Could you explain the difference, please?

“a degree, although not usually a good one.”

OK, I understand what you mean–I think–but the value of a degree is to some extent relative, and we can’t all be above average. We can all be educated or trained in certain things, but that’s different. A degree is an employment asset, and any degree places them ahead of those with none. Which is the point. As the old joke goes, I don’t have to be faster than the hungry bear. I only have to be faster than the other hiker.

On the “acting white” instance, when I’ve heard the term applied, it wasn’t for success, as you imply, but for behavior–doing the homework, speaking politely to the teacher and such. That’s not something that itself requires greater genetic gifts, but it does make an implicit statement that the system is not completely rigged.

And I know of white students who dropped a student in a tall waste-paper basket for gratuitous and malicious curve-raising.

On the larger question of failure and response, the missing word is “persistence.” I do not know what causes some of us to “get up one more time than we’re knocked down.” It seems best taught by example, but teaching by annecdote is not bad. I can’t remember when I didn’t know of Robert the Bruce and the spider, of Demosthenes with pebbles in his mouth, or of Edison’s 90+ failures on his way to the electric light. Perhaps the question of what history is “relevant” isn’t altogether clear-cut.

Repeated failure can be very destructive. Lots of people, not just your students try and try again and still fail. Some of them focus their hopes and plans on another target eventually, but they’ll still have people – and that little voice inside their head – telling them that they should have succeeded, and if only they go back and try again, they will. There comes a point where you have to give up or go crazy.

There are two more points I’d like to make. First of all, in many cases in which you’re talking about people who get through the K-12 system without learning anything, you don’t have failure, exactly. You have failure to learn, sure; but it’s accompanied by the claim that you have learned and can move on to the next grade, or leave school with a diploma (or some kind of certificate that looks like a diploma). We all have to learn to interpret adult statements which reflect what should be more than what is, but this particular variant must drive people crazier faster than simply failing repeatedly.

And secondly, where are all the other options between becoming a single mother on welfare at 15 and getting a university education? Getting a good solid training in some kind of valuable technical skill might not educate the student in human nature or history or even how their own country runs, but it can give someone a valued and valuable place in society.