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845d0c2
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One cannot dispute the fact that giving poor black adolescents job skills, if it is self-evident that they do not possess the academic skills to go to college, is a good thing in itself. But the business leaders who put emphasis on filling entry-level job slots are too frequently the people who, by prior lobbying and voting patterns and their impact upon social policy, have made it all but certain that few of these urban kids would get the ..
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Jonathan Kozol |
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acc9afc
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One would not have thought that children in America would ever have to choose between a teacher or a playground or sufficient toilet paper. Like grain in a time of famine, the immense resources which the nation does in fact possess go not to the child in the greatest need but to the child of the highest bidder--the child of parents who, more frequently than not, have also enjoyed the same abundance when they were schoolchildren.
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Jonathan Kozol |
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e4d6d9f
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People who know but do not act do evil too. I don't know if I would call them evil but they're certainly not thinking about heaven.
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Jonathan Kozol |
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93c5157
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There is a parallel in this to arguments that we have heard in New York City in regard to health facilities that serve the rich and poor. There, too, we were told by doctors that the more exhaustive services provided to rich patients may not represent superior health care but a form of "overutilization"--again the theory of "diminishing returns." But here again it is not argued that the rich should therefore be denied this luxury, if that i..
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Jonathan Kozol |
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96b4c15
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This degree of equanimity in failure, critics note, has led most affluent parents in Chicago to avoid the public system altogether. The school board president in 1989, although a teacher and administrator in the system for three decades, did not send his children to the public schools. Nor does Mayor Richard Daley, Jr., nor did any of the previous four mayors who had school-age children. "Nobody in his right mind," says one of the city's al..
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Jonathan Kozol |
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b64d5c5
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School boards think that, if they offer the same printed information to all parents, they have made choice equally accessible. That is not true, of course, because the printed information won't be read, or certainly will not be scrutinized aggressively, by parents who can't read or who read very poorly. But, even if a city could contrive a way to get the basic facts disseminated widely, can it disseminate audacity as well? Can it disseminat..
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Jonathan Kozol |
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fd95d27
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If there were a multitude of schools almost as good as these in every city, so that applicants for high school could select from dozens of good options--so that even parents who did not have the sophistication or connections to assist their children in obtaining entrance to selective schools would not see their kids attending truly bad schools, since there would be none--then it would do little harm if certain of these schools were even bet..
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Jonathan Kozol |
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269ff34
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When a school board hires just one woman to retrieve 400 missing children from the streets of the North Bronx, we may reasonably conclude that it does not particularly desire to find them. If 100 of these children startled us by showing up at school, moreover, there would be no room for them in P.S. 94. The building couldn't hold them.
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Jonathan Kozol |
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7b01d76
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Liberty, school conservatives have argued, is diminished when the local powers of school districts have been sacrificed to centralized control. The opposition to desegregation in the South, for instance, was portrayed as local (states') rights as a sacred principle infringed upon by federal court decisions. The opposition to the drive for equal funding in a given state is now portrayed as local (district) rights in opposition to the powers ..
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Jonathan Kozol |
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c8844d2
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The usual reduction in class size," says the --from 30 to 24, for instance--"isn't enough to make a difference." If this were really true, and if the wanted to help the poorest children of Chicago, the logical solution would appear to be to cut their class size even more--perhaps to 17, as in Winnetka. This is a change that even the 's editors concede to be worthwhile. But this is a degree of equity the does not entertain. It contempl..
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Jonathan Kozol |
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f8c661d
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A physical education expert, asked to visit a grade school in East Orange, is astonished to be told that jump ropes are in short supply and that the children therefore have to jump "in groups." Basketball courts, however, "are in abundance" in these schools, the visitor says, because the game involves little expense. Defendants in a recent suit brought by the parents of schoolchildren in New Jersey's poorest districts claimed that differen..
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Jonathan Kozol |
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0fa40ed
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It is a matter of national pride that every child's ship be kept afloat. Otherwise our nation would be subject to the charge that we deny poor children public school. But what is now encompassed by the one word ("school") are two very different kinds of institutions that, in function, finance and intention, serve entirely different roles. Both are needed for our nation's governance. But children in one set of schools are educated to be gove..
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Jonathan Kozol |
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028af52
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Conservatives are generally the ones who speak more passionately of patriotic values. They are often the first to rise up to protest an insult to the flag. But, in this instance, they reduce America to something rather tight and mean and sour, and they make the flag less beautiful than it should be.
