An End to Inequality by Jonathan Kozol

Seven Essential Quotes

Competent teachers do not need to make that choice. They know that children need to be prepared to go out and earn a living when they’re no longer children. The question that many of them ask, however, is whether students who are only six or eight or ten years old ought to be perceived as just so many economic units in a corporate society, and long before they’re old enough to choose the kinds of lives they might like to lead and the work in which they might, or might not, find some satisfaction.

Placing a price on a child’s right to meet a basic need, turning that right into a privilege that a child has to buy—and the whole idea of monetizing childhood behavior to this extreme degree—according to the teacher aide, would have been unthinkable in the school she had attended as a child in a wealthy suburb of New York. I think it would be anathema as well in most of the white and wealthy districts that I visit to the west and north of Boston.

She also said she thought it was insulting to good teachers to ask them to recycle this simplistic jargon. She told me about a person that she called “the Efficacy man,” who was sent into her building when she was a young teacher. “He had some kind of three-point plan to make us more effective—but he said ‘efficacious.’ It was all a bunch of bloated language about ‘competency’ and ‘rigor’. We’d heard it all before.…”

It’s a wonder that is took so long. Robert E. Lee no longer has a place of honor on the front wall of the school. But the shadow of plantation days is still a presence there. In a somber citadel of hypersegregation that was fiscally bankrupt at the time when I was there, the programmed voices and robotic recitations of those children just seemed very sad to me. I wondered if the children in that class had any sense at all of their city’s history of fighting against servitude.

Locking kids in closets, where they often wet themselves, or defecate, and cry out for their mothers, turned out to be a more familiar practice than I knew. In one instance in New York, according to the New York Daily News, “a tiny padded room … about the size of a walk-in closet” became “a reallife nightmare for two young boys,” one in the first grade, the other in kindergarten. The kindergarten child, according to his mother, underwent an anxiety attack and had to be taken to the hospital.

Children spend something like six or seven hours in their classrooms every day, five days a week, for forty or more weeks a year, for thirteen years, a total of approximately 18,000 hours if they stay in high school long enough to graduate. If they repeat a grade or two or are required to remain in school for afternoon tutorials to drill them for their next exam, it’s probably more than 20,000 hours. That’s a good big chunk of anyone’s existence. Are all those days and years and hours to be seen as little more than basic training for utilitarian adulthood? Does the present tense of childhood have no inherent value of its own?

Most of these books and dozens of other old or modern treasures are usually listed by the state or district as recommended titles for kids of different ages, and they’re usually there, somewhere in the classroom, packed in shelves or boxes. Too often, however, unless I’m in the kind of school where progressive values have survived and teachers are allowed some sensible autonomy, the books remain there in the shelves and boxes for too many days and hours while children fill in bubbles on their practice texts. Whether students read these texts on a sheet of paper passed out by the teacher or on a laptop or a tablet, it’s a shallow and reductive exercise. The teachers I admire most tell me that they hate it. They did not come into teaching in order to become the dutiful technicians of mechanistic learning. They want to seed the future of their students with a lifelong love of reading.