THE DOORWAY

From Chapter 1:
The Origins of the Dilemma
Our present-day crisis dates back at least 100 years to the time when adolescence, as a term and concept, was invented. Prior to the industrial revolution, it was necessary that everyone in the family, from age 5 up, work. Some cooked, some cared for younger siblings, and others labored in the family business. Interactions with adults of all ages were natural and the norm in areas of work, school, sports, and leisure. The transition from childhood to adulthood was relatively smooth, as young people were naturally apprenticed into the adult world of work and responsibility.

But with the dawn of industrialization, modern society began segregating young people from the world of adults. Work was removed from the home, and child labor laws were created in response to the abuse of children in “sweat factories.” The net result was that youth were kept out of the workforce entirely. At the same time, the creation of compulsory education required children to attend formalized schools, where they were segregated into age-specific groups. Adults assumed more “professional roles” such as educators and therapists and, in effect, distanced themselves from the intimate contact with youth that had always been the norm.

From Introduction:
What I am referring to when I speak of being ‘on the street’ is a belief system. It is a way of viewing yourself and your role in the world. Being ‘on the street’ is a way of relating to the world around you through specific values and beliefs that are different from a person that we would consider ‘off the street’. The need-based services that we offer, such as food, clothing, shelter, and education, are not what makes the difference between a young person who is ‘on the street’ and a young person who is ‘off the street’. These are nothing more than the tools that we use to address the real issues, which are contained in a youth’s belief and value systems. Helping a youth transition ‘off the street’ is about helping them make conceptual, not physical, changes. Until a youth begins to change their concepts, they will remain ‘on the street’ regardless of their environmental circumstance.

Since being ‘on the street’ is a conceptual condition, this manual present the primary concepts that you will encounter when working with street-dependent youth. The goal is to give you an opportunity to view the world through a street-dependent youth’s eyes, and to help you to understand the behaviors and responses that street-dependent youth exhibit. The format includes true-life examples of these concepts based on my personal experiences with youth, as well as suggestions for how to modify your approach when encountering these concepts in order to maximize the effectiveness of your interventions. One word of caution, however. When describing the concepts held by street-dependent youth, we are speaking in very general terms. It doesn’t take much time with young people to realize that they are each a unique individual. This is one of the more challenging aspects of this field, because it doesn’t really matter how much experience you have. Each new youth that you meet turns you into a rookie. If you are going to work with street-dependent youth, you are enrolling in a university from which there is no graduation, and every youth you meet will be a learning experience for you. This can be another area of difficulty for programs, which are by their nature designed for populations, but applied to individuals. An example of what can happen can be seen in an early experience we had at a transitional living group home. As part of our effort to meet a perceived need for independent living skills in the area of cooking and nutrition, we implemented staff-guided cooking and nutrition education. The only flaw in our plan was that our staff at that time had difficulty boiling water, and one of our residents was a gourmet cook. This experience rather dramatically highlighted the need for flexible and personalized case planning.

From the Introduction:
Man is stuck with his lack of knowledge about himself until he can learn to look beyond apparent causes. From the human record, we may note that answers never arise from identifying “causes” in the world. Instead, it’s necessary to identify the conditions that underlie ostensible causes; and these conditions exist only within man’s consciousness itself. No definitive answer to any problem can be found by isolating sequences of events and projecting upon them a mental notion of “causality.” There are no causes within the observable world. As we shall demonstrate, the observable world is a world of effects.

The difference in finding effective means reduces itself, on examination, to our inability to discriminate the essential from the nonessential. Thus far, there has been no system affording a method by which to distinguish powerful and effective solutions from weak, ineffective ones. Our means of evaluation themselves have been inherently incapable of performing realistic appraisal.

Societal choices, more often than not, are the result of expediency, statistical fallacy, sentiment, political or media pressure, or personal prejudice and vested interest. Crucial decisions affecting the lives of everyone on the planet are made under conditions that virtually guarantee failure. Because societies lack the necessary reality base for formulation of effective problem resolutions, they fall back, over and over, on a resort of force (in its various expressions—such as war, law, taxation, rules, and regulations), which is extremely costly, instead of employing power, which is very economical.

