The Shame of the Nation

This week, I finished reading The Shame of the Nation: The Restoration of Apartheid Schooling in America by Jonathan Kozol.  If you haven't read anything by Kozol, you really should go to your local library and check out one of his books. He is an educator that has written extensively about the plight of children in urban schools.  A few weeks ago, I read Savage Inequalities, which is a book he wrote in the late 80s/early 90s to expose the inequality in educational experience between children in the suburbs versus the cities.  The sad truth is that not much has changed for these children in the twenty years between these books.

There are so many issues raised in his books about the educational system in the United States that I could write pages about them.  Issues like the financing of school systems, the segregation of minority children, the high dropout rates for minority children, and the role of politics and business in educational decision making.  In my attempt to keep this post short, I just want to comment on one little piece from the book that really stuck with me.  Here is a quote:

"Merit, no matter how it may have been attained, is somehow self-confirming.  They early advantages one may have had become irrelevant to most of us once a plateau of high achievement has been reached.  The years we may have spent when we were three or four years old in a superb developmental preschool, the strategies our parents may have used to win us entrance to a first-rate elementary school, and all the other preferential opportunities that may have introduced us to the channels in which academic competence has been attained - all this falls out of view once we arrive in a position in which we can demonstrate to others, and ourselves, that our proficiences are indisputably superior to those of other students of our age who may not have had these opportunities."  (p. 140-141)

Just before this particular quote, Kozol was talking to students in an privileged high school in New York City.  The students were basically saying that they deserved to have all the benefits afforded to them in their high school - great teachers, cultural experiences, top notch facilities, and a variety of high level courses - because they were the best students.  They failed to realize they were the best students because of all the extra benefits they had received throughout their life. It was easy for them to look down on the students in other schools who were not as academically successful, but they didn't acknowledge that these students have been educated in subpar buildings with overcrowded classrooms, in many cases without textbooks or regular teachers.

These are the same people that will grow up in many cases to be our nation's leaders.  How can we expect them to have empathy for people who are not as privileged as them, when, as young people, they have no empathy for those less fortunate?