An End to Inequality
Breaking Down the Walls of Apartheid Education in America
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- USD 12.99
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- USD 12.99
Descripción editorial
An eloquent and passionate call for educational reparations, from the New York Times bestselling author
When Jonathan Kozol’s Death at an Early Age appeared in 1967, it rocked the education world. Based on the Rhodes Scholar’s first year of teaching in Boston’s Black community, the book described the abuse and neglect of children for no reason but the color of their skin. Since that National Book Award–winning volume, Kozol has spent more than fifty years visiting with children and working with their teachers in other deeply troubled and unequal public schools.
Now, in the culminating work of his career, Kozol goes back into the urban schools, where racial isolation is at the highest level since he became a teacher and is now compounded by a new regime of punitive instruction and coercive uniformity that is deemed to be appropriate for children who are said to be incapable of learning in more democratic ways, like children in more privileged communities.
Kozol believes it’s well past time to batter down the walls between two separate worlds of education and to make good, at long last, on the “promissory note” that Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. described on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial in 1963. Sure to resonate with current-day arguments for reparations in a broad array of areas, this is a book that points us to a future in which children learn together, across the lines of class and race, in schools where every child is accorded a full and equal share of the riches in this wealthiest of nations.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In this vigorous polemic, National Book Award winner Kozol (Death at an Early Age) condemns the subjugation of Black and Latino elementary school children to an education that stifles their imagination, and he forcefully calls for busing and desegregation as the solution. Drawing on visits to classrooms across the U.S. and years of teaching experience, Kozol asserts that struggling urban schools are characterized by "a pressure-cooker ethos of tightly scripted training, an often morbid code of discipline, and coerced uniformity." Such a pedagogy, according to Kozol, "inculcates unquestioning conformity" and strips learning of both its joy and the "act of exploration." Most troubling to Kozol is that these "crudely autocratic" pedagogic practices are often accompanied by police presence in the schools and the use of physical punishment. Dismantling these "walls of apartheid" requires the government to invest heavily in racially integrated schooling, he argues: "millions of our children across lines of class and race in beautifully and culturally expansive and richly funded classrooms." Kozol's vivid classroom scenes depict how mandated and rigidly controlled teaching practices negatively impact students' education, as well as teachers' ability to treat their students with respect. The result is an impassioned indictment of elementary school education in the U.S. and a cri de cœur for racial equity.