Quotes from "The Shame of the Nation" by Jonathon Kozol Chapters 1-3

Page 28

““It’s like we’re being hidden,” said a fifteen-year-old girl named Isabel I met some years ago in Harlem, in attempting to explain to me the ways in which she and her classmates understood the segregation of their neighborhood and schools. “It’s as if you have been put in a garage where, if they don’t have room for something but aren’t sure if they should throw it out, they put it where they don’t need to think of it again.””

Reading this quote puts everything that Kozol is saying about segregation into a more personal perspective, because it is coming from a young girl who is living it every day. Instead of reading about the factual figures behind which schools are segregated and why, Kozol brings us into the mindset of the people who are living in it. I personally could never have imagined that any child, or person, could ever feel that way about themselves just because of the color of their skin. But I now see that the color of this girl’s skin is making her feel like she is inferior because she goes to a school that is falling apart and doesn’t have the same resources as the schools around her. If she feels this way now as a child in her school, will her feeling of inferiority remain with her and will it stop her from being the best that she can be all throughout the rest of her life? Will she ever get to know the other world that is outside of the closed in life she is living? Childhood is the most important time in a person’s life because it is the time when someone grows the most. As a child, our brains are like a sponge, soaking up everything around us which later forms the people we become. If all a child has to soak up is negativity and feelings of inferiority, they will not be able to grow into a well adjusted and confident person . On page 29, Kozol discusses the court (in 1954) saying that taking “black children away from white children” so that they would be in separate schools is demoralizing and would hurt the minds of the children in a way that it would never be able to be undone. The fifteen-year-old girl is a real-life example of the ruling of that court. If the court came to that conclusion in 1954, why is it that a young lady is feeling this way today, and if one person feels that way, how many others are hurting also? Have the people in America forgotten that they once believed that segregation would permanently hurt the people involved?

Page 20

““To give up on integration, while aware of its benefits,” write Orfield and his former Harvard colleague Susan Eaton, “requires us to consciously and deliberately accept segregation, while aware of its harms…””

People do this all the time, they ignore what is best for them (while knowing it is the best) and decide to do something that could be potentially harmful (the whole time knowing it is harmful). But when talking about segregation in the school systems, we are not talking about ourselves, we are talking about our children and grandchildren: our future. As Kozol states, our government has been stagnant towards the efforts to try and integrate our school systems for the last 25 years. During the time of Martin Luther King Jr. and for a short time afterwards, steps were taken in our government to form laws announcing the equality of people and helping for that truth to come into play in everyday life. However, things were never fully resolved everywhere when it came to people living in poverty, and as time wore on, things became worse. This is one of the biggest reasons for our segregated schools today: lack of government action. So not only is Orfield talking about the everyday people, but he is talking about the American government and its lack in action to help stop segregation. If we are aware of the harms that segregation can cause on a community, a school, a child, etc. then why are there still schools in the United States that are segregated? Kozol continues to state that having segregation in the school system cannot coexist with the healthy functioning of a multi-racial country. Could this be why there is still so much racism in today’s society? As a country, if we know that this is happening but do nothing about it, then how far have we truly come to prove that all peoples within our country are equal? 

Page 56

““Is the answer really to throw money into these dysfunctional and failing schools?” I’m often asked. “Don’t we have some better ways to make them work?””

Here, I am reminded of the quote “money is the root of all evil”. However, in this situation, it is not money itself that is evil, it is the situation involving the lack of money that is causing problems. Unfortunately, in today’s society, money really is one of the biggest things to help us get ahead. Not only in school systems, but in life. Without money, we really can’t do anything. When it comes to a school, the success of it relies largely on the materials and equipment that it has to help educate all of the students that attend. Also, the money that a school has pays for the teachers that teach the students attending. Without money in a school, there would not be enough teachers to teach the number of children that go there and the materials would either be outdated or there wouldn’t be enough for all of the students. So does a school that is failing and has a high turn-over rate of teachers really need a lot of money, or is there another way to help failing schools in their mission to better educate their students?