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Jonathan Kozol |
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da1fbad
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Now and then, in private, affluent suburbanites concede that certain aspects of the game may be a trifle rigged to their advantage. "Sure, it's a bit unjust," they may concede, "but that's reality and that's the way the game is played.... "In any case," they sometimes add in a refrain that we have heard now many times, "there's no real evidence that spending money makes much difference in the outcome of a child's education. We have it. So w..
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Jonathan Kozol |
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bb897b2
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Competition at the local high school, said another Great Neck parent, was "unhealthy." He described the toll it took on certain students. "Children in New York may suffer from too little. Many of our children suffer from too much." The loss of distinctions in these statements serves to blur the differences between the inescapable unhappiness of being human and the needless misery created by injustice. It also frees the wealthy from the obli..
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Jonathan Kozol |
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726ace4
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Placing a black person in control of an essentially apartheid system--whether that system is a city or its welfare apparatus or its public schools--seems to serve at least three functions. It offers symbolism that protects the white society against the charges of racism. It offers enforcement, since a black official is expected to be even more severe in putting down unrest than white officials. It offers scapegoats: When the situation is un..
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Jonathan Kozol |
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dbdf00b
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Equal funding is opposed for opposite reasons: either because it won't improve or benefit the poorer schools--not "necessarily," the governor's assistant says--or because it would improve and benefit those schools but would be subtracting something from the other districts, and the other districts view this as unjust."
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Jonathan Kozol |
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faa6895
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When low-income districts go to court to challenge the existing system of school funding, writes John Coons, the natural fear of the conservative is "that the levelers are at work here sapping the foundations of free enterprise." In reality, he says, there is "no graver threat to the capitalist system than the present cyclical replacement of the 'fittest' of one generation by their artificially advantaged offspring. Worse, when that advanta..
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Jonathan Kozol |
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6e4be52
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Segregation, he concluded, "is neither sought nor imposed by healthy ... human beings."
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Jonathan Kozol |
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20d1b6e
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That is the great luxury of long-existing and accepted segregation in New York and almost every other major city of our nation nowadays. Nothing needs to be imposed on anyone. The evil is already set in stone. We just move in.
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Jonathan Kozol |
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eeaf1ff
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MEET MR. HIV," writes an 11-year-old child, over a diamond-shaped face from which six scaly legs extend. "He invades your body. This is what he looks like when he does," another child writes over a scary-looking monster that resembles a tarantula. An HIV-infected 12-year-old draws a transparent yellow picture of his body filled with hairy, bloblike creatures that resemble paramecia and amoebae. "I hate you because you do bad things to my bo..
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Jonathan Kozol |
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5feb85d
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A four-year-old says, "My mommy lives in heaven. Her eyelashes go down instead of up because she is ... in heaven, but I miss her." She feels consoled that her mother "is with God," who, she says, "has pink whiskers, red hair, and two feet.... I did not want her to die until I died. I think I am going to die too in a little while."
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Jonathan Kozol |
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0ec530d
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But just as legal segregation in the South was a huge national horror hidden in plain view, so too the massive desolation of the intellect and spirits and the human futures of these millions of young people in their neighborhoods of poverty is yet another national horror hidden in plain view; and it is so enormous and it has its ganglia implanted so profoundly in the culture as we know it, that we're going to have to build another movement ..
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Jonathan Kozol |
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7ec8837
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A balancing act of equally unlikely options was the only answer that the city and the nation gave to the requests of these poor people. This juggling of options--in this instance, countering school-funding efforts with the need for preschool--does no good if neither of these options is to be enacted anyway and if the act of balancing only serves to guarantee our permanent inaction in both areas.
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Jonathan Kozol |
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e9d3fd4
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The report by the Community Service Society cites an official of the New York City Board of Education who remarks that there is "no point" in putting further money "into some poor districts" because, in his belief, "new teachers would not stay there." But the report observes that, in an instance where beginning teacher salaries were raised by nearly half, "that problem largely disappeared"--another interesting reminder of the difference mon..
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Jonathan Kozol |
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a8722b0
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In effect, a circular phenomenon evolves: The richer districts--those in which the property lots and houses are more highly valued--have more revenue, derived from taxing land and homes, to fund their public schools. The reputation of the schools, in turn, adds to the value of their homes, and this, in turn, expands the tax base for their public schools. The fact that they can levy lower taxes than the poorer districts, but exact more money..
