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.
The best time to plan a book is while you're doing the dishes.
And that's why books are never going to die. It's impossible. It's the only time we really go into the mind of a stranger, and we find our common humanity doing this. So the book doesn't only belong to the writer, it belongs to the reader as well, and then together you make it what it is.
Far more thought and care go into the composition of any prominent ad in a newspaper or magazine than go into the writing of their features and editorials.
Many books that tell you how to achieve come from a privileged position. If you can't see yourself in the advice, how can you use it?
For a highly motivated learner, it's not like knowledge is secret and somehow the Internet made it not secret. It just made knowledge easy to find. If you're a motivated enough learner, books are pretty good.
We do not wish to abolish teaching and to make every man his own master, but if the curates will not teach the gospel, the layman must have the Scripture, and read it for himself, taking God for his teacher.
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