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The Shame of Nation: Educational Legislation and Inequality

Introduction

In today's global economic environment, where everything is competed for, parents give upmost priority to education of their children. Parents want to empower their kids for the future and are concerned regarding equal opportunity to best possible education. This equal opportunity is available in some countries but not all countries. This fact is highlighted by Jonathan Kozol in his treatise of the persistent socioeconomic and racial inequalities in the American school system today. The Economist recently depicted America's schools as unjust, and mentions that “some unlucky kids get a shoddy education” (Kozol, 2005, pp.34) while well-off children live in regions with property taxes, better education expenditure and excellent schools.

In The Shame of the Nation: The Restoration of Apartheid Schooling in America, Kozol would concur. He does not sugarcoat the issue of such educational inequality at all: in fact, his book is a searing, heart-rending portrait of the current U.S. educational crisis seen from diverse viewpoints. These include leaders and researchers closely following the dilemma, the teachers and administrators who struggle to motivate their disillusioned pupils from charred, decaying and hostile school environments, and the low-income, disproportionately minority children themselves, who face the daily reality of having to learn in such outrageous contexts.

Book Summary

After a gripping introduction, which gives the reader a retrospective look on how events in the civil rights era prompted Kozol to become an educator, Chapter One, “Dishonoring the Dead”, highlights the searing discrepancies between school age children affected by dire poverty and those that are not. Kozol states that “a segregated Inner-city school is “almost six times as likely” to be a school of concentrated poverty as is a school that has an overwhelmingly white population” (Kozol, pp. 20). Chapter 2, “Hitting them Hardest When they are Small”, begins with examples of student letters Kozol cites that beg for better school conditions: “You have all the thing and we do not have all the thing…can you help us?”(Kozol, pp. 39). As the book moves into a discussion of school practices and discrepancies in conditions, Chapter 3's “The Ordering Regime” tells of how B.F. Skinnerian-like, rote and drill classroom approaches in impoverished settings have come to be the norm in current urban educational systems, depriving teachers and students of opportunities for innovation. Chapter 4's “Preparing Minds for Markets” continues with examples of how elementary schools that assign various “managerial” tasks to students such as “Absence Managers” and “Coat Room Managers” infuse youth with the message that a solid work ethic “will prompt companies to give you opportunities to work, to prove yourself, no matter what you have done” (Kozol pp. 93).

Chapter 6, “A Hardening of Lines” demonstrates a widening gulf between the worlds of more complicated consumers of education influencing PTA boards to accept their children and the harsh reality of urban high schools that Kozol visits. This is followed by a saddening portrait of school conditions ranging from lack of materials to vermin-related problems in Chapter 7, “Excluding Beauty”. ...