Pete Accused Of "Racist Paternalism" After Viral Essay Blasts 2011 Stance On Minority Education

[PatrickforO]

40. Agreed. The mathematical correlation of income and educational attainment is

nearly 100% - to your point, low income individuals tend to have lower educational attainment.

My dad was a high school dropout - he actually slugged his 10th grade teacher, which effectively ended his scholastic career. He became a salesman. He sold skis, business opportunities and finally real estate. He was also a restaurateur for a short time, and managed apartments in his so-called 'golden years.'

He encouraged me to go to college and said I'd make a good lawyer. But never having gone, he had no clue as to how to guide me in any way. And my high school career guidance experience sucked - I went into the counseling office and asked for guidance on what to do after high school, and was led into a little room filled with college catalogs. The result was it took me ten years to make it through undergrad because for about the first five I just took classes I liked without even looking at a catalog because I didn't know how to use one. Certainly my counselor who shall remain nameless because I've long since forgotten her name didn't tell me that stuff. She left me alone in the room. Seriously. And, I went in with 26 credits from the CLEP, but in the end that didn't help me all that much.

When I discovered how to use a college catalog to make a graduation plan, I did, and was able to finish it off in a couple years, graduating at age 28. The ten year plan.

But I was desperate to make it through because as a teen into my twenties I did redo apartment painting, which was brutal. I had forays into sales, but I was always terrible at selling. And that's really it if you don't have a degree or some technical training. Manual labor or sales. And I'm just not geared for that.

Now I'm white and was raised in suburbia. Went to decent public schools - not great, but decent. And way back when when I went to college, it cost about $500 a semester, with textbooks maybe another $120, so I graduated with no debt. Think about that for a minute.

College? Best thing I ever did, bar none. I had an uncle, though, who had graduated from Stanford, so I did have a role model. And there was always the expectation endemic to suburban, predominantly white schools like the one I went to - OF COURSE you're going to college!

It was touch and go, though. I almost didn't make it. Many times got discouraged. Many times went broke and had to drop out and go back to work.

Minority kids in the inner city attending impoverished schools don't have half the chance I did, and that's institutional racism. But they may also lack adult role models who not only value education, because pretty much everybody sees the value in it, but who actually went and got a college education and can then be a real role model for the kid to follow. That's where I think Pete went wrong - he used the word 'value' as opposed to pointing out there is usually a dearth of people with high educational attainment in low income neighborhoods, so kids may lack role models.