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.
The atmosphere of libraries, lecture rooms and laboratories is dangerous to those who shut themselves up in them too long. It separates us from reality like a fog.
Three Rules for Literary Success: 1. Read a lot. _x000D_ 2. Write a lot. 3. Read a lot more, write a lot more.
From the standpoint of the child, the great waste in the school comes from his inability to utilize the experiences he gets outside the school in any complete and free way within the school itself; while, on the other hand, he is unable to apply in daily life what he is learning at school. That is the isolation of the school β its isolation from life.
I think that the greatest education in the world is the education which helps one to be able to do the right things at the time it has to be done.
The usual way the people are taught to think in amerika is that each subject is in a little compartment and has no relation to any other subject. For the most part, we receive fragments of unrelated knowledge, and our education follows no logical format or pattern. It is exactly this kind of education that produces people who donβt have the ability to think for themselves and who are easily manipulated.
I learn something new every game. Every game is always different, no matter how you try and think about it beforehand.
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