Adolescence: Cultural Deprivation, Poverty, and the Dropout

Abstract

During the present decade the topic of cultural deprivation and education has received attention in hundreds of articles, dozens of books, and most recently in an entire issue of the Review of Educational Research (American Educational Research Association, 1965). Differences exist in the terms used to describe these students-lower class, culturally deprived, culturally disadvantaged, socially disadvantaged, center-city, urban poor, potential dropouts, etc.-but whatever the description, the purpose is to deal with a problem. For the culturally deprived adolescent this problem frequently takes the form of dropping out of school. Not all culturally deprived students drop out, of course, and not all dropouts are culturally deprived, but there is a relation between these two factors, and the present chapter will focus on the culturally deprived adolescent who may or does drop out of school. Not too many years ago it might have been possible to study this student in an unhurried, thoughtful way. Today, however, the dropout or potential dropout is the focal point of many areas of national policy with urgent implications: school integration, employment rate, crime rate, poverty programs, impact of automation, etc. Consequently, crash programs, both in research and in action, have become the order of the day with a resulting lack in the accretion of systematic knowledge. Since this problem intersects so many areas, differences also exist in opinions about the very nature of the core problem and the level at which it should be attacked: economic, political, psychological, socioeconomic, familial, educational, or some combination. focus here will be primarily on the educational domain, with particular reference to programs of educational intervention designed to deal with this enormously complex problem. Planning such programs for the culturally deprived student is simply a special case of the more general problem of educational decision making. Stern (1961, p. 728) formulated this general problem as follows: The characteristics of the student and of the educational objectives must both be employed as guides in the design of maximally effective environments for learning. Describing the characteristics of dropouts and then specifying the optimal educational environment for them form the underlying organizational strategy of two recent collections of papers on the dropout problem (Schreiber, 1964; Torrance and Strom, 1965), and a similar approach characterized two more general collections (Passow, 1963; Beck and Saxe, 1965), as well as the work by Riessman (1962), which is probably the prototype in this area. To plan effective educational programs