Savage Inequalities

In the mid-1960s, Jonathan Kozol, a public elementary school teacher, published Death at an Early Age, a riveting account of teaching 4th grade in Boston. He documented in detail the banal humiliations, mistreatment, and injustices endured by poor Black students in Northern schools. The book won a national book award and helped to galvanize the movement for full human and civil rights as it moved into the cities of the North. Kozol later marched with Martin Luther King Jr. and became widely recognized as a pivotal figure in the struggle for equity in education. In his book, Savage Inequalities, Kozol illustrates the hypocrisy in all claims of equal opportunity and access by comparing schools for the privileged with schools for the marginalized and the disadvantaged.

Kozol recognized that schools serve societies, and that in many ways all schools are microcosms of the societies in which they're embeddedthey are both mirror and window onto social reality. If one understands the schools, one can see the whole of society; if one fully grasps the intricacies of society, one will know something true about its schools. Apartheid schools would highlight apartheid reality, and racist schools would indict the society that built and maintained them. In an [Page 758]authentic democracy, we would expect to find schools defined by equality, cooperation, inclusion, and full participation, places that honor diversity while building unity.

Kozol has issued a steady stream of important books for over four decades now: Illiterate America, Children of the Revolution, The Night Is Long and I am Far From Home, and the runaway best-sellers: Rachel and Her Children, Amazing Grace, and Shame of the Nation, each filled with lyrical description, arresting metaphors, and dialogue that is heartbreaking.

His laser-like examination of the class and racial fault-lines haunting American democracy has served for a long time as a kind of atlas from the classroom to the larger society, and with Savage Inequalities, he added a new phrase to the American vocabulary. Throughout this book, Kozol reminds us that while many have implicitly settled for the obscene logic of separate but equalthe new apartheidthe promise of Brown v. Board of Education was always a moral promise, an affirmation of the full humanity of the descendants of enslaved people, of all people, and the requirement that everyone in a democracy be granted equal education, equal opportunity, and full respect and dignitynothing less. The right to a decent education is a fundamental human right.

School has always been and will always be contested spaceWhat should be taught? In what way? Toward what end? By and for whom?and at bottom the struggle is over the essential questions: Who is to be included in the family of the fully human? What does it mean to construct a meaningful, purposeful, and valuable life in the world, here and now? What demands does freedom make? We live in a time when the assault on disadvantaged communities is particularly harsh and at the same time gallingly obfuscated. Access to adequate resources and decent facilities, to relevant curriculum, to opportunities to reflect on and to think critically about the world is unevenly distributed along predictable lines of class and color.

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