Sentimentalization.

Recently read and really appreciated Jonathan Kozol's Savage Inequalities. This quote, from a Chicago minister working with inner-city kids in the early 1990s, really connected with some of my own recent reflections about life and teaching.

There are good people in this neighborhood, determined and persistent and strong-minded people who have character and virtues you do not see everywhere. You say to yourself, 'There's something here that's being purified by pain.' All the veneers, all the facades, are burnt away and you see something genuine and beautiful that isn't often found among the affluent. I see it in children--in the youngest children sometimes. Beautiful sweet natures. It's as if they are refined by their adversity. But you cannot sentimentalize. The odds they face are hellish, and, for many, many people that I know, life here is simply unendurable. --Rev. Jim Wolff (pp. 42-43).