“Twenty years ago New York City provided emergency shelter for just under a thousand families a day; last month it had to find spaces for 10,000 children on a given night”(Quindlen 246), observed by Anna Quindlen, a well-known reporter for Newsweek. Also in New York City, the Wall Street is always flooded with money from trust fund babies, elite private schools can hardly catch up with the sizzling demands, upscale toy stores in Manhattan seemingly never sleep, and million-dollar penthouses pretentiously dominate the city’s sky. Apparently, New York City is just a glimpse of socioeconomic phenomenon: the intermingled coexistence of the two worlds, the impoverished world and the affluent world. As a matter of fact, the phenomenon is omnipresent
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On top of the problem of being deprived of a decent life and educational opportunities, every day poor children more often than not also become the victims of mental and psychological abuses in many ways. Discrimination and prejudice against unfortunate children are the most obvious. As seen on the film “Finding Forrester,” even a highly educated professor, Mr. Crawford, made all of kinds of biased assumptions on Jamal, and questioned Jamal’s integrity and academic excellence just because Jamal was black and from the housing projects in the Bronx. There was a scene that Jamal, suffering enough disrespect and prejudice against him, explosively claimed, “Yeah, I’ll get out!” (Finding Forrester) and burst out of the classroom after a hostile confrontation with Mr. Crawford. The abrupt walkout was absolutely an expression of Jamal’s anger at the prejudice, frustration with battling a never-ending discrimination, and helplessness while facing an unjust society. Certainly, we could imagine that lots of poverty-stricken children have dropped out of school simply because of intolerable and outrageous discrimination, and lost their once in a lifetime opportunity out of poverty. Furthermore, poor children’ early childhood mentality of feeling underprivileged, deprived, and hopeless tends to have a negative effect on their developing some vital personalities, such as confidence and competence, during the adolescence as well as adulthood. Without education, confidence, and competence, how would underprivileged children have a chance of growing up to be productive members of our society? In other words, chances are that unfortunate children are very prone to being socially dysfunctional, disadvantaged, and unsuccessful down the road. As Ms. Parker puts it, “Poverty is looking into a
On top of the problem of being deprived of a decent life and educational opportunities, every day poor children more often than not also become the victims of mental and psychological abuses in many ways. Discrimination and prejudice against unfortunate children are the most obvious. As seen on the film “Finding Forrester,” even a highly educated professor, Mr. Crawford, made all of kinds of biased assumptions on Jamal, and questioned Jamal’s integrity and academic excellence just because Jamal was black and from the housing projects in the Bronx. There was a scene that Jamal, suffering enough disrespect and prejudice against him, explosively claimed, “Yeah, I’ll get out!” (Finding Forrester) and burst out of the classroom after a hostile confrontation with Mr. Crawford. The abrupt walkout was absolutely an expression of Jamal’s anger at the prejudice, frustration with battling a never-ending discrimination, and helplessness while facing an unjust society. Certainly, we could imagine that lots of poverty-stricken children have dropped out of school simply because of intolerable and outrageous discrimination, and lost their once in a lifetime opportunity out of poverty. Furthermore, poor children’ early childhood mentality of feeling underprivileged, deprived, and hopeless tends to have a negative effect on their developing some vital personalities, such as confidence and competence, during the adolescence as well as adulthood. Without education, confidence, and competence, how would underprivileged children have a chance of growing up to be productive members of our society? In other words, chances are that unfortunate children are very prone to being socially dysfunctional, disadvantaged, and unsuccessful down the road. As Ms. Parker puts it, “Poverty is looking into a