Is there a relationship between a lack of education and homelessness? The Homeless Grapevine recently interviewed a dozen homeless men and women in Clevleand and asked the following questions: Did you graduate from high school? How old are you? How did you feel about your education and your homelessness? Do you think your education had anything to do with your homelessness?

In spite of statistics which show the direct relation of poverty to a lack of education, no one we interviewed felt the quality of their education effected their present condition: Homelessness, helplessness, hopelessness--what we call "the tree H’s" of poverty.

Bob, over the age of thirty, graduated from John Adams, and told us, "They taught me how to add and subtract." As he revealed his perspective, he stated he did not feel it was the school’s responsibility to prepare him for life after school. "How can they do that? I think they put you on the right track and show you the routes, but you have to take them." Bob felt the depletion of jobs, "Everything’s going overseas," as he put it, was the principle reason for the theory that "the only road out is a job at McDonalds."

Angelo, forty, graduated from East High and told us, "The school is responsible to make sure there are opportunities for education. If you take advantage of it and absorb it, you will prepare yourself for life." He further asserted, "Poor education has nothing to do with homelessness. That’s only a myth."

Using a macro-economic model to characterize the role of prisons in a society, the Journal of Economic Behavior and Organization (October 1993) demonstrated that a country’s capability to control the costs of an underclass depends on its providing sufficient quality educational facilities for its youth—stating that a country’s educational policy has a substantial effect on its ability manage poverty, "to find a job which pays more than minimum wage."

As he thoughtfully fingered the rim of a plastic coffee cup, fifty-five year old Marvin told us he left school when he was seventeen to paint bridges for six hundred dollars a week. He pointed to the men at Cosgrove that morning, "These guys just sit here accepting, accepting, accepting. They become smaller and smaller and smaller. They lose their dignity, their pride. They just give up."

Impatient to speak to us, forty-two year old James told us he came from Mississippi when he was five, graduated from East High and "did foundry work" most of his life.

Anthony, fifty-six, toothless and eager to work at "anything, anything at all," talked about his job last summer. "I worked at a car lot. We (a team of six) unbolted the [outdoor light] poles, took’em down, and re-finished’em, re-wired’em, and put’em back up." The job lasted several weeks and paid him $4.50 an hour.

England’s New Statesman and Society printed a 1993 interview with Stuart McDonald, who described the violence, despair, and alcohol abuse he experienced due to his homelessness. He stated emphatically that the threat of prison is no deterrent to the homeless "because it is not really a punishment for them."

"You’re living on your wits; on your nerves. And you’re so near the borderline of having absolutely nothing that if anything threatens what little you have, there is only one way to react, and that is violently. You’ve not got the time nor the inclination to stand and discuss a thing; talk it through or that. It’s just violent...it just becomes a nightly occurrence."

While most of the homeless men interviewed did not believe that there lack of education contributed to their poverty, the evidence does not bear this out.