Hillbilly Elegy, by J. D. Vance: on Education

JD Vance: Poor families recognize college as the way out

Manual labor was honorable work, but it was [our parents'] generations work--we had to do something different. To move up was to move on. That required going to college.

And yet there was no sense that failing to achieve higher education would bring shame or any other consequences. The message wasn't explicit; teachers didn't tell us that we were too stupid or poor to make it. Nevertheless, it was all around us, like the air we breathed: No one in our families had gone to college; older friends and siblings were perfectly content to stay in Middletown, regardless of their career prospects; we knew no one at a prestigious out-of-state school; and everyone knew at least one young adult who was underemployed or didn't have a job at all.

JD Vance: Uneducated people trust talent more than hard work

It's not like parents and teachers never mention hard work. These attitudes lurk below the surface, less in what people say than in how they act.

The reasons poor people aren't working as much as others are complicated, and it's too easy to blame the problem on laziness. For many, part-time work is all they have access to. But whatever the reasons, the rhetoric of hard work conflicts with reality. The kids in Middletown absorb that conflict and struggle with it.