"I was worried about all the stuff."

I remember reading a month or so ago about homeless families, primarily in Appalachia, as they prepared to send their kids back to school. There is no national data available, but the New York Times article claims “the number of schoolchildren in homeless families appears to have risen by 75 percent to 100 percent in many districts over the last two years.” The instability of constant moves and the inconsistency of food and meals become ruinous to a school education. Nine year-old Charity Crowell, the subject of the piece, says: “I couldn’t go to sleep, I was worried about all the stuff.” And in turn she found herself nodding off in class.” Like Ruthie and Winfield, the current economic trouble has seen a large effect not only on those who have lost jobs, but to those whose parents have lost jobs as well. And likewise, since Hurricane Katrina, one in five high school students live without parents in New Orleans.

Campground: "Ms. Richardson meeting her daughters as they walked home from the school next to their campground."In a modern world when childhood schooling is so highly measured toward adult success, poverty can’t necessarily be overcome as it could have by the Joad children. While there was a time when a child could grown up on a farm and end up founding Ford Motor Company, the opportunity for success and dare I say, the “American Dream” might not be so available to the underprivileged in today’s more complicated, technological world.

Sixth grade reading assignments might rightfully seem trivial to a child who concerns herself over a bed and a dinner and a crying mother. It seems unfortunate that our society has advanced in such a fashion as so one’s concern for survival can’t be a part of one’s concern for success. Instead we’ve determined a rank between the two, for which one can have one worry or the other. It seems that the insistence on the necessity classroom education and our failure to teach all children, not just underprivileged ones, both the skills and the importance of trade labor, that we’ve created some sort of impossible gulf for children without computers and internet and cell phones to ascend. I’m sure there are more proper editorials on the subject, but in hearing these stories in which someone can find success with a few dollars, then a car, then a home, a business and a little success, the “Dream” now is much more complex, with many more impossible steps to climb.