The dropout crisis is just the tip of an iceberg. What it doesn't count are all the kids who are in school but being disengaged from it, who don't enjoy it, who don't get any real benefit from it.
I just never did like school.
I had absolutely no focus as a kid. I never paid attention at school, I never went to college. Not because we were too poor; we were. But if I wanted to go to college, I would have found a way.
I kind of lost interest in school. I was never really that interested anyway. I was never academic. I didn't really go to school as much as I should have.
They basically said that if I didn't show up for school they'd mark me present, they wouldn't send the truant officer after me. At 16 I enrolled in something called continuing education. Once a month I'd go out to Jamaica, but I didn't take it seriously.
I just did not get on at my school. It completely failed to inspire me.
I'd dropped out of high school without really doing it on purpose - I'd just go home at lunch 'cos I didn't have friends, then stay there all afternoon listening to rap. It got to the point where I wouldn't have passed even if I'd gone back. I was depressed, basically.
At 12 I dropped out of school but I had lost interest in it at a much earlier age. For me, school was very very stressful.
Mostly out of step, young people, especially poor minorities and low-income whites, are increasingly inscribed within a machinery of dead knowledge, social relations and values in which there is an attempt to render them voiceless and invisible.
I just couldn't stand school. If I went, I'd skip after the first class. I didn't like to be told I had to study and had to do homework. There's a fact that you have to want to learn.
I didn't only have a perceptual problem, I was also so nervous and so upset. The process just didn't work. I lost enthusiasm for school and I flunked second grade. The teachers said I was lazy.
Right now, in every big city ghetto, tens of thousands of yesterday's and today's school dropouts are keeping body and soul together by some form of hustling in the same way I did.
I walked out of class one day and I never went back.
I skipped school starting in tenth grade. I started doing badly and failed every class but English, so they kicked me out of school. They gave up on me.
It's just like anybody else - some people, most people don't wanna go to school. They just don't want to. It's... not fun. I was just somebody who got away with it.
I dropped out of high school, and had this girlfriend, and we broke up, and it was this horrible crisis.
