ABSTRACT
The attitudes are supposedly responsible for a complex of behaviors which further hamper the expectations of poor youth. Low-income youth tend to be more likely to leave school prematurely and to achieve little even when they persist in their schooling. Education for professional and business roles was in the past the third way for aspiring lower-class youth to improve their economic and social status. The school is an integral part of the insoluble problem of low-income youth. The response of low-income youth to schools which present such bitter contradictions resembles the behavior of other organisms presented with insoluble problems. The problem for poor youth is not that they lack future orientation but indeed, that they lack a future. They are made aware of this early because there is so little meaning in their present. Poor youth develop a basic pessimism because they have a fair fix on reality.
