ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses what can be done, how institutions such as schools can be made more fulfilling and more consistent with the American dream. The most striking and probably the most significant conclusions about the sixty-one young men studied in the Pathways project and about their friends, families, teachers, and surroundings are the pervasiveness of stereotyped thinking about them and the destructive results of such thinking. Andy Garrison's educated and highly skilled father remains stuck for a lifetime in a succession of poorly-paying and insecure jobs. Similarly, the young men growing up in the ghetto confront in their daily lives the often visible irrelevance of education to material success. The young men showed a complex variety of life styles, ways of coping, and kinds and qualities of relationships with family and friends. Their connections to schooling were often ambiguous, contradictory, and without clearcut pattern.