From Chapter 7 (page 128):
There is no doubt that Canada’s new poor laws are forcing or harassing hundreds of thousands of Canadians to undermine the wages and working conditions of other, primarily low-wage workers. Many workers don’t know this. They don’t know it because the corporate think-tanks, the media, and politicians have manipulated and inflamed the old animosities towards people who are poor. After all, the elites and their media wanted Canadian workers to believe that people on welfare got $45,000 a year, as Financial Post columnist Diane Francis claimed. They wanted Canadian workers to then ask, as Francis asked, is it fair to “Canada’s 12 million workers who pay taxes” that people on welfare get $45,000 a year? They wanted working people to believe, as Ralph Klein said, that “somebody down the street…is doing no work whatsoever and taking home more money than the person who wants to be employed.

Some workers may think that people on welfare are too stupid or too lazy or undisciplined to compete for their jobs. But that’s the stereotype, not the reality. Most people who use welfare have worked in their lives and will work again. Many are working raising children or in jobs with low pay. Some 11 per cent of the heads of households on welfare in 1997, according to the National Council of Welfare, have attended some form of post-secondary education.

I believe that welfare is an important program for workers to have in case they are laid off, or become single parents, or sick, or can’t work or earn enough for any reason. But because of poor-bashing, welfare and the people who use it are so despised that many workers can’t imagine themselves ever needing welfare or ever having to take part in a workfare program.

From the Preface:
In the last twenty years, educators who have dared to study and learn new ways of thinking and teaching so that the work we do does not reinforce systems of domination, of imperialism, racism, sexism or class elitism have created a pedagogy of hope. Speaking of the necessity to cultivate hope, Brazilian educator Paulo Freire reminds us: “The struggle for hope means the denunciation, in no uncertain terms of all abuses…As we denounce them, we awaken in others and ourselves the need, and also the taste, for hope.” Hopefulness empowers us to continue our work for justice even as the forces of injustice may gain greater power for a time. As teachers we enter the classroom with hope. Freire contends: “Whatever the perspective through which we appreciate authentic educational practice—its process implies hope.”

My hope emerges from those places of struggle where I witness individuals positively transforming their lives and the world around them. Educating is always a vocation rooted in hopefulness. As teachers we believe that learning is possible, that nothing can keep an open mind from seeking after knowledge and finding a way to know.

From the Introduction:
How is it that America has become so dispirited? The sense of social disarray is pervasive: families collapsing, schools failing, violence spreading, medical systems out of control, justice systems overwhelmed, prisons burgeoning, human services degenerating, and surveys and studies everywhere indicating the less of faith of Americans in their basic institutions.

The most common response is a call for institutional reform. Leaders urge Total Quality Management programs, new technologies, “right-sizing,” lifelong learning, and new highways for information that will renew the services produced by our systems. The chapters in this book outline the reason that these reforms will fail. And they point toward the path that will allow us to create an effective, satisfying society.

The discussions point out that our problem is not ineffective service-producing institutions. In fact, our institutions are too powerful, authoritative, and strong. Our problem is weak communities, made ever more impotent by our strong service systems.

Those relationships formed by consent and manifested as care are the center of community. It is this consenting care that is the essence of our role as citizens. And it is the ability of citizens to care that creates strong communities and able democracies.

In Whose Best Interest? One Child’s Odyssey, a Nation’s Responsibility, Seita, Mitchell, & Tobin

From Chapter 7 (p. 90):
Give Seeds Time to Grow – The most pernicious thinking error of professionals is to assume that present problems predict future behavior. In the midst of a crisis, youths may act like nothing we say makes sense or is even heard. Some time later, we may be surprised to discover that they remembered and were able to benefit from the interaction. We are often surprised at the serious reflection a young person may give to a problem, although outwardly they communicate indifference or antagonism. The human animal has an inbuilt self-righting tendency; we are born problem solvers.

