savage inqualities/by jonathan kozol

Savage Inequalities by Jonathan Kozol

Introduction

The author of the book Savage Inequalities ' is Jonathan Kozol . The book explores the education system for children in the United States and exposes the extremes of wealth and poverty in America 's public school system and the tragic impact it has on the underprivileged children Kozol worked as a teacher in the Boston Public School during the early 1960s and witnessed the unfairness of the system towards the poor students of the community . He worked in the basement of an underfinanced , entirely black "freedom

" school that had been set up in a Roxbury Church . It was here that Kozol directly experienced the dismal conditions in which children studied , due lack of state funds . The children were cramped in dirty corners and there were no study materials . Their reading levels were not standard and moreover , there was extreme racial segregation . In the early nineties , he worked at Mott Haven in South Bronx , New York City - another impoverished neighborhood He also saw that the children also suffered from inadequate medical care , lack of proper housing , unemployment and violence . Coming from this teaching background Jonathan Kozol does have a bias towards the poor and downtrodden and has through this book , he successfully exposes with examples and arguments the neglect of poor and black children in America

Author 's major hypothesis

Kozol unfolds the dark conditions in which poor black children study by narrating his experiences at East St . Louis , Illinois , which as a 98 percent black population and dubbed by the press as an inner city without an outer city . The question Jonathan Kozol puts before his readers in `Savage Inequalities is whether America is providing equal opportunities in education and if yes , how can one explain the conditions of the children left behind in places such as East St . Louis Ill , Chicago 's South Side , Camden and Jersey City , N .J , the slums of San Antonio , the South Bronx . His major finding is that children who attend schools in these places are cramped with 40 or 50 kids to a classroom , a new teacher every few weeks , little or no art , music foreign language , or advanced science courses , and too few books to go around . These schools have just one counselor for every 700 students holes in the roof , raw sewage in the basement and a record of 80 dropouts before graduation 'These are innocent children , after all Kozol writes in Savage Inequalities 'They have done nothing wrong They have committed no crime . They are too young to have offended us in any way at all . One searches for some way to understand why a society as rich and , frequently , as generous as ours would leave these children in their penury and squalor for so long-and with so little public indignation . Kozol shows that the normal response to lawsuits or legislative action in various places in America just forces states to spend equally on all school districts . This does not result in any solution because...