October 1994

SAVAGE INEQUALITIES: Children in America's Schools

Jonathan Kozol; HarperCollins 1991; 262 pages; ISBN 0-06-097499-0.

SOW THE WIND, reap the whirlwind, is the phrase that keeps coming to mind reading this account of current American grade school education. While the best schools have gotten marginally better, the worst have gotten immeasurably worse, effectively dooming their students and entrenching a permanent underclass in America. For these students the door is slamming shut on the Information Age: without education they cannot participate.

In the 1960s Kozol reported on his experience teaching grade school in Boston, and the result was one of the inspiring texts of the time--Death at an Early Age. For this book he returned to the subject after decades away from it, visiting schools in many cities, including basket cases like East Saint Louis and Camden, New Jersey, talking to the teachers and to the children. He was shocked by the blatant racial segregation, growing steadily worse rather than better. When he talked to people of influence he found that they either denied the problem or admitted it but had given up on it. The subject was taboo, and his inquiries were not welcome.

He went ahead with the book anyway, figuring that the future employers of the cheated students might be interested, or their future crime victims, or the taxpayers who would pay for their welfare and prisons, or those who might remember their own schoolroom pledge about liberty and justice for all.

--Stewart Brand

Quoted from the text

In public schooling, social policy has been turned back almost one hundred years.

Almost anyone who visits in the schools of East Saint Louis, even for a short time, comes away profoundly shaken. These are innocent children, after all. They have done nothing wrong. They have committed no crime. They are too young to have offended in any way at all. One searches for some way to understand why a society as rich and, frequently, as generous as ours would leave these children in their penury and squalor for so long--and with so little public indignation.

"Ideal class size for these kids would be 15 to 20. Will these children ever get what white kids in the suburbs take for granted? I don't think so. If you ask me why, I'd have to speak of race and social class. I don't think that the powers that be in New York City understand, or want to understand, that if they do not give these children a sufficient education to lead healthy and productive lives, we will be their victims later on. We'll pay the price someday--in violence, in economic costs. I despair of making this appeal in any terms but these. You cannot issue an appeal to conscience in New York today. The fair-play argument won't be accepted. So you speak of violence and hope that it will scare the city into action."

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