And I’m still not buying your a priori/a posteriori distinction, man, sorry. I am talking exactly about kids whose parents and communities were f***ed by the system, and who are then poisoned– yes, culturally– by that experience before they even hit pre-K. How much more a priori can you get?

You’ll see my linguistic issue here, though. Obviously, “culture,” in my lexicon, is not a substitute for “BLAME.” And as long as we continue to pretend to be talking about culture when we’re really talking about responsibility, the train ain’t leaving the station.

You wrote: “if you put people in enough chronic pain, I seriously wonder how you can *avoid* such things becoming a priori beliefs.”

I’m absolutely with you, but then we’re not talking about an a priori condition as this article and the worst of the staff room would have us believe. A priori is before experience; you’re talking about a response to experience and I couldn’t agree more. The attitudes we’re seeing don’t arise out of being Latino. That’s absurd. They arise out of a reponse to non-functioning school environments, whose non-functioning is paired with this rhetoric of why-aren’t-you-doing-better.

I think these attitudes ARE chosen, and man, it’s real hard to say you can’t justify a kid’s assumption of that attitude. I’d like to think I’d be different, but I doubt it. The kids that are different are seriously special, but we should also remember that their rejection of these attitudes can be strongly reinforced in ways that are generally unattainable for kids who have already reached for them.

I don’t know if this is all a “waste” or not, but that shit came out in my backyard, and it’s a refutation of everything my colleagues and I understand about kids, and how to reform schools and communities.

Your clarification of “a priori” versus “entrenched” beliefs is important, but I also don’t think it holds up. As I stated in the post, if you put people in enough chronic pain, I seriously wonder how you can *avoid* such things becoming a priori beliefs.

But here’s the kicker: to my eyes, whether anti-school attitudes are “cultural” or not doesn’t change the issue *at all*. Which leads me to reiterate my overarching idea (which I’m still noodling through): would it not be better to dive right to the bottom and ask *not* what inscribed rhetorical circle these anti-school beliefs belong in, but: *are they autonomously chosen, and if so, are they justified?*

In otherwords, it seems to me more and more that questions about “culture” are simply code for “Where can we place blame?” or, more optimistically, “Where did things go wrong, and how can we fix it?” Why not answer the presupposition, then, instead of the code?

You start to answer the presupposition in your original post, and it’s the best part of it. But beyond that, I am beginning to think that we might be wasting your considerable brain power on a useless ivory tower debate. Angels and pins and so on.

But I could be very wrong. @Doug: I deeply appreciate your support, man, but I am SO no expert on this. My reading in the area is superficial at best, for one thing. My question may be unoriginal or uninformed or full of holes. So don’t send me that Nobel yet.