A New Car or a High School Diploma? Not an easy choice for some.

Which is more important-a high school diploma or a new car?

That may sound like a ridiculous choice, but only if you are not a member of the underclass.

Start with the proposition that children born into poverty are unlikely to go to college. Further, that one or both of their parents dropped out before finishing high school. Add the fact that no member of their immediate family has gone to college. In other words, not much is expected of them. Now put yourself in those shoes and ask yourself that question.

Consider also that bone-crushing poverty isolates you from classmates, who are also a constant reminder of your lower social status. You are fed up with the misery caused by the unrelenting stress of hunger, deprivation and the violence at home and in your neighborhood. Suddenly the idea of having a car to get away from it all sounds down-right appealing.

So why not wait until after completing high school before going to work full time in order to buy that car? After all, dropping out of high school will destroy a fragile dream. The primary reason is respect, a search for dignity. By the time they are seventeen, the self-esteem of poverty victims has been hammered hard. They struggle with issues of personal legitimacy and inadequacy. A child exposed to constant abuse will worry about adequacy because they want to love and be loved, and want to be treated with respect. The search for dignity may seem like a worthy goal, but it can also lead to self-destructive behavior, which is what happens when a child quits high school. Out of eight children in my family, only one completed high school.

I know what it feels like to have people look down upon you. I was six years old the first time I walked into a candy store. No sooner had I reached the counter when the grim-faced proprietor grabbed me by the ear and proceeded to lecture me about the proper behavior of children who lived in the slum apartments above her store.

"We don't allow your kind in here," she said coldly. " Don't come back here again unless you have money in your pocket."

The store owner had discarded me like so much trash. A stranger had turned my young world around, and pointed me toward the bottom. That was the first of many situations during my childhood and adolescent years in which I experienced bigotry based solely upon my financial status.

Typically, when we think of poverty it's in purely financial terms: those families who don't make a certain amount of money per year are defined as "living below the poverty line." I also know what it's like to fall into that category. My family was not just poor, but devastatingly, hopelessly, mind-numbingly poor. We had nothing, including the knowledge of where the next meal would come from, if the place we slept last night would be the place we would sleep the next night, and we did whatever it took - whatever it took - to survive. But I also know that the simple characterization of yearly income doesn't come close to defining the real meaning of poverty. Poverty is, in fact, an actual culture with its own unique dialect and distinctive behavioral patterns. During my childhood and adolescent years I had no idea that I was living in a unique culture, any more than a fish knows it lives in water, unless it is caught.

A culture of poverty leaves children feeling powerless to influence the course of their lives—a sense of defeat that keeps them feeling down and less worthy. But it doesn't have to be that way. We can start in the schools by teaching all students about the culture of poverty—call it Poverty 101. Give students the knowledge to understand why there is a difference between the accepted behaviors of the different social classes. At a minimum, poverty students will learn that they are part of a culture. If they understand that, perhaps they can make an informed decision about buying the car

Doug Wallace is an attorney, a successful entrepreneur and a published author. His book, Everything Will Be All Right is a memoir, scheduled for nationwide launch on October 1, 2009. Doug chose to write his story of growing up in poverty as a way to call attention to the unimaginable hardships for the generationally impoverished. Launched October 2009, available now at Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Borders Kindle, Sony Reader, and retail book stores everywhere