Johnathan Kozol talks about his many encounterments with various American educational settings. He talks of the schooling, and how its diversity has not changed much. These schools could still almost be considered as segrigated by the lack of diversity among it. "Schools that were already deeply segrigated twenty-five or thirty years ago are no less segrigated now, while thousands of other schools around the country that had been integrated either voluntarily or by the force of law have since been rapidly resegregating." I thought this quote was a particularly interesting point to make, for if you do look at schools today and the children that are in them you will notice either a school with all African Americans and few whites or vice versa. Typically also, these schools that have a high population of African Americans are inner city, run down ones with very limiting resources.
Kozol asks a few important questions that many people who are looking at educational equality tend to forget. It is not always about the test scores, and how children are doing academically, but we must question the fact if the children are enjoying coming to school? Are they happy where they are? If a child dreads coming to school every day, it is not going to matter what their intelligence level is, because they are not enjoying learning, and that is the main goal for every educator to try to obtain in their career. "Do kids who go to schools like these enjoy the days they spend in them? Is school, for most of them, a happy place to be? You do not find the answers to these questions in reports about acheivment levels, scientific methods of accountability, or structural revisions in the modes of governance. Documents like these don't speak of happiness. You have to go back to the schools themselves to find an answer to those questions. You have to sit down in the little chairs in the first and second grade, or on the reading rug with kindergarten kids, and listen to the things they actually have to say to one another and the diologue between them and their teachers." Kozol clearly shows that it is about caring about the students and their comfortability in the classroom, it is about having an environment in which children are excited to learn, and can feel like they can be themselves among their peers. If a school is run down, dull, and filled with teachers and people unenthusiastic about what they do then the children themselves are going to feel the same, and it is not going to matter how you teach, because they are going to be unwilling to learn.
When visiting a tenth grade class at Fremont High School in Los Angeles Kozol tells his experience of his visit there, and how honest the children were about the bathrooms, the cafeteria having rats in it, the walls falling apart, etc. The students mentioned how embarresing it was to be attending a school like this. Besides all those things, however, was something even more concering. Kozol mentions how he was told by one black student that told him she wanted to be a social worker or a doctor, but was put into a sewing class. The children are being told to take classes that are well under the level of which they are capable. The girl says " I don't want to take hairdressing. I did not need sewing either. I knew how to sew. My mother is a seamstress in a factory. I'm trying to go to college. I don't need to sew to go to college. My mother sews. I hoped for something else. I wanted to take an AP class." Another boy in her class tells her that the owners of the sewing factories need laborers, he goes on to tell the girl "You're ghetto, so we send you to the facctory. You're ghetto-so you sew!" I found this whole paragraph of this article to be particularly disheartening. Aspecially because there is some truth behind the situation. In our society we do need laborers, however who is to say at this young age who is to do those low wage jobs? Why is it set from the very begining of these children's lives that this is their highest expectation of what they will succeed to? These children are taught from the very begining that they don't have what it takes to live their dreams and do what anyone else can, and why is that? Has society forever engraved who will be the ones to succeed and who will not?
