By Julia Nelson
Handbooks and lectures rarely result in on-ramps to the “success sequence.”
“Facing outward on the low bar, the gymnast performs a pike sole circle backward through handstand with flight and a half (180 degree) turn to hang on the high bar.”
That is the description, in the women’s gymnastics code-of-points manual, of an uneven-bars skill called a Van Leeuwen. If you’ve watched Olympic or even college-level women’s gymnastics, you’ve seen it performed. But chances are, if you don’t have direct experience in the sport at fairly high level, you’re having trouble visualizing what the skill looks like from the description alone. It certainly wouldn’t be reasonable to ask you to walk up to a set of uneven bars and perform the skill after merely reading a description of what it is supposed to be.
Arguments about the “success sequence”—the almost-tautological assertion that people who graduate from high school, get and keep a job, and marry before having children are highly unlikely to be poor—often devolve into disputes over whether or to what degree the chronically poor are to blame for their poverty. Is material lack—particularly in America—the result of an unjust society that makes the rich richer and the poor poorer, or is it merely the result of bad decision-making? A simplified version of the first position demands we remake the rules that govern buying, selling, and wealth accumulation, while a simplified version of the second says, “The data shows that if the poor would just make different decisions, they would stop being poor.”
Graduating from high school, getting and keeping a job, and getting married before having children are all very straightforward, common-sense decisions if you have seen them modeled out in your own family and community. But when no one in your intimate circle of relationships has achieved these things, receiving these directives is a little like being asked to perform a Van Leeuwen after merely reading the description in a manual.
Read the full op-ed in The Giving Review.