Jonathan Kazol: Savage Inequalities (1991)

Savage Inequalities (1991)

Jonathan Kozol

Kozol spent two years visiting schools and talking with students and finding an astonishing amount of racial segregation. Many of the schools he visited had an astronomical amount of damage which gave the students very little to no hope. This reminds me a lot of my middle school. I went to Southwood middle school about two miles away from my house. It was from grades 6-8 and had about three thousand kids. I couldn't walk through the hallway without being pushed into a wall or smacking into someone. I dreaded going to school with all those kids and having a to race to my classes to avoid getting the squeaky chair in the back. I had loved going to school back in elementary school where the teachers knew you as a name rather than a number. Going to a big school where no one really cared about either you or the school contributes to the loss of interest in education or pursuing it.

There was a teacher Jonathan Kozol wrote about; his name was Jack Forman and he was the head of the English department. He is described as a “scholarly and handsome gray-haired man”. Mr. Forman is a teacher who cares about more than the money; he cares about the well being of his students. He gets the difficulties his students face and understands that even thought these kids have lived a tough life, growing up in a rough neighborhood they are still children and he “speaks to them like children.” At Southwood there was a young professor named Mr. Cameron. Like Mr. Forman, Mr. Cameron cared about more than the money. He saw my struggle to find the motivation I had lost moving to a big school. Mr. Cameron had high expectations for us and made sure that we had high expectations for ourselves. It was because of Mr. Cameron that most of us were able to move on to high school.

I was the only kid in my family to go to public school. I saw the beautiful campuses of my brother and sister’s school compared to the cinder block I went to school in. They were always so excited to go to school and eat the cafeteria food while I dreaded  going back to school on Mondays. Jonathan Kozols study is correct in saying that the environment we spend most of our days in has  large impact on whether or not we reach our potential. 

In the Beginning: The 1893 Report of the Committee of Ten (1893) Creating the Comprehensive High School (1959)

In the Beginning: The 1893 Report of the Committee of Ten (1893) 

Creating the Comprehensive High School (1959)

Its hard to believe that in 1890 only 6.7 percent of fourteen to seventeen year olds attended high school and today in 2010 it is mandatory for anyone under the age of sixteen to attend school. Growing up being forced to wake up early everyday to go to school definitely made me detest the whole education process but reading this has made me realize how much work and time went into creating the subjects and purpose of secondary schools. I never took the time to realize all the factors that go into creating the guidelines of education or what goes into creating the course schedule. Things like how many hours a week should school, what topics should we study, should we be required to graduate high school and go into college level courses, etc. So many issues had to be covered in order to create the educational system that most of us take advantage of because of the time that we have to wake up in the morning or the work we have to do at home. In most of the matters brought before the conferences, that took place to created the guidelines of education that we still follow today, the decision of the conference was unanimous. This is incredible when you consider the different institutions, professional experiences and personalities represented in each meeting. This holds great weight because deciding on what type of pizza to get at a slumber party with five different girls can get tricky enough with all the different personalities and preferences, and that is only pizza, I cant even fathom creating an entire system of education and having the decisions be unanimous for the most part.  

I had no idea the high school I went to in known as a “specialized” high school, New World provided a vocational education and admits students on a very selective basis. But a comprehensive high school is much different. Comprehensive high schools have three main objectives; to provide a general education, provide good elective programs and to provide satisfactory programs for those whose future depends on this education that will lead them into a university. James B. Conant, a former leading education researcher in the United States, did a survey and found eight schools that were in his judgement satisfactory in fulfilling the these three main objectives. What I found interesting were his results on gender in these schools. The academic inventory showed that more than half of the academically talented boys had studied at least seven years of mathematics, science, English and social studies while in no school had a majority of academically talented girls studied that same amount. But on the other hand boys did not choose to study more than two years of a foreign language while a majority of the girls studied foreign language for three or more years. I find these findings fascinating given the gender unit we just finished with, and I wonder if we studied more into these findings if gender role is a larger issue not just in how we act and what we do but also in what we choose to study.