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.
Interpretation
Kozol critiques the educational system, highlighting inequalities that perpetuate privilege and detachment from societal issues.
In this quote, Jonathan Kozol sheds light on the systemic issues in education, suggesting that schools efficiently serve the status quo rather than address deeper societal inequalities. He points out that affluent children receive a quality education that reinforces their privilege, while those from marginalized backgrounds attend underfunded schools that prepare them primarily for servitude. This stark contrast promotes a cycle of privilege and ignorance among the privileged, thereby detaching them from the struggles faced by the less fortunate.
In practice
This quote could be used in a discussion about education reform at a community event.
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.'
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.
For thousands and thousands of American kids, libraries are the only safe place they can find to study, a haven free from the dangers of street or the numbing temptations of television. As schools cut back services, the library looms even more important to countless children.
It was mostly through pop culture, through hip-hop, through Dungeons & Dragons and comic books that I acquired much of my vocabulary.
The capital-T Truth is about life BEFORE death. It is about the real value of a real education, which has almost nothing to do with knowledge, and everything to do with simple awareness; awareness of what is so real and essential, so hidden in plain sight all around us, all the time, that we have to keep reminding ourselves over and over: "This is water." "This is water." It is unimaginably hard to do this, to stay conscious and alive in the adult world day in and day out.
They're all so highly educated, you know. Education is a great shield against experience. It offers so much, ready-made and all from the best shops, that there's a temptation to miss your own life in pursuing the lives of your betters. It makes you wise in some ways, but it can make you a blindfolded fool in others.
Secretly, in studies and attics and schoolrooms all over America, people must be writing.
All human beings are born with unique gifts. The healthy functioning community depends on realizing the capacity to develop each gift.
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