Middle Class Ghetto

3 comments | Oct 30, 05:08 PM | best-of-earl | by Earl Creps

At a neighborhood birthday party last weekend, Janet and I met a middle school teacher from a large city in Texas.

She was new to her school district, teaching 7th grade in an almost-brand new suburb. The thing about her job that surprised us was that her middle school is for “at risk” students—1600 of them. She was so surprised by this fact, that she drove all over the district looking for a cause, only to find that even the “oldest” homes in the region had been built in the 1990’s.

Each day with these “at risk” kids begins with trying to establish basic respect, like not cussing out the teacher, etc. before any attempt at learning can begin. Or maybe that is pretty powerful learning. In any event, this new acquaintance found that the presence of middle-class affluence did not have the curative effect on her students that its advocates sometimes claim.

We asked for her conclusion about how this happened. It was simple. She believes, rightly or wrongly, that the parents who buy these new homes are so strapped with the financial burden of floating this lifestyle that they have no time to parent their kids, dumping an SUV-full of angry, under-nurtured youngsters at the schoolhouse door every morning.

Now maybe these kids arrived in this neighborhood with these problems. But maybe not.

This conclusion, and it’s only the view of one person, runs totally counter to the usual over-nutured stereotypes of under-18 year olds.

But it does tend to line up with a study I found a while back by the Manhattan Policy Institute that claimed that, with the exception of teen pregnancy, most measures of social ills (like violence) are the same in the ‘burbs as they are in the hood.

This very casual conversation really gripped me. I am a right-from-the-factory child of the 1960’s 1st ring suburbs. The culture of the ‘burbs fascinates me. They house millions of us, but not much thinking has been done (beyond the megachurch movement) about how Christianity could function there. We seem to have no actual missiology of the suburbs, for example.

I left this conversation wondering if the lure off expanded affluence hasn’t produced a new form of ghetto, the middle-class ghetto, in which the burdens of staying in the M-class are so great that the potential virtues are more than lost, they are reversed and twisted into something ugly that kids spend the rest of their lives trying to unpack.

This certainly isn’t a case for poverty, or for extravagant wealth.

But perhaps it is a warning that we better be careful what we dream of.

Jesus works about seeking the kingdom first sounded even better as we walked home from the party.