A first-person account from off the beaten track, as told to Anne Ford.
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“Americans have been bred with this idea that if you want something and you work hard enough, you can get it. That’s patently not true with certain things. I had this student who was a really sweet kid. He’d been to a very poor high school, and he’d been top of his class pretty much because he didn’t get shot or take crack.
“But he couldn’t read or write very well. He certainly couldn’t do math. And he was determined to be an aerospace engineer. He ended up dropping out. If you’ve been told that if you try hard enough you can do anything, when it turns out that’s not true, how are you supposed to deal with it? In Australia, the attitude is more: ‘Give it a go. Do your best.’
