsky family suffered just as much from this as did other immigrant families.
The children in this book at times seem wise beyond their years. They are exposed to difficult issues that force them to grow up very quickly. Almost all of the struggles that the children face stem from the root problem of intense poverty. In Mott Haven, the typical family yearly income is about $10,000, "trying to sustain" is how the mothers generally express their situation. Kozol reports "All are very poor; statistics tell us that they are the poorest children in New York." (Kozol 4). The symptoms of the kind of poverty described are apparent in elevated crime rates, the absence of health care and the lack of funding for education.
The tenement was the biggest hindrance to achieving the American myth of rags to riches. It becomes impossible for one to rise up in the social structure when it can be considered a miracle to live passed the age of five. Children under the age of five living in tenements had a death rate of 139.83 compared to the city’s overall death rate of 26.67. Even if one did live past the age of five it was highly probable he’d become a criminal, since virtually all of them originate from the tenements. They are forced to steal and murder, they’ll do anything to survive, Riis appropriately calls it the “survival of the unfittest”. (Pg.
Until the child labor laws of the twentieth century came into effect, a child leaving school either temporarily or permanently, in order to work and help sustain one's family, was a rather common practice. For instance, Rondal is taken out of school because his father is unable to produce enough money to take care of the family on his own; therefore, Rondal is left to pick up the slack in the mine. This is only another step in the circle of ignorance. If one is taken out of a comfortable educational environment and thrown into a dark, cold, abyss first the ability to cope with life's simple problems is virtually nonexistent. This is later revealed in the book when Rondal cannot come to terms with how he feels about Carrie not to mention his "need" to keep moving and fighting for a better life for the coal miners' children of the future.
After leaving Poland to venture out into the New World of America, the Smolinsky family endured impoverished lifestyles and countless hardships. For example, After an incident between Reb and the landlady (which made Reb revered), boarders began to occupy the Smolinsky family’s place, the three sisters Bessie, Fania, and Mashah had jobs, and they could purchase things they could have never afforded. These possessions included butter, regular towels, “toothbrushes[…] to brush [their] teeth with, instead of ashes”, and “separate knives and forks instead of” eating “from the pot to the hand as [they] once did” (29). Today, these are belongings that must people have in their everyday lives. To have them marvel at these material things further emphasizes the poor life they were so used to. In addition, when Bessie (Sara’s sister) dolls up the house with lace, oilcloths for the table, and cleans up all the clutter in the house for a man named Berel Bernstein, the mother suggests that they cover up the whiteness so as to prevent it from getting dirty. The mother warns the sisters not to “fly away with [themselves] in fairyland” because “[they’re] poor people yet…and poor people got to save”(39). Their family had to withhold any pleasures in material things because they did not have time to impress others. All of the family members’ wages went to the rent and what little food they had to eat. It was not realistic for them to be worrying about material possessions when they worry so much about where to get the money to put breakfast, lunch, and dinner on the table. Furthermore, Reb was always fixed in being the matchmaker for his children. He always made sure that the men they would marry was stable in their work, and that could support the rest of the family as well. There was a situation with Berel Bernstein in which Reb asked that if Berel was to marry Bessie, Berel would have to fork up some money to he...
...ous struggles of Jurgis and his family. Not only does the family suffer from poverty, but they also suffer from a poor knowledge of English, the glares of the townspeople, and the damaging effects of hard manual labor. The family gets harmed by the bosses in Packingtown as well, they receive unfair wages for long days at work. They also get deceived by the housing agent, forcing them to pay much more money for the house as a result of insurance, an expense they were not prepared for. As a result of the hard manual labor and his name being put on the blacklist, Jurgis resorts to “hoboing it” just to survive towards the end of the novel. The poverty tears the family apart: they end up splitting up towards the end of the novel, all going separate ways. Poverty negatively impacted the familial relationships of thousands of immigrants in Chicago in the early 1900s.
