As discussed in Chapter 1, there are many myths and misperceptions sur-rounding who the poor are. The typical image is of someone who haslived in poverty for years at a time, is Black or Hispanic, resides in aninner-city ghetto, receives two or three welfare programs, and is reluctantto work. On all counts, this image is a severe distortion of the reality.

i want to take you back to our lecture on cognitivism where we surveyed among other things the origins of this notion of a psychological subject within our inner architecture 00:05:52 that comes into being in 1896 john dewey wrote a very famous article called the reflex arc concept in psychology you may have missed it it's listed it's provided on 00:06:06 the page for cognitivism and what dewey was doing was surveying the very many very diverse uh research activities that were beginning to bring into being something like a 00:06:19 psychological science there was so many questions so many methods and a single theoretical construct had emerged that many people were leaning on to and was acting as a kind of a unified 00:06:32 construct with which notions of mind and body might be brought together that notion is the reflex arc now the reflex arc you may be familiar with from physiology if you touch something hot 00:06:45 then we can follow a physiological path from the receptors in the skin in this case if you touch a hot stove we can follow a very short path that goes through the spinal cord and immediately causes you 00:06:58 to move your hand away no thinking involved that's a reflex and you're familiar with the notion of reflex but that notion had been elaborated and was being developed by many people into a picture of the an account of the 00:07:11 embedding of the entire body and nervous system in the world john dewey was saying don't do that stop doing that it's a serious critique of this input output model and the 00:07:25 reflex arc starts with a stimulus and results in action and as a one-way throughput john dewey correctly said that an input output model reduces 00:07:40 the intervene the thing in the middle into a puppet there is no subjectivity possible here now this is a fundamental critique as the fundamental shift in perspective we're adopting in 00:07:53 this module which is to get away from the silly notion of the body and person and subject as being driven by inputs producing the 00:08:05 ghost of the cognitive sandwich there we go you've got the cognitive sandwich you've got sensation providing input you've got action on the output in between you have a great big mystery stuffed into the head it's very easy to make fun of this as 00:08:18 susan hurley does with her term cognitive sandwich it's much more difficult to make fun of exactly the same thing when we draw it like this there is an orthodox belief in our 00:08:30 society our society works on the assumption that there is the psychological subject who has inner processes of perception feeding into inner processes of higher cognition 00:08:43 all fueled by the world through senses and this model doesn't even have an output such constructive psychological representational stories typically 00:08:55 ignore action altogether so the cognitive sandwich may be ridiculous when we look at it in one way but it is also the most wide held belief in our society about the person and we 00:09:08 institute our laws our education systems our workplaces are built on this problematic model