Left Behind--in a broken family

On Monday Bob Herbert had a piece in the New York Times entitled "Left Behind, Way Behind" where he speaks of how poorly American children are doing in school and of a Program for International Assessment report that proposes to address this with changes to how schools operate.

 

I don't understand how he can write an article like "Left Behind, Way Behind" without any reference to all the broken families that those children he speaks of belong to. I am married to a woman from Africa, and with just the educational differences of two educational systems and two languages, we find it challenging to keep our children up to speed in school. But there are two of us. I do not see how grandma or mom by herself can possibly carry the load, even though I know some of them do. I have great respect for anyone with that capacity, and most of those are women. I also know that a lot of them do not and cannot. I hurt for them.

 

Since we returned to the US in 1999, I have been trying to come to grips with how American society and even just my hometown have changed in the years I was away. One of the biggest changes I see is in The terrible cost of broken families. In Africa I had gotten used to a whole extended family raising children. Africans never believed that raising children was something for just mother and father, but it always includes the whole extended family. Your grandparents, and your cousins, have a lot to do with how you grow up. Given the terrible difficulties of finding a job in much of Africa, your father might well be absent. But he is your father, he and your mother are usually still married, and he has lots of help in raising you. Given all the help built into the society, even when there is a divorce, there is usually remarriage on both counts and all those grandparents, aunts and uncles, and cousins help ease the pressure on any one individual.

 

I realize after reading this Bob Herbert article that when I wrote The terrible cost of broken families earlier this month, I was mostly writing about white kids. That's largely because of the area I live and work in. If I can pick up anything from all the African-Americans men I know, most all of them over 30, I'd say that their kids are just as scarred but live with a lot more violence and drugs that the young white kids I see firsthand. They're a generation ahead of where the white kids are--the men I know lived through this themselves. I think their kids are trying to rebuild that extended family with kids their own age--call it a gang if you want. As individuals, they are overwhelmed by the situation, even when they care for their kids deeply and long to see them do well--and I am talking about the African-American MEN. I think we need to work together to create an expectation, a way of being, in our families of a inescapable responsibility to raise our children as an EXTENDED FAMILY. Where the immediate family isn't there, then the religious community steps in, but it must be multi-generational and as many people as possible.

 

I do not believe that any school system can ever hope to do what Bob Herbert and this report calls for without this true family being there for these kids to belong to.