The Poverty of Antipoverty (a series of firsthand reports on the Poverty Program)
Kohl, Herbert
How do you get into the antipoverty business? In Brooklyn the Bedford—Stuyvesant YMCA, proposing TRY (Training Resources for Youth), may have come up with an ingenious solution. It merely takes a...
...In fact there has been discussion of closing the Y if the project is not funded...
...Isn't the fact that these were the only jobs available in the first place one of the causes for their dropping out of school and not looking for work...
...They do not know the origins of many of their attitudes and opinions...
...More likely it has been the individual teacher, counselor, and therapist —and what they have taught, counseled, and thought they were curing...
...Yet TRY's notion of Life-Skills education does have fascinating possibilities...
...Unfortunately TRY's portrait of 17-20-yearold jobless youths is more a caricature than a serious attempt to describe human beings...
...Yet when one looks closely at the diagram, one finds that what is meant, say, by food service is, in order from entry to exit: Kitchen Man and Counter Service Worker to Short-Order Cook and Second Cook, to Steward, First Cook, Advanced Short-Order Cook, and finally to Chef and Assistant Manager...
...But why such an elaborae program to teach these trades— aren't there vocational high schools in the city, and doesn't one learn such trades on the job anyway...
...They are easy to find, at the universities, or working for the military...
...Of segregation in the North, or of the strategy of prejudice and counter-prejudice...
...The vocational programs TRY has carefully selected involve nonunionized industries...
...Thus the federal government supports research on its own "underdeveloped" population so that American business will be ready to meet an increasing demand for service and training units in Africa and Latin America...
...The vocations, too, are dressed out in flow diagrams...
...The entire program is neatly summarized by several flow diagrams that follow these boys (the input) from entry into the program through educational, psychological, and vocational training (the phase states of the system) into jobs (the output) and through to follow-up services (the feedback...
...The Philco Corporation, the Interstate United Corporation, and tentatively the Brass Rail restaurants have been contracted to develop training programs, and a machine servicing corporation is also being sought...
...But do they want such jobs...
...The plan called for the jobless black youths to talk with policemen (some may have already), visit the station house (a neighborhood landmark), and learn the difficulties of policing a ghetto...
...to superficial or incorrect explanations...
...The boys are said to be "lacking [in] the ability to make connections between actions and consequences...
...So 500 to 1,000 jobless youths will be allowed to choose between working in restaurants or garages, or the filling of vending machines...
...Lest this seem too harsh on the TRY proposals, it must be added that their notion of "culturally deprived" youth is no different from that current in most antipoverty programs and is derived directly from the social science literature on the disadvantaged...
...Hate, for example—or bitterness, hopelessness and despair...
...Its actual usefulness in helping the boys has yet to be established...
...TRY has chosen Auto and Diesel Service, Food Service, Vending Machine Service, Home Appliance Service, Business Machines Service, Heating and Air-Conditioning, and Refrigeration as the areas of training...
...One can seem to be doing something and yet avoid the issue through entering the antipoverty business, via neatly packaged justifications and elegant experimental designs...
...And how is TRY to achieve these goals...
...This research aspect of the program is perhaps the most novel aspect of the design and possibly the one that most excites the social scientists who have conceived TRY...
...The TRY proposal is an impressive document...
...managing home and family responsibilities...
...Black youths, "disadvantaged" youths, jobless or not, are not mentally retarded, nor do they need to be taught how to develop and maintain themselves, their loves, families, homes and jobs...
...It is also encouraging that TRY acknowledges the magnitude of the problem of unemployed youth in Bedford—Stuyvesant and hopes to help up to a thousand boys...
...Give this material to a systems expert and let him cast it into "modern"form (complete with flow diagrams, input, output, and feedback...
...Yet one can't but wonder where that $50,000 and those ingenious experts would be if not for recent federal legislation...
...for retraining projects in underdeveloped nations...
...According to TRY's proposal, most deprived youths are neither introspective nor verbal...
...It sets out plans for a semi-residential vocational training program for 500 to 1,000 jobless youths from the age of 17 to 20 who live in the Bedford—Stuyvesant section of Brooklyn...
...Survey the most current social-science and educational journals and develop a justification for the program "in the light of the most recent research in the field...
...The TRY project offers, in addition to Life Skills, a list of carefully selected vocational programs...
