Hypersegregated inner-city schools - in which one finds no more than five or ten white children, at the very most, within a student population of as many as 3,000 - are the norm, not the exception, in most northern urban areas today.
Interpretation
The quote highlights the severe racial segregation in urban schools, emphasizing that it is a widespread issue rather than an anomaly.
Jonathan Kozol's statement draws attention to the alarming reality of hypersegregated schools in northern urban areas, where the racial makeup of student populations drastically lacks diversity. By noting the extremely low presence of white children in predominantly minority schools, he underscores the systemic inequalities in education and raises questions about the societal structures that perpetuate such segregation.
In practice
This quote can be used in a presentation discussing the challenges of urban education.
A great deal has been written in recent years about the purported lack of motivation in the children of the Negro ghettos. Little in my experience supports this, yet the phrase has been repeated endlessly, and the blame in almost all cases is placed somewhere outside the classroom.
Schooling should not be left to the whim or wealth of village elders. I believe that we should fund all schools in the U.S. with our national resources. All these kids are being educated to be Americans, not citizens of Minneapolis or San Francisco.
An awful lot of people come to college with this strange idea that there's no longer segregation in America's schools, that our schools are basically equal; neither of these things is true.
I wrote the first book, and I thought people would say: 'Separate and unequal schools in the City of Boston? I didn't know that. Let's go out and fix it.'
The trouble is not that schools don't work; they do. They're excellent machines for achieving historically accepted purposes. In suburban schools are children of the rich, who grow up to privilege and anesthetic oblivion to pain - and who then use the servants produced by ghetto schools.
Children are not simply commodities to be herded into line and trained for the jobs that white people who live in segregated neighborhoods have available.
Men and women must be educated, in a great degree, by the opinions and manners of the society they live in.
Emotional 'literacy' implies an expanded responsibility for schools in helping to socialize children. This daunting task requires two major changes: that teachers go beyond their traditional mission and that people in the community become more involved with schools as both active participants in children's learning and as individual mentors.
The youth need to be enabled to become job generators from job seekers.
To begin with, it's true, she read with trepidation and some unease. The sheer endlessness of books outfaced her and she had no idea how to go on; there was no system to her reading, with one book leading to another, and often she had two or three on the go at the same time.
By reading so much, my vocabulary automatically improved along with my comprehension.
When I say to a parent, "read to a child", I don't want it to sound like medicine. I want it to sound like chocolate.
Subscribe for the occasional hand-picked quote. No noise.