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Jonathan Kozol |
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c957a51
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A polarization of this issue, whereby some insist upon the primacy of school, others upon the primacy of family and neighborhood, obscures the fact that both are elemental forces in the lives of children. The family, however, differs from the school in the significant respect that government is not responsible, or at least not directly, for the inequalities of family background. It is responsible for inequalities in public education.
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Jonathan Kozol |
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aa59633
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East Side High became well known some years ago when its former principal, a colorful and controversial figure named Joe Clark, was given special praise by U.S. Education Secretary William Bennett. Bennett called the school "a mecca of education" and paid tribute to Joe Clark for throwing out 300 students who were thought to be involved with violence or drugs. "He was a perfect hero," says a school official who has dinner with me the next ..
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Jonathan Kozol |
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ebe90b9
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It has recently become a matter of some interest to the press and to some academic experts to determine whether it is race or class that is the major factor in denial of these children. The question always strikes me as a scholar's luxury. To kindergarten children in the schools of Paterson or Camden, it can hardly matter very much to know if the denial they experience is caused by their skin color or their destitution.
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Jonathan Kozol |
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51d57cd
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Phone calls aired on several radio stations voice a raw contempt for the capacities of urban children ("money will not help these children") but predict the imminent demise of education in the richer districts if their funding is cut back. Money, the message seems to be, is crucial to rich districts but will be of little difference to the poor."
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Jonathan Kozol |
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6305b2f
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The slowness of change is always respectable and reasonable in the eyes of the ones who are only watching; it is a different matter for the ones who are in pain.
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society
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Jonathan Kozol |
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5ddc27f
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It is the comfortable people, by and large - those like the Reading Teacher - who make the decisions in our society. It is the people who those decisions are going to affect who are expected to stand quietly, and watch patiently, and wait.
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society
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Jonathan Kozol |
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1296da7
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the willingness to relegate a person in my father's situation to a lower and less vigilant degree of medical attention was an accurate reflection of the values of a social system which, as I had learned in my own work in education, measures human life, more frequently than not, in rather hard-nosed and explicit terms of future payoff to the national well-being.
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Jonathan Kozol |
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6708042
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The New Jersey constitution, says the court in its decision, requires that all students be provided with "an opportunity to compete fairly for a place in our society.... Pole vaulters using bamboo poles even with the greatest effort cannot compete with pole vaulters using aluminum poles."
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Jonathan Kozol |
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8dc3dfb
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The struggle being waged today, where there is any struggle being waged at all, is closer to the one that was addressed in 1896 in Plessy v. Ferguson, in which the court accepted segregated institutions for black people, stipulating only that they must be equal to those open to white people. The dual society, at least in public education, seems in general to be unquestioned.
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Jonathan Kozol |
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abc357c
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But many human beings do take pleasure in inflicting pain on others, and those who have the least to be proud of or to be happy about are often the ones who take that pleasure most.
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Jonathan Kozol |
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9faf11f
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We are preparing a generation of robots. Kids are learning exclusively through rote. We have children who are given no conceptual framework. They do not learn to think, because their teachers are straitjacketed by tests that measure only isolated skills. As a result, they can be given no electives, nothing wonderful or fanciful or beautiful, nothing that touches the spirit or the soul.
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Jonathan Kozol |
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09a1745
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All white people, I think, are implicated in these things so long as we participate in America in a normal way and attempt to go on leading normal lives while any one race is being cheated and tormented. But I now believe that we will probably go on leading our normal lives, and will go on participating in our nation in a normal way, unless there comes a time where Negroes can compel us by methods of extraordinary pressure to interrupt our ..
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equality
jonathan-kozol
race
race-and-racism-in-america
race-relations
white
white-people
white-privilege
white-supremacy
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Jonathan Kozol |
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22f1706
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One hundred years before the present government existed, a powerful leader, Sir William Berkeley, governor of Virginia, stated his views in clear, unflinching terms. "I thank God," he said, that "there are no free schools nor printing [in this land]. For learning has brought disobedience, and heresy, and sects into the world, and printing hath divulged them...God save us from both!"
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critical-pedagogy
education
revival
subversion
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Jonathan Kozol |
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e9c2332
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Pride in my father, thankfulness that he had been my father, and an ultimately grateful feeling of respect (grudging at first, it took a while to come) for the aching if imperfect love he never ceased to feel for Mom--these are the things I wanted to hold on to. It will soon be seven years since the night I bent down by his bed to press my ear against his chest and listen to his breathing as his life came to its end. But even now, and even ..
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Jonathan Kozol |