Let’s say President Obama’s bow to King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia earns him a gift, in the form of a gesture to help shift the balance of power in America from the white upper and middle class base that currently holds it. The goal would be that 60 years from now, there would be a far greater number of blacks and English-speaking Hispanics leading the nation, having risen to upper levels of business management, scientific research, and government policy positions.
The path to this goal would require education, and lots of it, for those who can’t afford it. The King decrees “free college for all non-white, lower-income families, including parents as well as children, up through a PhD if desired. Your BFF Saudi Arabia is footing the bill.” He is compelled to make such a gesture in return for the continued security of his family’s medieval dictatorship as provided by the United States.
The thing is, by the age of 18, it’s already too late for higher education. The stresses of living at the lower rungs of society literally makes people “stupider,” according to several studies reviewed by The Economist:
That stress, and stress alone, is responsible for damaging the working memories of poor children thus looks like a strong hypothesis. It is also backed up by work done on both people and laboratory animals…
…it shrinks the volume of the prefrontal cortex and the hippocampus. These are the parts of the brain most closely associated with working memory.
The only way out of this self-sustaining cycle is to escape those lower levels of society. The remedy, whatever it may be, has to be administered long before the kids are old enough to enjoy a free ride through college.
Children with stressed lives, then, find it harder to learn. Put pejoratively, they are stupider. It is not surprising that they do less well at school, end up poor as adults and often visit the same circumstances on their own children.
