Jonathan Kozol's Savage Inequalities

If we continue to fail to plum and fully educate these children, we will not only languish socially and economically, we will also, even more importantly, increasingly get an inhumane and unjust nation.

This is not to say that Kozol does not extend statistical information and documentation, for he does. The point is that Kozol, unlike too many other "experts" on the educational form, remembers that the educational system is the children. Theories for improving the system which forget this essential fact are not likely to truly or effectively channelize the problems.

Kozol puts himself in the position of the children as he returns to the grooms where he had started command twenty-five years earlier. He tries to imagine what sort of enthrone they would be for the child who was going there to try to learn. Would much(prenominal) initiates be conducive to learning:

These urban schools were . . . extraordinarily miserable places. . . . They reminded me of "garrisons" . . . in a foreign nation. Housing projects, bleak and long-shanked

. . . frequently stood adjacent to the schools. . . . Doors were guarded. Police sometimes patrolled the halls.

I often wondered why we would agree to let our children go to school in places where no politician, school board president, or business chief operating officer would dream of working (Kozol 5).

Kozol's examination of East St. Louis is a around discouraging portrait of a segregated city in which the children suffer m

Hacker, Andrew. Two Nations. impertinently York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1992.

Hacker's style reflects his straightforward attitude toward his subject. This has both positive and ban effects. It is positive because the reader never forgets that Hacker has no pretensions or uncertainties about either his thesis or his style. It is negative because the style is bloodless, academic, and sometimes awkward and boring. Hacker has a deep amuse in his subject, obviously, still this interest does not translate into a passion which the reader can feel.

Again, however, Kozol does not deal further in statistics or abstract analysis of the macro issues, but rather with the real needs and concerns of the children themselves.

The children tell their stories directly to Kozol and to the reader, and we fill out to feel deeply their anger and their despair. A 14-year-old girl, for example, says "We have a school in East St. Louis named for Dr. King. . . . The school is full of toilet water and the doors are locked with chains. Every student in that school is black. It's like terrible joke on fib" (Kozol 35).

It is further to find such honesty, for too often authors feel a false obligation to provide a cheerful shutdown to a study whose thesis has been discouraging at best. In fact, Hacker openly declares that it would be futile to even want for improvement at this time in American history:

Kozol does not paint a pretty picture. The reader mustiness ask precisely what the author hopes to accomplish with such a dark picture of American education, especially with respect to minorities and the poor. It would search that he is appealing to the heart and soul of the nation, the nation's leaders, and the people of the nation. He is trying to reach the mind by way of the heart, present the awful discouragement the children of the poor face in school every day, and concluding that the nation will pay profoundly in both material and spiritual ways if the educational system is not
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