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A review by dorhastings
Savage Inequalities: Children in America's Schools by Jonathan Kozol
4.0
This was a chilling book to read. There is so much to be upset about with this book. It may be over two decades old, but I think the content is still sadly applicable to today's schools and schooling, and I think that's especially compelling when you consider that, again, the book is two decades old. How do we make schools better? Have we really desegregated public schools? Does money improve education and schooling? Who says that money doesn't improve schooling, and what does wealth have to do with it?
I've marked quite a few quotations about this book in Goodreads, but there are just so many. But I think Kozol continues to demonstrate some major issues in today's society, our assumptions, and our schooling system.
"Terms such as 'attaint of blood' are rarely used today, and, if they were, they would occasion public indignation; but the rigging of the game and the acceptance, which is nearly universal, of uneven playing fields reflect a dark unspoken sense that other people's children are of less inherent value than our own. 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 we spend it. But it's probably a secondary matter. Other factors--family and background--seem to be a great deal more important.' In these ways they fend off dangers of disturbing introspection; and this, in turn, enables them to give their children something far more precious than the simple gift of pedagogic privilege. They give them uncontaminated satisfaction in their victories. Their children learn to shut from mind the possibility that they are winners in an unfair race, and they seldom let themselves lose sleep about the losers.
"Defining unfairness as the difficulty that a Great Neck graduate encounters at a top-flight private college, to which any child in the South Bronx would have given her right arm to be admitted, strikes one as a way of rendering the term so large that it means almost nothing. 'What is unfair,' he is saying in effect, 'is what I determine to be unfair. What I find unfair is what affects my child, not somebody else's child in New York."
"'My children,' says Elizabeth, a friend of mine who lives in a black neighborhood of Boston, 'know very well the system is unfair. They also know that they are living in a rich society. They see it on TV, and in advertisements, and in the movies. They see the president at his place in Maine, riding around the harbor in his motor boat and playing golf with other wealthy men. They know that men like these did not come out of schools in Roxbury or Harlem. They know that they were given something extra. They don't know exactly what it is, but they have seen enough, and heard enough, to know that men don't speak like that and look like that unless they have been fed with silver spoons--and went to schools that had a lot of silver spoons and other things that cost a lot... So they know this other world exists, and, when you tell them that the government can't find the money to provide them with a decent place to go to school, they don't believe it and they know that it's a choice that has been made--a choice about how much they matter in society. They see it as a message: "This is to tell you that you don't much matter."'"
"'If you're black you have to understand--white people would destroy their schools before they'd let our children sit beside their children. They would leave their homes and sell them for a song in order not to live with us and see our children socializing with their children.'"
"Night after night, on television, Americans can watch police or federal agents rounding up black men and black teen-agers. The sight of white policemen breaking down the doors of houses, black people emerging with their heads bent low in order to avoid the television cameras, has become a form of prime-time television entertainment in America. The story that is told by television cameras is a story of deformity. The story that is not told is the lifelong deformation of poor children by their own society and government. We hear of an insatiable attraction to consumer goods like sneakers, stereos and video recorders. The story that we do not hear is of the aggressive marketing of these commodities in neighborhoods where very poor black people live: neighborhoods where appetites for purchasable mediocrity are easily inflamed because there sometimes is so little that is rich and beautiful to offer competition. Once these children learn that lovely and transcendent things are not for them, it may be a little easier to settle for the cheaper satisfactions."
"'When they hear of all these murders, all these men in prison, all these women pregnant with no husbands, they don't buy the explanation that it's poverty, or public schools, or racial segregation. They say, "We didn't have much money when we started out, but we led clean and decent lives. We did it. Why can't they?" I try to get inside that statement. So I ask them what they mean. What I hear is something that sounds very much like a genetic answer: "They don't have it." What they mean is lack of brains, or lack of drive, or lack of willingness to work. Something like that. Whatever it is, it sounds almost inherent. Some of them are less direct. They don't say genetics; what they talk about is history. "This is what they have become, for lots of complicated reasons. Slavery, injustice or whatever." But they really do believe it when they say that this is what they have become, that this is what they are. And they don't believe that better schools or social changes will affect it very much. So it comes down to an explanation that is so intrinsic, so immutable, that it might as well be called genetic. They see a slipshod deviant nature--violence, lassitude, a reckless sexuality, a feverish need to over-produce--as if it were a character imprinted on black people. The degree to which this racial explanation is accepted would surprise you.'"
Okay last one:
"Standing here by the Ohio River, watching it drift west into the edge of the horizon, picturing it as it flows onward to a place three hundred miles from here where it will pour into the Mississippi, one is struck by the sheer beauty of this country, of its goodness and unrealized goodness, of the limitless potential that it holds to render life rewarding and the spirit clean. Surely there is enough for everyone within the country. It is a tragedy that these good things are not more widely shared. All our children ought to be allowed a stake in the enormous richness of America. Whether they were born to poor white Appalachians or to wealthy Texans, to poor black people in the Bronx or to rich people in Manhasset or Winnetka, they are all quite wonderful and innocent when they are small. We soil them needlessly."