Page 60

“Those who search for signs of optimism often make the point that there are children who do not allow themselves to be demoralized by the conditions we have seen but do their work and keep their spirits high and often get good grades and seem, at least, to have a better chance than many of their peers to graduate from high school and go on to college-and, in any case, whether they do or not, refuse to let themselves be broken or embittered by the circumstances they may face.”

The biggest problem we may be facing when we think of this is: are we forcing children to grow up faster than they should? At a young age, more and more children are being forced to grow up with the stresses of poverty and racism surrounding them. It is absurd to think that a child can, or should be able to, handle such things. A child needs to be able to be a child: play, imagine, have fun, and worry about only what is due for homework the next day at school. To be able to calmly say that a few of the many students in a segregated school are able to rise above the situation around them is beyond the realm of being just. Does because a student can do it mean that they should do it? There is a quote by an author/comic strip writer, Lynda Barry, which fits the quote above; “We don't create a fantasy world to escape reality, we create it to be able to stay. I believe we have always done this, used images to stand and understand what otherwise would be intolerable." It brings up the reality of unhappy people making up a world that is happier than the one they are living in just so that they feel ok while they are living it. Is this what we are forcing the children in segregated schools to do? Are they being forced to look at their world in a light that is opposite from the truth just so that they can get through the school day? The ones who want to remain optimistic when talking about segregation may say that even if this is what is going on, it is ok because the children are able to succeed and continue to live happily by doing so. Are the children really happy though, or are they living in a fake world wondering what true happiness is really like.

Page 64

“”If you do what I tell you to do, how I tell you to do it, when I tell you to do it, you’ll get it right,” says a South Bronx principal observed by a reporter from The New York Times in laying out a memorizing rule for math to an assembly of her students. “If you don’t, you’ll get it wrong.””

This Skinnerian approach is led in the inner-city schools because the people in control believe that this level of total control in the classroom will help test scores rise and teachers to stay longer. This type of teaching does not allow any time for the student to act like a child. Mary Cowhey is a teacher in Massachusetts who teaches in a poverty stricken area and has taught her students using a transformative, hands-on approach with much success. In her book “Black Ants and Buddhists”, Cowhey gives us her stories of how she has helped her students grow into intelligent and bright young men and women using a teaching style that does not include her as a dictator, but rather as someone who is willing to get onto her students’ level and learn with them. At times, she even lets her students do the teaching. While reading her book, I have seen the success she has had in teaching her second grade students everything they need to know, and more. So will a dictator-like teaching style work with students? Can they learn when they are only allowed to speak or ask questions during the allotted time given to them by the teacher? Most importantly, can a system like that actually raise test scores and keep teachers longer if it is only causing a lot of anxiety amongst the teachers and students?

Page 65

“Silent lunches had been instituted in the cafeteria and, on days when children misbehaved, silent recess had been introduced as well. On those days, the students were obliged to stay indoors and sit in rows and maintain silence on the floor of a small room that had been designated “the gymnasium.””

This phenomenon is not only seen in segregated schools today, but is starting to be seen everywhere. With the focus being on higher test scores, teachers and school legislators are starting to cut back on the time that allows for students to take a break and have fun during the school day. NCLB, although having good intentions, has caused today’s education system to greatly stress good test scores so that each school can be deemed as a passing school. This has forced educators to buckle down on the amount of time a child spends learning, which usually means cutting out any free time in the day. However, how healthy is it really for students to spend all day working and studying with no real break. During lunch, students use the time to converse with their friends about things that can’t be brought up in class. Sometimes, children even use that time to vent about the stresses and struggles they are facing at home or in the classroom. So when a lunch period is forced to be silent, is that helping the students or hurting them? If a silent lunch can’t be used as punishment, are there other ways to help settle down students in a noisy lunchroom? Recess is also a time that students use to take a break from the stresses of school. Children need to be children. They need to be able to run around, yell, have fun, and move around after being in a classroom all day. When a child gets too stressed out, the ability for them to learn and retain information quickly diminishes. If the recess is there to help a child relax throughout a busy school day, isn’t it helping them to actually do better in school? Could recess be helping test scores to be as high as they are? What happens if recess is taken away and test scores actually drop, what will be done to change things then?