At the University of Missouri-Kansas City, only 35 percent of Pell Grant recipients graduate college, a rate that is more than 20 percentage points lower than that of their wealthier peers.
Why is anyone surprised by that?
I think, for you thinkers out there, that this is just another example of Reynold’s Law in action.
The article is about children that understand their place in the generational family structure. From the article:
The more children knew about their family’s history, the stronger their sense of control over their lives, the higher their self-esteem and the more successfully they believed their families functioned. The “Do You Know?” scale turned out to be the best single predictor of children’s emotional health and happiness.
The whole thing is very interesting, go read the whole thing: The Family Stories That Bind Us — This Life – NYTimes.com.
The article concludes:
The bottom line: if you want a happier family, create, refine and retell the story of your family’s positive moments and your ability to bounce back from the difficult ones. That act alone may increase the odds that your family will thrive for many generations to come.
Now is it just as simple as building the narrative? Or does causation run the other way? It is my guess that causation runs the other way; faimilies that know their history do so because they are happier and better adjusted emotionally.
Embedded in this article linked above is a notion that is a corollary of Reynold’s Law. I’ll have to work on this and refine it to a level of elegance. But there is no way that a family could just sit down over family vacation this summer and educate everyone on family history and the result will be a happier, more well adjusted family for generations to come. Again this happiness is just a marker for the possession of certain traits that will lead to happiness.