I've marked quite a few quotations about this book in Goodreads, but there are just so many. But I think Kozol continues to demonstrate some major issues in today's society, our assumptions, and our schooling system.
"Terms such as 'attaint of blood' are rarely used today, and, if they were, they would occasion public indignation; but the rigging of the game and the acceptance, which is nearly universal, of uneven playing fields reflect a dark unspoken sense that other people's children are of less inherent value than our own. 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 we spend it. But it's probably a secondary matter. Other factors--family and background--seem to be a great deal more important.' In these ways they fend off dangers of disturbing introspection; and this, in turn, enables them to give their children something far more precious than the simple gift of pedagogic privilege. They give them uncontaminated satisfaction in their victories. Their children learn to shut from mind the possibility that they are winners in an unfair race, and they seldom let themselves lose sleep about the losers.
"Defining unfairness as the difficulty that a Great Neck graduate encounters at a top-flight private college, to which any child in the South Bronx would have given her right arm to be admitted, strikes one as a way of rendering the term so large that it means almost nothing. 'What is unfair,' he is saying in effect, 'is what I determine to be unfair. What I find unfair is what affects my child, not somebody else's child in New York."
"'My children,' says Elizabeth, a friend of mine who lives in a black neighborhood of Boston, 'know very well the system is unfair. They also know that they are living in a rich society. They see it on TV, and in advertisements, and in the movies. They see the president at his place in Maine, riding around the harbor in his motor boat and playing golf with other wealthy men. They know that men like these did not come out of schools in Roxbury or Harlem. They know that they were given something extra. They don't know exactly what it is, but they have seen enough, and heard enough, to know that men don't speak like that and look like that unless they have been fed with silver spoons--and went to schools that had a lot of silver spoons and other things that cost a lot... So they know this other world exists, and, when you tell them that the government can't find the money to provide them with a decent place to go to school, they don't believe it and they know that it's a choice that has been made--a choice about how much they matter in society. They see it as a message: "This is to tell you that you don't much matter."'"
"'If you're black you have to understand--white people would destroy their schools before they'd let our children sit beside their children. They would leave their homes and sell them for a song in order not to live with us and see our children socializing with their children.'"
"Night after night, on television, Americans can watch police or federal agents rounding up black men and black teen-agers. The sight of white policemen breaking down the doors of houses, black people emerging with their heads bent low in order to avoid the television cameras, has become a form of prime-time television entertainment in America. The story that is told by television cameras is a story of deformity. The story that is not told is the lifelong deformation of poor children by their own society and government. We hear of an insatiable attraction to consumer goods like sneakers, stereos and video recorders. The story that we do not hear is of the aggressive marketing of these commodities in neighborhoods where very poor black people live: neighborhoods where appetites for purchasable mediocrity are easily inflamed because there sometimes is so little that is rich and beautiful to offer competition. Once these children learn that lovely and transcendent things are not for them, it may be a little easier to settle for the cheaper satisfactions."
"'When they hear of all these murders, all these men in prison, all these women pregnant with no husbands, they don't buy the explanation that it's poverty, or public schools, or racial segregation. They say, "We didn't have much money when we started out, but we led clean and decent lives. We did it. Why can't they?" I try to get inside that statement. So I ask them what they mean. What I hear is something that sounds very much like a genetic answer: "They don't have it." What they mean is lack of brains, or lack of drive, or lack of willingness to work. Something like that. Whatever it is, it sounds almost inherent. Some of them are less direct. They don't say genetics; what they talk about is history. "This is what they have become, for lots of complicated reasons. Slavery, injustice or whatever." But they really do believe it when they say that this is what they have become, that this is what they are. And they don't believe that better schools or social changes will affect it very much. So it comes down to an explanation that is so intrinsic, so immutable, that it might as well be called genetic. They see a slipshod deviant nature--violence, lassitude, a reckless sexuality, a feverish need to over-produce--as if it were a character imprinted on black people. The degree to which this racial explanation is accepted would surprise you.'"
Okay last one:
"Standing here by the Ohio River, watching it drift west into the edge of the horizon, picturing it as it flows onward to a place three hundred miles from here where it will pour into the Mississippi, one is struck by the sheer beauty of this country, of its goodness and unrealized goodness, of the limitless potential that it holds to render life rewarding and the spirit clean. Surely there is enough for everyone within the country. It is a tragedy that these good things are not more widely shared. All our children ought to be allowed a stake in the enormous richness of America. Whether they were born to poor white Appalachians or to wealthy Texans, to poor black people in the Bronx or to rich people in Manhasset or Winnetka, they are all quite wonderful and innocent when they are small. We soil them needlessly."