An End to Inequality

January 15, 2024
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.