Dear Editor:
Politicians, educators and the gambling lobby invoke “the children” as a rationale for furthering the gambling agenda. They tirelessly tout the college scholarships and pre-kindergarten education that a lottery would supposedly fund. They omit a few unpleasant details of the “education lottery” scheme.
First, they will learn that it is very easy for children to gamble on a state-sponsored lottery. In Massachusetts, 47 percent of seventh-graders have purchased lottery tickets. Nationwide, more than four in 10 adolescents gamble on lotteries.
Students will learn that pathological gambling is a phenomenon that affects more than 15 million Americans – half of those are teens. Thousands of Tennessee students will learn this firsthand as the rate of gambling problems in states such as Louisiana exceeds 16 percent. Tennessee’s schoolchildren will learn that gambling addictions are a serious and tragic matter and that lotteries are a highly addictive form of gambling.
A report by the National Gambling Impact Study Commission (June 1999) documents strong links between gambling addiction and crime, homelessness, child abuse and neglect, bankruptcy, divorce, and poor performance at work and school. Twenty percent of gambling addicts attempt suicide. The federal commission received numerous testimonies of teens devastated by gambling.
Students will learn that study, sweat and diligence have become outmoded means to success. They will be bombarded by advertisements from their government telling them “all you need is a dollar and a dream” (New York), that work is nothing but heart-attack-inducing-drudgery (Massachusetts) or that the lottery “could be your ticket out” of poverty (Illinois).
The students will learn, too, that many people cannot afford to lose money on the lottery. Some will learn by watching their parents squander thousands of dollars that could have put food on the table and shoes on their feet. A national study by two Duke University professors found that individuals earning less than $10,000 per year spend more money on lotteries than any other income group. High school dropouts spend four times as much as college graduates. Blacks spend five times as much as whites. The government lottery works like Robin Hood in reverse, seducing meager resources from the poor and bestowing them on the middle and upper classes.
Sales of Georgia lottery tickets are two-and-a-half times higher in poor neighborhoods than affluent ones, while recipients of lottery-funded scholarships have family incomes of $13,000 higher than the state average. Lotteries intentionally target impoverished neighborhoods with outlets, knowing exactly where their most loyal, and desperate, customers are.
Tennessee’s young people will learn much more: that lotteries must constantly invent more alluring games and hype existing ones to induce residents to keep gambling, that another government bureaucracy must be created, regulated and funded, that lotteries are a notoriously unreliable source of revenue, that once government officials get hooked on lottery revenues, they become ardent gambling promoters at the expense of the public’s welfare. I’m from lottery-saturated Florida and I have seen all of this.
On second thought, perhaps the politicians, educators and lobbyists are right: A state lottery would provide quite a learning experience for Tennessee’s schoolchildren. Unfortunately, it will take more than four years of college to undo the damages of a lottery education.
Terrence P. Means
Office of Professional Development

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