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  3. The most important divide in America today is class, not race, and the place

The most important divide in America today is class, not race, and the place

游客2024-04-18  38
问题     The most important divide in America today is class, not race, and the place where it matters most is in the home. Conservatives have been banging on about family breakdown for decades. Now one of the nation’s most prominent liberal scholars has joined the chorus.
    Robert Putnam is a former dean of Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government and the author of Bowling Alone (2000), an influential work that lamented the decline of social capital in America. In his new book, Our Kids, he describes the growing gulf between how the rich and the poor raise their children. Among the educated elite the traditional family is thriving: fewer than 10% of births to female college graduates are outside marriage—a figure that is barely higher than it was in 1970. In 2007 among women with just a high-school education, by contrast, 65% of births were non-marital. Race makes a difference: only 2% of births to white college graduates are out-of-wedlock, compared with 80% among African-Americans with no more than a high-school education, but neither of these figures has changed much since the 1970s. However, the non-marital birth proportion among high-school-educated whites has quadrupled, to 50% , and the same figure for college-educated blacks has fallen by a third, to 25% . Thus the class divide is growing even as the racial gap is shrinking.
    Upbringing affects opportunity. Upper-middle-class homes are not only richer ( with two professional incomes) and more stable: they are also more nurturing. In the 1970s, there were practically no class differences in the amount of time that parents spent talking, reading and playing with toddlers. Now the children of college-educated parents receive 50% more of what Mr. Putnam calls "Goodnight Moon" time (after a popular book for infants).
    Working-class parents, who have less spare capacity, are more likely to demand that their kids simply obey them. In the short run this saves time: in the long run it prevents the kids from learning to organize their own lives or think for themselves. Poor parenting is thus a barrier to social mobility, and is becoming more so as the world grows more complex and the rewards for superior cognitive skills increase.
    Stunningly, Mr. Putnam finds that family background is a better predictor of whether or not a child will graduate from university than 8th-grade test scores. Kids in the richest quarter with low test scores are as likely to make it through college as kids in the poorest quarter with high scores.
    Mr. Putnam suggests a grab-bag of policies to help poor kids reach their potential, such as raising subsidies for poor families, teaching them better parenting skills, improving nursery care and making after-school baseball clubs free. He urges all 50 states to experiment to find out what works. A problem this complex has no simple solution. [br] We can infer that working-class parents________.
选项 A、tend to be more strict with children
B、forbid kids to think independently
C、overlook changes of the society
D、need training for education methods
答案 D
解析 推理判断题。定位句指出，工薪阶层的父母，由于没有多少余力，只是要求孩子们单纯地服从。定位句之后还详细地解释了这种做法的弊端，由此可以推断，这些父母需要养育方式上的指导，故答案为D)。A)“会对孩子更加严厉”，要求孩子们单纯地服从并不等同于“更加严厉”，故排除；B)“禁止孩子独立思考”，文中提到父母要求孩子们单纯地服从客观上会限制孩子独立思考，但并未在主观上禁止孩子独立思考，故排除；C)“忽视社会的变化”，本段最后一句提到了社会对高层次的脑力技能的要求不断提高，但并未提到这些父母对此变化的反应，故可排除。
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