James P. Comer Quotes

The young love and cherish people and places from which they receive the skills and the emotional support which enable them to make it in the world or to meet their basic human needs. The same people and places are often the first recipients of the frustration and anger--violence, vandalism, disrespect--of young people who are not making it well in the world. I suspect that this is the reason that personal and school property violence is increasing more rapidly than school burglary and dropout rates.

While most of today's jobs do not require great intelligence, they do require greater frustration tolerance, personal discipline,organization, management, and interpersonal skills than were required two decades and more ago. These are precisely the skills that many of the young people who are staying in school today, as opposed to two decades ago, lack.

Playing games with agreed upon rules helps children learn to live by rules, establish the delicate balance between competition andcooperation, between fair play and justice and exploitation and abuse of these for personal gain. It helps them learn to manage the warmth of winning and the hurt of losing; it helps them to believe that there will be another chance to win the next time.

Often low-income parents give their children every other thing they need for successful participation in school and the world of work except the planning and organizing skills and habit patterns needed to operate in complex settings. Many intelligent and able college students from low-income backgrounds confront these deficits when faced with a heavy assignment load. . . . These patterns are best acquired at an early age and need to be quite well developed by late elementary school or twelve or thirteen years of age.

Children in home-school conflict situations often receive a double message from their parents: "The school is the hope for your future, listen, be good and learn" and "the school is your enemy. . . ." Children who receive the "school is the enemy" message often go after the enemy--act up, undermine the teacher, undermine the school program, or otherwise exercise their veto power.

Many more children observe attitudes, values and ways different from or in conflict with those of their families, social networks,and institutions. Yet today's young people are no more mature or capable of handling the increased conflicting and often stimulating information they receive than were young people of the past, who received the information and had more adult control of and advice about the information they did receive.

As blacks, we need not be afraid that encouraging moral development, a conscience and guilt will prevent social action. Black children without the ability to feel a normal amount of guilt will victimize their parents, relatives and community first. They are unlikely to be involved in social action to improve the black community. Their self-centered personalities will cause them to look out for themselves without concern for others, black or white.