...The very existence of such appalling irrational poverty and helplessness in American society is a more serious indictment of the helping than the helped...
...Then get endorsements from leading members of the community, package and publish the project proposal, set up a token pilot project—and wait for the dividends from Washington...
...It is the YMCA that needs LifeSkills Education...
...Connections between stealing and flight, for example, or job-seeking and rejection...
...Why not just give the dropouts the jobs in the first place...
...It isn't necessarily the role of the teacher, counselor, or therapist that has failed with the poor and the alienated...
...These youths are experts at picking out the lie and silently quitting in despair...
...TRY has offered these corporations alluring incentives: profit (from federal funds), and the opportunity to develop a training program that can be resold to the U.S...
...The YMCA, after all, has not been notoriously active in fighting poverty during its last 25 years in Bedford—Stuyvesant...
...using leisure time productively...
...TRY may have a solution, but one has to be wary of the proliferation of "professional" roles...
...It merely takes a powerful board of directors and an initial investment of $50,000...
...In the original version of the proposal, an example of such Life Skills was presented in the unit entitled "The Policeman and Me...
...By teaching "Life Skills" and "Life Responsibilities" that will "provide for an intensive study of community resources...
...We read that the jobless youths from Bedford—Stuyvesant "must become more aware of the quality and content of their thoughts and feelings," and that the TRY project must "help them learn how to analyze their own thought processes and their feelings...
...The planners envision a computer bank programmed with the characteristics of both the staff and the boys that will constantly be used to develop research projects and to indicate the effectiveness of the ongoing program...
...The counselors are to work within "the areas of Life Responsibility" emphasized in this curriculum: "Developing and maintaining the self psychologically and physically...
...and participating effectively in the community...
...The new flexibility of a Life-Skills educator may be desirable, but if he is to tell the same old condescending lies (as in the Policeman story), he will fail in the same old way...
...It is rumored that the TRY package has been approached by the Canadian government, even before it had been funded or tested in the U.S...
...But if committment is to go any deeper, if social and human motives are to take precedence over narrow economic interests, then one must be committed to change and agitation, to sacrificing transient respectability, in order to win the respect of those one is trying to help...
...Then review federal legislation to see what the government is offering and design a program accordingly...
...preparing for a career...
...An admirable program for the educable mentally retarded perhaps, but also admirably designed to further alienate the already alienated...
...A lack of practice in introspection leads [them...
...What they need is simply the opportunity to live lives in which human beings can humanly maintain themselves...
...Here then is the dilemma of the YMCA proposal—can one accept the status quo and still do something about poverty and prejudice in America...
...The book most frequently referred to in the literature is Frank Riessman's The Culturally Deprived Child which characterizes deprived children as anti-intellectual, physical and visual, content-centered, externally-oriented, problemcentered, inductive, spatial, slow, careful and persevering—implying that non-deprived children are intellectual, aural, form-centered, introspective, abstract-centered, deductive, temporal, quick, clever, facile, and flexible—a portrait no less absurd than that of the deprived child...
...It seems that the antipoverty program is being used by corporations to develop training methods which may easily become part of foreign aid and development packages...
...The first step is simple—hire a "professional" staff of social scientists, legislative specialists, and systems experts...
...The Life-Skills educator is conceived of as combining the roles of teacher, counselor, and therapist in a newer, more flexible way which certainly may be called for because of the acknowledged failure of traditional teaching, counseling, and therapy with "disadvantaged" youth...
...The ghetto is inhuman, not the people who live there...
...The interplay of these students with the others in the DISCUSSION which follows the police officer's talk should REVEAL FEELINGS [capitalized in the proposal] with which counselors will work . . . Good God...
...The intentions behind such a proposal may well be moral...
...An elaborate research design incorporates continual scientific evaluation and reevaluation...
...That is perhaps the true meaning of Riessman's term "non-introspective...
...Then these youths were to meet a policeman in "real life" and, "listening to the Police Officer after having had opportunity to learn more about policing in the city should result in more appreciative attitudes towards the police and their work...
...Undoubtedly there will be some students who will still hold unfavorable opinions about police services in the city...
...Vending Machine Service, when translated reads: Candy routeman, cigar routeman, gum routeman, etc...
...Can one feed these young people lies in modern, attractive forms and buy out their bitterness...
Vol. 13 • September 1966 • No. 5
