[Number 10 GI]

Originally Posted by OrangeBlossomBaby

Painting the canvas with a pretty broad stroke there. In my graduating class in 1978, 1/8 of the senior girls didn't graduate because they were pregnant. In the same year's graduation class in a more rural part of our state, around 1/6th of the males didn't graduate, because they were expected to work on their family farm and you can't do that and be in a classroom at the same time, and the world wide web hadn't been invented yet.

In rural areas all over the country, kids are expected to NOT finish school, and stay on the family farm. In some of the poorer parts of this country, kids are expected to NOT finish school, and get minimum wage jobs to help their families financially at home. When it's time for them to fall in love and get married, they have NOTHING. No savings, because daddy drank it all. Or mama shot it all into her veins. Or big brother spent it at the track.

Not all kids CAN graduate school, because not all families are in a position to provide a home life to support their kids graduating school. Some people are truly and sincerely stuck at the bottom. They don't even know what it would be like to dream of getting out of the bottom, because all the people who are out - want to keep their own position, and do everything they can to ensure that the ones on the bottom stay there.

This isn't true for all poor people. It's not true for all rural people. And it's not true for all suburbanites. But it is a significant demographic that is never represented in these conversations, because they're the the ones you can't conveniently dump the blame on.

That happened a lot back in the early part of the 1900s. I grew up on a small farm in southwest Iowa and graduated from high school in 1965 and I don't remember a single farm kid dropping out of school. Education and graduating from high school was stressed pretty hard at that time. There were a few that were junior thugs that dropped out but they were town kids and were in jail within 5 years. In the mid west for the last few decades the family farm doesn't really exist, it is mostly large farmers that have bought neighboring farms or rent the land, and corporate farms. I believe you will find the majority of school drop outs are inner city kids in large cities.