Presidential candidate John Edwards introduced the concept of income inequality in his speech at the 2004 Democratic national convention that he entitled “Two Americas.” There are indeed two Americas still, and the gap is widening. In this political season, we will hear a great deal about income inequality. But in my opinion far worse than the inequality of income is social inequality. Strategies that seek only to confiscate and redistribute money will never truly pull the country together or lift up those at the bottom. We should promote strategies that create wealth, not just confiscate and redistribute wealth.
I have recently run across some statistics that illustrate why the two Americas are pulling apart and that perhaps also shed light on the growing performance gap between social classes in education. Robert Putnam is a Harvard researcher and the author of Bowling Alone. He found that 72% of children of upper-half families knew the alphabet when they entered school, as compared with only 19% of the children of the bottom half. Dr. Anne Fernald of Stanford found that children from the bottom half are educationally two years behind children of the upper half already as five-year-olds! That gap will never be closed.
Betty Hart and Todd Risley, working for the University of Kansas, broke social classes into three groups: professionals, working class, and low income (including those needing some form of government assistance to get by). They found that by age 3, children of the professional class had a vocabulary of 1,100 words and average IQs of 117; children of the working class had vocabularies of 750 words and average IQs of 107; and children of low-income people had vocabularies of only 500 words and average IQs of 79. One reason? Children of the upper class heard 215,000 words per week; working class kids heard 125,000; low-income kids heard only 62,000. Hart and Risley call this top-to-bottom gap the “30 Million Word Gap,” based on the sheer difference in linguistic environment by age 3.
Another of their key findings: professional class people had far more words of encouragement and praise, and children from the bottom heard far more criticism and disparagement. Robert Putnam writes that children from the bottom end are up to five times more likely to experience abuse and violence from their parent(s), as well as addictions, disappearance, incarceration, and death of their caregivers. A woman in my congregation, a social worker supervisor, calls it the urban “trauma culture.
I wish I had some obvious or easy solutions to these catastrophic social inequalities, but I don’t. Channeling Winston Churchill, I can offer you only blood, toil, tears, and sweat. Here are three challenges:
- Talk with your kids and grandkids a lot. Read to them every day. As soon as they can, have them read to you. Fill their ears with positive and encouraging words, and try to protect them from the stresses and traumas of life in our crazy world.
- Find and support quality schools, especially Christian schools, which can tap into the power of God’s Word to build up God’s little people.
- Stay connected to a church. Putnam writes that over half of all volunteerism takes place in religious organizations. Social capital is capital too. Our friends are a big part of our wealth.
Originally posted by Time of Grace.
