A Quote by Geoffrey Canada
I graduated from Bowdoin College and went to the Harvard Graduate School of Education. Then I left and took a job teaching really poor inner-city white kids in Boston. It was interesting to me because I'd never been around poor whites before.
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Imagine if you had genuine, high-quality early-childhood education for every child, and suddenly every black child in America - but also every poor white child or Latino [child], but just stick with every black child in America - is getting a really good education. And they're graduating from high school at the same rates that whites are, and they are going to college at the same rates that whites are, and they are able to afford college at the same rates because the government has universal programs. So now they're all graduating.
People don't understand: I've always been busy. They think that, "Oh, he's too busy, blah blah blah...," but for me, this is how it's always been. I took 18 credits every semester of college, graduated in three years, took graduate school courses, played football and baseball my whole college career. I've never stopped, and that's where that phrase "No Time 2 Sleep" is always true. I get motivated by success, by winning, by being around great people.
Americans should understand that 50%, or something like, of the kids in inner-city schools, often poor and often minority, don't graduate. And the ones that do don't necessarily have the skills to get a job. That is the biggest disgrace in this country.
When you live in a poor neighborhood, you are living in an area where you have poor schools. When you have poor schools, you have poor teachers. When you have poor teachers, you get a poor education. When you get a poor education, you can only work in a poor-paying job. And that poor-paying job enables you to live again in a poor neighborhood. So, it's a very vicious cycle.
The difference between our family and other poor families was that my mother actively chose to be poor. She was highly literate, and she had a college degree, but after my father left, she took the first secretarial job she could find and never looked for other employment again.
I was pretty poor for a long time. Not *poor* poor. But college student poor. I lived for most of my adult life living on student wages, then after I got my MA and started teaching, I lived on teacher's wages, which isn't much better.
I went to Wellesley College, and it was really hard for me to get a job after I graduated. I would go into places where I would not see any black people at all in Boston - like, zero. And then in publishing in New York City, it was pretty much the same. I knew that it wasn't about the value of my work.
I went to graduate film school at NYU, and at first I didn't get a degree, because I took a scholarship that was supposed to pay my tuition, and I used it to make a film. For the longest time, I never actually graduated. And about 70 percent of the things I learned there I had to unlearn, but 30 percent was really valuable. It's like Mark Twain said, "Don't let school get in the way of your education."
I don't want there to be this separation between the rich and poor. I may be part of the three percent because I've been fortunate and done well for myself, but I will never forget about the 97 percent. That was me growing up. I was so poor I dreamt about being just 'regular poor,' not 'poor, poor.'
I never really had a job, because I've been cycling from such a young age: there was never really a time to have a job. My mum went into Starbucks once and asked if they had a job for me, and they offered me one - but I never took it up because I couldn't fit the job in with school and cycling.
I enrolled at a local college, but this time paid attention to myself - took only courses that really interested me, even if they weren't in sequence; kept out of classes with people I knew from high school, because I tended to act like the class clown around them; selected teachers by their teaching style - until I could build up my study habits. I ended up graduating with a 3.97 GPA and got into Harvard for my doctorate.
I went to Harvard College, grew up in Boston, and went to high school in Boston.
I'm not sticking up for white kids - I'm going to have a barrage of hate mail - but it's true. If you're poor, you're really poor.
My parents were born in 1912; they graduated from college into the Depression. They kept notebooks of every nickel they spent, and these habits of frugality from having grown up so poor never left them.
We grew up very poor, and I hated being poor. I was the oldest of five kids, and I never got a pair of skates until I was nine. It was very difficult to get an education back then and play junior hockey.
A white college student from a private college goes into a poor neighborhood and volunteers four hours a week and that's considered exemplary. [Whereas] a poor kid who lives in that community and takes care of all the kids in that neighborhood four hours every day is not seen as a volunteer.
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