For Americans the contradiction between national ideal and social fact required explanation and correction. Ultimately this contradiction did … - Kenneth Keniston

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Kenneth Keniston

For Americans the contradiction between national ideal and social fact required explanation and correction. Ultimately this contradiction did not lead to the abandonment of the ideal of equal opportunity but rather to its postponement: to the notion of achieving for the next generation what could not be achieved for the current one. And the chief means to this end was a brilliant American invention: universal, free, compulsory public education. This "solution" was especially important for children and families because it gave children a central role in achieving the national ideal.

Brilliant, Children, Education, Explanation, Ideal, Mean

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Poor children live in a particularly dangerous world--an urban world of broken stair railings, of busy streets serving as playgrounds, of lead paint, rats and rat poisons, or a rural world where families do not enjoy the minimal levels of public health accepted as standard for nearly a century. Whether in city or country, this is a world where cavities go unfilled and ear infections threatening permanent deafness go untreated. It is world where even a small child learns to be ashamed of the way he or she lives.

Busy, Children, Cities, Country, Infections, Minimal

Schools, the institutions traditionally called upon to correct social inequality, are unsuited to the task; without economic opportunity to follow educational opportunity, the myth of equality can never become real. Far more than a hollow promise of future opportunity for their children, parents need jobs, income, and services. And children whose backgrounds have stunted their sense of the future need to be taught by example that they are good for more than they dared dream.

Children, Dream, Educational, Jobs, Social

Mothers work outside the home for many reasons; one of them is almost always because their families need their income to live up to their standards for their children.

Children, Family, Home, Income, Mother, Mothers

In the early nineteenth century, the doctrine of self-sufficiency came to apply to families as well as individuals. . . . The familybecame a special protected place, the repository of tender, pure, and generous feelings (embodied by the mother) and a bulwark and bastion against the raw, competitive, aggressive, and selfish world of commerce (embodied by the father). . . . In performing this protective task, the good family was to be as self-sufficient as the good man.

Early, Families, Father, Mother, Pure, Selfish

It is misleading to discuss recent changes in family life without emphasizing the fact that for generations some Americans have had to raise children under particularly appalling pressures. Although much of what is worrying American parents is shared by them all, the most grievous problems are those that especially afflict a large minority--the poor, the nonwhite and, in various ways, the parents of handicapped children.

Afflict, Children, Family, Parent, Problems, Worry