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.