In fact, the human brain is programmed to keep pondering unsolved problems (even when we sleep!), and thus our therapeutic seeds often bear belated fruit. We also know that [our] brain constructs our life narrative by selecting and remembering certain pivotal incidents which have major influence in defining the trajectory of life. A colleague recounts being a poor African-American child who asked her principal if she thought she could someday be a teacher. “Young lady, you could even be a principal” was the self-fulfilling prophecy. Today she has her doctorate in school administration.

Hold On to Your Kids: Why Parents Need to Matter More than Peers, Neufeld & Mate

From Chapter 1 (p. 7):
The chief and most damaging of the competing attachments that undermine parenting authority and parental love is the increasing bonding of our children with their peers. It is the thesis of this book that the disorder affecting the generations of young children and adolescents now heading toward adulthood is rooted in the lost orientation of children toward the nurturing adults in their lives. Far from seeking to establish yet one more medical-psychological disorder here—the last thing today’s bewildered parents need—we are using the word disorder in its most basic sense: a disruption of the natural order of things. For the first time in history young people are turning for instruction, modeling, and guidance not to mothers, fathers, teachers, and other responsible adults but to people whom nature never intended to place in a parenting role—their own peers. They are not manageable, teachable, or maturing because they no longer take their cues from adults. Instead, children are being brought up by immature persons who cannot possibly guide them to maturity. They are being brought up by each other.

From Chapter 1 (p. 44):
Dehumanization, which marks not only those whose humanity has been stolen, but also (though in a different way) those who have stolen it, is a distortion of the vocation of becoming more fully human. This distortion occurs within history; but it is not an historical vocation. Inceed, to admit of dehumanization as an historical vocation would lead either to cynicism or total despair. The struggle for humanization, for the emancipation of labor, for the overcoming of alienation, for the affirmation of men and women as persons would be meaningless. This struggle is possible only because dehumanization, although a concrete historical fact, is not a given destiny but the result of an unjust order that engenders violence in the oppressors, which in turn dehumanizes the oppressed.

Because it is a distortion of being more fully human, sooner or later being less human leads the oppressed to struggle against those who made them so. In order for this struggle to have meaning, the oppressed must not, in seeking to regain their humanity (which is a way to create it), become in turn oppressors of the oppressors, but rather restorers of the humanity of both.

Nickel and Dimed,
Barbara Ehrenreich

From the Introduction (p. 7):
I had other advantages—the car, for example—that set me off from many, though hardly all, of my coworkers. Ideally, at least if I were seeking to replicate the experience of a woman entering the workforce from welfare, I would have had a couple of children in tow, but mine are grown and no one was willing to lend me theirs from a month-long vacation in penury. In addition to being mobile and unencumbered, I am probably in a lot better health than most members of the long-term low-wage workforce. I had everything going for me.

If there were other, subtler things different about me, no one ever pointed them out. Certainly I made no effort to play a role or fit into some imaginative stereotype of low-wage working women. I wore my usual clothes, wherever ordinary clothes were permitted, and my usual hairstyle and makeup. In conversations with coworkers, I talked about my real children, marital status, and relationships; there was no reason to invent a whole new life. I did modify my vocabulary, however, in one respect: at least when I was new at a job and worried about seeming brash or disrespectful, I censored the profanities that are—thanks largely to the Teamster influence—part of my normal speech. Other than that, I joked and teased, offered opinions, speculations, and, incidentally, a great deal of health-related advice, exactly as I would do in any other setting.

Several times since completing this project I have been asked whether the people I worked with couldn’t, uh, tell—the supposition being that an educated person is ineradicably different, and in a superior direction, from your workaday drones. I wish I could say that some supervisor or coworker told me even once that I was special in some enviable way—more intelligent, for example, or clearly better educated than most. But this never happened, I suspect because the only thing that really made me “special” was my inexperience. To state the proposition in reverse, low-wage workers are no more homogenous in personality or ability than people who write for a living, and no less likely to be funny or bright. Anyone in the educated classes who thinks otherwise ought to broaden their circle of friends.