It's very much a common reality among working-class families of nearly any ethnic background in the USA.

I have plenty of friends and some non-intermediate family members that have reported that their friends and family actively discouraged continuing their education after highschool for one reason or another. In some cases, reasons like "you'll earn more working an honest trade", and "college debt is a scam" are given (in some cases, these may actually be true). In others, things like "do you think you're better than the rest of us?", "that's for white people", and "only f-gs and liberals go to college" are hurled at those that want to continue their education.

And in many cases, it doesn't even take active discouragement to prevent people from wanting to obtain any higher education. I have relatives that live in very small, rural farming towns that have actively resisted attending anything other than the local 2-year junior college, in part because the people that get 4-year degrees never come back to town. They're convinced that they would be betraying their family and friends by getting educated and finding a better living situation.

My anecdotes are the opposite. Usually the parents had a job they hated (manufacturing or service sector), and encouraged their kids to attend college.

I grew up poor. My father paints houses. He always used to tell me: "Work smarter, not harder."

My roommate hired him to refinish his deck (He owns the house), and every time my father showed up for work and I was working from home, he was thrilled.

My mother is barely literate, never really attended high school. She always read to me, encouraged me to read, and always made money available to buy books. The only things she cared about was me taking education seriously and not saddling myself down with kids too young (which might have backfired because neither I, or my brothers, have any interest in having children, which makes her sad).

I guess I'm just saying: Have another anecdote to add to your collection. But I'd also say, don't think the GP is wrong. Both attitudes exist obviously.

According to this poll [1], only 6% of Americans see college education as "not too important", and the rest see it as at least "fairly important". If there are people actively resisting education, they are a rather tiny minority.

1: http://www.gallup.com/poll/166490/americans-college-educatio...

The entire comment is an absurd stereotype, and about what you'd expect to find in this forum. Manufacturing jobs weren't (and aren't) filled with a bunch of meatheads coloring by numbers any more than are construction jobs.

>Manufacturing jobs weren't (and aren't) filled with a bunch of meatheads coloring by numbers any more than are construction jobs.

This is true, but the fact that there are definitely stigmas around higher education in underprivileged and working class communities in the USA is very much a reality.

You're absolutely right that this stigma exists and needs to be challenged but I would add that in my experience one, although certainly not the only, reason for this stigma is that many working class people don't feel that the more educated classes have much respect for the kind of labor they do. I think US society in general views a lot of working class jobs as rather undignified and the stigma against education in these communities is in part an unfortunate reaction to that.

>about what you'd expect to find in this forum

I disagree, you find a diverse set of viewpoints on HN, this isn't representative. The fact that a distillation of r/theredpill dogma is the top comment is upsetting to me, but then again, I have come to expect that when the number of comments exceeds the number of upvotes on a story, such stories are more of a lightning rod of politicizing than it is substantial conversation.

Eventually the up/down votes equalizes it out. There are a couple of interesting comments below this that shock discuss the content of the article and probably will take this comment's place.

I'm sorry you're upset. I regret my original comment, and trying to remove it, today I found out HN doesn't let users delete comments older than a certain small amount of time.

The implication that "coastal" people value education more is also a crude stereotype.

Yes, it is real. I'm from a small town in Montana with a strong timber industry presence, and loads of people stick around, largely because their parents want them to stay or because they don't want to leave everything they know. Often times, there's no choice because the kids didn't do well enough to go to "coastal school," nor could they or their parents afford it if they did.

People from cities exhibit this kind of behavior too, but for some reason no one talks about it as negatively as they talk about staying in your shitty rural town after high school.

>> and loads of people stick around, largely because their parents want them to stay or because they don't want to leave everything they know.

We've really fallen as Americans, too eager to stick in one place. 2-3 generations ago many of our ancestors left everything they had in their home country to come here with nothing more than the money in their pockets and shirt on their back.

Those Americans often suffered from homesickness so bad that it was possible to die from it:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nostalgia#As_a_medical_conditi...

Homesickness: An American History by Susan J Matt is a great book about how it existed in America. The song "Home Sweet Home" is banal to us, but was forbidden to be played during the Civil War because it caused homesickness and desertions.They used to hospitalize people suffering from nostalgia. It could be that bad. the past was nothing like the modern rootlessness we have now.

True. Not saying it's good, just providing some pathology.

Kids on the coast can inherit their families now $1m house... Meanwhile those that move are forced to save and save and maybe get lucky to buy a house.

It is probably more stereotype than not. But there is some truth to it: I do know an anecdote of someone who was effectively disowned for daring to go to college. That case is almost certainly on the extreme side of the spectrum, but I wouldn't be quick to discount the fact that some places are actively hostile to the idea of higher education.

It's certainly a generalization, and I think its fair (if recursive) to caution that every generalization is an overgeneralization.

But as far as the "reality" goes, there are certainly personal anecdotes to support it, some about people I personally know.

Definitely a stereotype.

I certainly saw this in school in the late 70'sin the UK