Education Quote by James S. Coleman

Coleman is smuggling a radical idea into a plain sentence: dropout decisions are not just private failures or family tragedies; they are contagious social facts. The phrasing "might never consider" sets a baseline of latent stability, then introduces the destabilizer not as poverty or aptitude but as the peer ecology of a school. He’s pointing to norms as infrastructure. Put enough exits in the building and more people start noticing the door.

The intent is diagnostic and, quietly, political. Coleman isn’t excusing individuals; he’s relocating causality from character to context. By making the trigger "attended a school where many boys and girls did so", he suggests that institutions manufacture the very behaviors they later punish. The subtext is a rebuke to moralizing narratives about grit: if dropout rates cluster, the unit of analysis can’t be the lone student with a supposed deficit. It has to be the network, the expectation, the sense of what people like you do.

This sits neatly in Coleman’s larger preoccupation with social capital and the ways communities transmit opportunity or resignation. Written against the backdrop of postwar debates about equal schooling, desegregation, and the limits of resource-based reform, it reads as a warning to policymakers: you can’t fix education by treating students as isolated inputs. Concentrated disadvantage doesn’t only drain material resources; it scripts a future. When dropping out becomes normal, staying in starts to look like deviance.