Every day at the Frederick Douglass Academy in Harlem, NY students hear dozens of times from countless members of the faculty that they are going to college. All of this talk about college, and careers, and future opportunity allows a child to focus on the very real good that education and education alone can provide. This is first and foremost how the children begin to care about school. The next step is to get the parents involved and to extend the mission of the school into the home as I said earlier. Parents need to learn how to read to their children, how to check their homework, how to do all the things upper income kids take for granted, and this creates the habit in the home of talking about what lies beyond the neighborhood.
Children learn that in school that there is a life beyond school.
I can't believe that we really need contracts, faculty pushing college from grade 1, etc. Sometimes I think how sad it is that we have to discuss this at all. It is certainly sad that we have to discuss it in the terms that we do. But let's make a simple point. The Great Depression did not give rise to a generation of illiterates.