The lack of education can lead to poverty and poverty can lead to a lack of education, this is a cycle that is hard to get out of. Author Wes mother was able to go to college and get her degree. She wasn 't the first to go or the first two finished. She was able to overcome the situation poverty and found a way to go to college. This desire for college was something she gave to author Wes. She knew the public school was a bad place to be for her son so she did what she had to have the money to send Wes to Riverdale Country School. Author Wes got the schooling that had more of a focus on attending college as an end goal by attending Riverdale Country School. Since he went to Riverdale Country School he got the desire to get a degree that he probably would have never got in the public school in his neighborhood. The other Wes mother 's life was different and she didn 't put that need to get a degree into her
As demonstrated by the characters in Ragged Company, finding a home is not as easy as signing a lease. Sometimes people search their whole lives before finding a place that they can truly be themselves and be celebrated for it. As Dick said, “When you make it home, everything that made life difficult out there disappears. You become whole. You don’t stutter anymore, you think clearly, your body’s not old and tired. You’re healed,” (Wagamese, 2009, p.376). Material wealth only marginally improved the health of the characters in the book, while coping with mental trauma and trusting their friendship was what actually improved their lives. Even after they obtained housing, the most important home the rounders had was the one they found in each
The Neumann children even offered to sell their personal items to help their parents.Not only that but divorce became a thought in their family as things weren’t being fixed. In the video, the children in the Stanley family are shown doing yard work as a business. Although the ideal type to this is most likely that they won’t make that much but it’s still a hope. They were happy to be doing the “dirty work” (Gans, 1971) as it would help their family pull through the crisis. While the Stanley family was pulling, the Neumanns were having troubles (still around 1990s) as their children were being set with the norm of having their parents or one of their parents never home. At this time, socialization between the kids of both families and their parents decreased, dramatically affecting how they learned, thought, talked, and translating ideas to
With a large family such as the Stanleys, financially supporting everyone in the family is difficult with a stable economy, let alone during a period of struggle (Frontline Video, 2013). During this time, the middle class was in poverty, meaning people in poverty originally, are far financially worse (Frontline Video, 2013). The father, Claude, was a pastor (Frontline Video, 2013). The mother, Jacki, made efforts to find work (Frontline Video, 2013). She spent most of her time helping her husband run the church (Frontline Video, 2013).
In Junot Diaz’s essay “The Money” he explains where his family stands economically. Stating that his father was regularly being fired from his forklifting jobs and his mother 's only job was to care for him and his four siblings. With the money brought home by his father, his mom would save some. Her reason was to raise enough to send to her parents back in the Dominican Republic. When his family went on a vacation, they came back to an unpleasant surprise; their house had been broke into. Eventually Diaz was able to get back their money and belongings. Diaz returned the money to his mother although she didn’t thank him for it, this disappointed him. Like Diaz I have also encountered a similar situation where I was disappointed. When I was in second grade, my life life took a completely different turn. My dad took an unexpected trip to Guatemala, on his return, the outcome was not what I expected.
Families were broken apart because of the gulags. Husbands and wives. Mothers and fathers were separated from their kids. This was all part of striking fear into the communities of the Soviet Union. Here’s an example. Maria Tchebotareva had to feed four starving children. The reason is because in the early 1930’s there was a famine. She stole three pounds of rye from a collected field. (it was her field to start but it was taken away during the period of collectivization which is when the Soviet Union collected every individuals farms.) She served until 1945 and then had to live in exile until 1956. When she came back home she was never able to find he kids the rest of her life (What Were Their Crimes?, n.d.). This happened all over the Soviet Union. This cause multiple children to be without parents. People always say that the reason why there is so much crime in the United States is because they don’t have a father or mother figure. In the Soviet Union they take away the parent figure so this causes multiple problems. One problem come for taking the parents away from the kids is that the child doesn’t know what is going on. They don’t receive love or nurture. Which cause a problem because they don’t know how to act around people. They don’t know how to show love because they were never given
class family. He was determined to make a better life for himself by getting an
The Alcott family was always struggling to survive, and often was forced to move from place to place in order to find work. Bronson Alcott was an extremely educated man, but because he had a hard time of supporting his family they were “Impoverished and often moved like vagabonds to smaller and smaller quarters” (Butos). Bronson was a schoolteacher who believed in teaching his students more than just simple memorization. For this reason, he was usually out of work, leaving his growing family with no income. However, the children never really understood just how poor they were until later on in their lives. Alcott’s family was so poor that her mother’s family, a prominent Boston family, urged her mother to disclaim her husband. As soon as she was able to realize how poor they were, she vowed that she would gratify her family by pulling them out of poverty. Alcott lived in an extremely poor family growing up, but she still had a good childh...