More money is put into prisons than into schools. That, in itself, is the description of a nation bent on suicide. I mean, what is more precious to us than our own children? We are going to build a lot more prisons if we do not deal with the schools and their inequalities.
Interpretation
This quote highlights the troubling prioritization of funding for prisons over education, stressing the importance of addressing educational inequalities.
Jonathan Kozol's quote points out the alarming reality that a nation invests more in its prison system than in its schools, revealing a deep societal flaw. By suggesting that this is a form of self-destruction, he emphasizes the vital need to prioritize education, particularly for children, as they represent the future of society. If inequalities in education are not addressed, the cycle of incarceration and societal failure will only continue to escalate, leading to more prisons being built instead of schools.
In practice
This quote could be used in a discussion about educational reform at a school board meeting.
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.
The education of youth, an employment of more consequence than making laws and preaching the gospel, because it lays the foundation on which both law and gospel rest for success.
No matter how long you play the guitar, there's always something else to learn.
I don't care who writes a nation's laws - or crafts its advanced treaties - if I can write its economics textbooks.
It appears to me that if one wants to make progress in mathematics, one should study the masters and not the pupils.
When our students fail, we, as teachers, too, have failed.
I'm the product of the classical, old-fashioned European education that is broad-based. You want to get your degree in the world, you have to study all sorts of things.
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