n the South Bronx is set in a windowless skating rink next to a mortuary with class size up to thirty-five. The school contains a library of only seven hundred books and no playground. This school is ninety- percent black and Hispanic. Only a few minutes north of that school Kozol visits another school in a more affluent part of the Bronx with an overwhelmingly white and Asian population. Flowering trees, two playing fields, and a playground surround this public school. The school has a planetarium and a library with over eight thousand books. Kozol comments that, “nearly forty years after Brown vs. the Board of Education many of are schools are still separate but no longer even remotely equal.”Kozol’s main argument is that public education should be free and equal to people of all economic classes. Kozol believes that children from poor families are cheated out of a future by unequipped, understaffed and under funded schools in the United State’s inner cities and less affluent suburbs. The majority of these children are non-white, and living amongst poverty and crime. Kozol argues about the unfair standards we expect these underprivileged children to rise to. Children in these poor areas are being compared to children in affluent areas where the quality of their education is much higher. Kozol asks how these children will succeed in today’s world if they are not given the same opportunities as affluent schools give their children. Kozol believes that by depriving our poorer children of their basic needs we are forcing them into lives of crime, poverty and a never-ending cycle of inequalities in education. Kozol stresses that these students must be taught that “savage inequalities” do not have to exist between them and students in more affluent schools, and that all children are entitled to an equal education.I had many different reactions to this book. At first, I was horrified an...
