Mending the Social Safety Net

It's not just kids in poor families. The education system is almost wholly geared towards background information, not life skills or even how to use the information taught in school. It's that way through grade school and junior high, sometimes starts to offer a little real-world stuff in junior high or high school (shop and home economics, for example) and not until college are there heavy-duty professional classes. Even colleges don't teach a lot of stuff that people need to know.

When I found out how little some of our Grey School students knew about math and budgeting, etc. I threw a fit. Then I found a teacher to write and teach "Personal Prosperity for Wizards." It covers basics like setting up and balancing a checking account, making a budget, etc. and then there's a Lesson about money magic.

My mother teaches public school, junior high and high school. She usually gets in a unit or a sideline project on household accounting. It can be a lot of fun. Some of the kids whine because it's nothing like what they've been doing. But a lot of them come back later and say, "You know, Mrs. B, that checking project really saved my bacon. Nobody else ever showed me how to do that." *grin* So I come by it honestly.

Anything you want people to know, you had better be teaching fluently, because not many people are good at bootstrapping skills. And the ones who are ... you want to waste them on figuring out their checkbook!

I wish you luck with that.

An important part of problem-solving is finding and removing barriers to progress, when people are trying to do a desirable thing and can't because they're blocked. So then you have to figure out what's stopping them and get rid of the barrier or create a way around it.

A related type of problem is what's called a "gravy stain" problem in a volunteerism handbook I read. Sometimes there's an unpleasant side effect to a desirable program -- in the sample, cheap containers on charity meals meant the delivery people always wound up with spilled gravy in their cars. Then you have to find what's annoying people so much that they avoid the program, and change things to be less annoying.

Government-run systems tend to be clunky and frustrating, so people frequently avoid them. Making services more user-friendly and sane would help a lot. This can often be achieved by doing them at the local level, and preferably, by other groups besides the government so it doesn't have to get involved. Frex, a temp service for people of variable health could be run by and for the partially-able, as a business. That childcare co-op is another good idea, even though it didn't work out in your case. I've seen a bare handful of Christian charities that seriously impressed me because they didn't proselytize much, just set about that "give everything you have to the poor, and follow me" thing.

That reminds me, my favorite charity is Heifer International:
http://www.heifer.org/
They provide livestock to poor people around the world, to help them out of poverty. The program includes education on livestock care, and requires recipients to pass on the gift to other families when their livestock reproduces. It works.

That's the kind of model we need to be replicating and applying to different situations. Suppose a city has a problem with illiteracy. They can start offering classes in reading comprehension. At the end of the first program, students can move up to a more challenging one -- and start tutoring the new students in the first class. This helps take some of the load off the teachers, and speeds skill improvement for the tutors. After a few more rounds, some of the better students will be good enough to start teaching that first class all by themselves, and they'll be an inspiration to new students as to what can be accomplished.

Don't just look at what people need. Look at what they can do.