INTERNATIONAL STORY PHOTO BY BILL WEGENER ON UNSPLASH PHOTO BY SIGMUND ON UNSPLASH WHAT POVERTY DOES TO CHILDREN INTERVIEW BY BENJAMIN BUCHHOLZ A childhood of poverty can shape people throughout their lives, says sociologist Aladin El-Mafaalani. Good schools could help, he says, in a conversation with street paper Hinz&Kunzt. HINZ&KUNZT: Professor El-Mafaalani, how important is it to you to be addressed by your title? ALADIN EL-MAFAALANI: Not important at all. Might that also have something to do with your childhood home - with your social background? My father also has a doctorate, and it’s more important to him than it is to me. He himself comes from a non-academic household, perhaps that is why he insists on having his title everywhere. To what extent does the milieu we grow up in shape our view of the world as adults? It shapes it a lot. People are interested in different things, depending on whether they grow up poor or wealthy. To put it bluntly, those who grow up poor want exactly what they lack: wealth and fame. That’s why any form of recognition and wealth is enormously important to them. For those who grow up with them, they aren’t that important, because they’re taken as given. In your book, Myth of Education, you write that children who grow up in poverty become “insolvency administrators of everyday life”. What do you mean by that? Their daily lives are characterized by a general state of shortage: they have too little money, too little recognition and too few opportunities for recreational activities. In fact, they have too little of everything. Children then develop a shortage management mentality. An insolvency manager must act for the PHOTO BY YARENCI ON UNSPLASH short term, cannot experiment, and must avoid any risk. These patterns of activity are developed by poor children, as well. Can you give a concrete example? If there’s no money, then children have few options for recreational activities. Once they’ve developed a routine that they can to some extent manage, they stick to it almost exclusively. That’s why, in such milieus, there’s sometimes a lot of media consumption or other activities that the children engage in every day. This always becomes clear when you compare them with children who grow up wealthy in the same city: they are often members of two sports clubs and pursue all kinds of activities. Sounds like children are very good at adapting to their circumstances. Why is that still a problem? It’s a super sensible and highly rational form of adaptation to those circumstances. It becomes problematic, for example, because these people tend not to get involved. If I only see meaning in something that’s of immediate and short-term use to me, then I won’t get involved when a citizens’ dialogue takes place in a neighborhood, asking how “we” want to live in 20 years’ time. An abstract “we” and a long time horizon of 20 years require room for manoeuvre—and poor people are usually other-directed by their precarious surrounding 8 DENVER VOICE November 2022
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