Nicholas Kristof's "Land of Limitations?"

   Nicholas Kristof brings an insight and perspective to how poverty in America has become a vicious part of our society. Though his article he addressed how huge numbers of Americans are unable to grow and become successful in today's society, not because they are lazy or dumb, but because they were born into a lower economic class that is unable to provide them with the resources to excel. He centralizes his thoughts around how the country has diverged from what I was founded on which was the dream of being able to make your own path and has turned into the very thing that our fore fathers where trying to escape, which was having huge gaps between classes that were nearly impossible to break out of. His point was that the way our economy is set up today, it is designed to keep the rich people at the top and the poor people at the bottom no matter what their person intelligence or strengths. Now he also made it very clear that this is not to say no one has ever been able to get rich growing up in low economic areas or that someone who is rich could become poor one day. He is simply stating that the likelihood of that happen has become smaller and smaller as years have passed. Kristof used a home town friend to illustrate this point that he was making. He uses his friend to really bring a few key problems to our attention.

          The three things really stuck out to me able Kristof's friend Ricks story. The first was that Rick was a smart young man whose parents left him early on forced to basically grow up with little help from family. This lack of parenting and guidance can cause long term effects on children. I personally have a few close friends whose parents did not play a role in their lives. I can see on many occasions that they are smart and hardworking individuals but for some reason lack the social skills to get ahead in life. For some reason they always seem to fall short even though in many areas of life they are smarter than a lot of friends that have graduated from College. This is a perfect example of what was being talked about when Kristof was mentioning things that some people have access to that others do not. "77 percent of adults in the top 25 percent of incomes earn a B.A. by age 24. Only 9 percent of those in the bottom 25 percent do so."(Nicholas Kristof, U.S.A., Land of Limitations" 16) Even though the will to learn and work hard is there the fact that College was not on the radar for these friends meant that they more than likely will not succeed as well as the friends that did go to College.

          The Second thing that really stood out when Kristof made it clear, "Remember that disadvantage is less about income than environment."(Kristof, 21) This is huge because most people are thinking about how wealthy someone is rather than what their upbringing might be like. Having a happy, healthy, nurturing upbringing will help to increase the likelihood that a person will succeed. Also this touches on the type of home or neighborhood that a child grows up in. How children from better neighborhoods are able to attain more because they are provided with more.

          Finally bringing me to the point that I felt is most important for us heading into a teaching profession. Kristof mentioned an event that happened with Rick; "IN the eighth grade, the principle punished Rick for skipping school, by suspending him for six months."(Kristof, 11) He has previously said that Rick also struggled with an attention disorder. This issue is all too common in schools today. Students with un-diagnosed  or misdiagnosed disorders not being given the attention that they need in order to succeed in the classrooms so the act out and just get punished rather than helped. When children act out there is usually a reason behind it. In this case Rick did not want to be in school, possibly because he did not have the correct guidance at home to keep him there. His way of acting out was skipping school and rather than finding a way to help Rick and keep him in school the principle did possible the worst possible thing by suspending him for a HUGE period of time. We need to work hard as future educators to not only teach other classes but help students like Rick who could have had a better future with a little more attention.