Constructing the "Culturally Deprived Children": Histories and Politics of the "Culture of Poverty" during the US War on Poverty

The culture of poverty theory is often used in today's educational research to explain how the culture and education of poor families lead to the intergenerational transmission of their economic conditions. This theoretical discourse emerged as a kind of "poverty knowledge" in the United States War on Poverty project during the mid-twentieth century. By tracing the large-scale educational interventions for poor children as the main part of this project from the theoretical perspective of critical poverty studies, this article examines how the knowledge about the "culture of poverty" was invented by American social psychological experiments and anthropological field research, and then adopted by the US federal government as the theoretical basis for the War on Poverty, and also translated by education researchers and administrators into three kinds of assumptions about the "culturally deprived children". The curriculum and teacher education programs that took up these assumptions to intervene in the dropout students became a far-reaching but unnoticed undercurrent in the curriculum reform of the 1960s. Such dropout interventions were eventually combined with standardized tests to create a de facto triage of students in the name of equal opportunity, which exacerbated rather than eliminated the sense of deprivation of poor students and the fragmentation within society.