"These children should be enrolled in Independent Living programs designed by state and local governments to prepare them to enter the workplace, or attend college, and successfully manage their lives"
About this Quote
Policy language can sound like compassion while quietly narrowing a kid's future to whatever a bureaucracy thinks is realistic. Charles Foster Bass reaches for that reassuring register here: "Independent Living", "prepare", "successfully manage". It reads like a tidy ladder out of chaos. The real intent is managerial. This is government speaking in the dialect of outcomes, trying to convert vulnerable childhoods into measurable adult functioning: job, college, self-sufficiency.
The subtext is where the politics live. "These children" is a distancing phrase that marks a population as a case file rather than neighbors with names; it implies a problem to be solved, not a community to be invested in. "Designed by state and local governments" signals control and standardization, suggesting that the appropriate response to trauma, poverty, or foster care is a program, not a broader redistribution of resources or power. It also shifts responsibility: if the system offers a program and the individual later struggles, failure can be read as personal rather than structural.
Context matters because "independent living" has a specific U.S. policy history, often tied to youth aging out of foster care and the anxiety that they'll become unemployed, unhoused, or justice-involved. Bass is speaking into that fear, offering prevention through training. The rhetorical move is pragmatic and defensible, but it carries a quiet austerity: the goal isn't belonging or flourishing; it's compliance with adulthood as a checklist. Even "enter the workplace" comes first, framing citizenship through productivity. College is an option; employability is the baseline.
The subtext is where the politics live. "These children" is a distancing phrase that marks a population as a case file rather than neighbors with names; it implies a problem to be solved, not a community to be invested in. "Designed by state and local governments" signals control and standardization, suggesting that the appropriate response to trauma, poverty, or foster care is a program, not a broader redistribution of resources or power. It also shifts responsibility: if the system offers a program and the individual later struggles, failure can be read as personal rather than structural.
Context matters because "independent living" has a specific U.S. policy history, often tied to youth aging out of foster care and the anxiety that they'll become unemployed, unhoused, or justice-involved. Bass is speaking into that fear, offering prevention through training. The rhetorical move is pragmatic and defensible, but it carries a quiet austerity: the goal isn't belonging or flourishing; it's compliance with adulthood as a checklist. Even "enter the workplace" comes first, framing citizenship through productivity. College is an option; employability is the baseline.
Quote Details
| Topic | Youth |
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