| Beat on the Brat |
[Jan. 4th, 2009|10:49 pm] |
| [ | mood |
| |  rejuvenated | ] |
| [ | music |
| | The Clash, "The Guns of Brixton" | ] |
There's an old rhetorical trick apologists of capitalism like to use: blame the poor for their own poverty. Poor people are lazy. Poor people are stupid. Or both. This blame-the-victim approach is a perennial favorite, and is constantly cropping up in new forms. Plenty of people have taken it upon themselves to answer this charge, especially in its straightforwardly economic form. But I'd like to take a moment to look at another version of what I think is the same basic argument.
Even those of you who don't believe the statement "poor people are poor because they're lazy" might still believe it in this form: "Poor students are (academically) poor because they are lazy." It will seem that we have slipped into metaphor. It will seem as if I am equivocating. Economic poverty isn't the same thing as academic poverty, after all. But does this make the argument any more valid?
( Of Kant and Critical Pedagogy ) |
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