The Ambition Of The American Dream

Success is based on merit, and economic inequality is due to differences in ambition and ability. Individuals do not inherit their social status; they attain it on their own. The American Dream is held out as a genuine prospect for anyone with the drive to achieve it. What about the static, nearly permanent element in the working class, whose members consider the chances for mobility remote and thus despair of all hope? These people are shunned, hidden, forgotten and for a good reason because just as the self – made individual is a testament to certain American ideals, so the very existence of an “underclass” in American society is a living contradiction to those ideas. How is it that in contemponary America a boy of eleven can feel bereft …show more content…
As Ronald Reagan said “anything is possible in America if we have the faith, the will, and the heart.” But Freddie Piniella and other people that grew up in households with their parents are usually undereducated, unemployed, or imprisoned. For them the American Dream but far from being a genuine prospect, is not even a dream but more of a hallucination. Young kids (age eleven to thirteen) say there is a strong relationship between aspirations and occupational outcomes, if the individuals don’t even spare the middle – class jobs, then they are unlikely to achieve them. That individuals disqualify themselves from attaining the American definition of success a prestigious well – paid …show more content…
Reproduction theory attempts to show how and why the United States can be dipicted more accurately as the place where “the rich get richer and the poor stay poor,” than as “ the land of the opportunity”. Many theorectical issues are: the role of education in the perpectuation of class inequality: the influence of ethnicity on the meanings individuals attach to their experience: the causes and consequences of racism: the relationship between structual determinants and cultural practices: the degree of autonomy individuals exercise at the cultural level. If we understand what we see on the streets, if we are to make sense of the forces and act upon everyone, and if we are to generalize from their experiences in any meaninful way, we must situate our work in a broader theoretical framework by letting theory inform our data and, ultimately, by allowing our data to inform theory. The ethnographic account provides an intricate picture of how poverty circumscribes the horizons of young people and how, at the societal level, the class structure is reproduced. An agenda can be addressed most thoroughly by a methodology of intensive participant