In many of the high schools in the South Bronx, more children will end up in prison than will go to college.
Interpretation
The quote points out the stark reality of educational and social challenges faced by children in the South Bronx.
This quote by Jonathan Kozol highlights the alarming situation in many high schools in the South Bronx, where systemic issues result in a greater likelihood of children ending up in prison rather than pursuing higher education. It underscores the profound impact of socioeconomic factors and the urgent need for reform in the education and justice systems to ensure that every child has the opportunity to succeed and thrive.
In practice
This quote can be used in a discussion about the education reform needed in struggling communities.
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.
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.
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.
For it is humanly certain that most of us remember very little of what we have read. To open almost any book a second time is to be reminded that we had forgotten well-nigh everything that the writer told us. Parting from the narrator and his narrative, we retain only a fading impression; and he, as it were, takes the book away from us and tucks it under his arm.
The illiterate of the future will not be the person who cannot read. It will be the person who does not know how to learn.
Reading should not be presented to children as a chore, a duty. It should be offered as a gift.
Like all readers, I want my limits to be drawn by my own sensibilities, not by my melanin count.
I think of reading like a balanced diet; if your sentences are too baggy, too baroque, cut back on fatty Foster Wallace, say, and pick up Kafka as roughage.
Teachers teach because they care. Teaching young people is what they do best. It requires long hours, patience, and care.
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