The Shame of the Nation

By Elana Berkowitz, Campus Progress. Posted September 22, 2005.

Jonathan Kozol isn't subtle. He is angry. A veteran of 40 years spent on the frontlines of education reform, his new book is titled Shame of the Nation: The Restoration of Apartheid Schooling in America.

The book, told primarily through the voices of teachers and students, vividly exposes the ways that the American educational system has betrayed lower-income inner-city children. Kozol describes schools that are separated by a 15-minute drive but that offer educational opportunities that are light years apart - primarily white schools that offer drama club and AP classes and primarily black schools that require classes like hairdressing.

One teacher at a South Bronx elementary school who Kozol spoke with pointed to one of her students and said that after 18 years of teaching, the child was "the first white student I have ever taught." Kozol, a Harvard graduate, Rhodes scholar, author of books including Savage Inequalities and former public school teacher, talked about race, education, and Shame of the Nation.

How do we activate liberally minded young people who may graduate with a lot of debt and who are wavering between Teach for America and a lucrative career at Goldman-Sachs? What do you say to those students?

First of all, I think there's a myth most college students are selfishly inclined to earning money quickly or so determined to make their way in the corporate world that they don't have any time or inclination to go out and do the decent things that are needed to change the world. In fact, I find thousands of college students, tens of thousands, wherever I go, packing the auditoriums wherever I speak, and then typically 200 of them will keep me up for another two hours asking me exactly where they're needed. They are not willing to suppress their sense of justice or postpone their activism until some later time in life until after they've established a lucrative career. They want to do it now and they're right to have that feeling because if they postpone the moment of ethical action for another five years, the likelihood is that they'll never return to it. Once they go on to law school or whatever career it may be, they almost never return to that state of mind where they're willing to take risks for the cause of justice.

Secondly, a lot of young people are frightened by their parents or by the older generation because older people will say to them, "Hey, you might ruin your careers if you do something decent first," or "you might never be able to pay off your college debt." Typically for young teachers out of college, I know thousands of young people who go right into public school as soon as they're certified to teach. Virtually all of them want to protest the conditions that they see within but some of them are scared; again their parents say, "don't take a chance on speaking out; you might lose your job."

What I tell these young people is, the world is not as dangerous as the older generation would like you to believe. Anyone I know who has ever taken a risk and lost a job has ended up getting a better one two years later. The ones I pity are the ones who never stick out their neck for something they believe, never know the taste of moral struggle, and never have the thrill of victory.

And what do you say to those who aren't interested in getting involved or who feel like this is a problem outside of themselves?

Some young people will tentatively say to me, "well maybe I oughtta get involved." Well I say, "You don't have any choice; you're involved already. Even if you never do anything about this, you've benefited from an unjust system. You're already the winner in a game that was rigged to your advantage from the start. If we did not have an apartheid school system in America, what is the chance you'd walk into this college so easily? It would have been a lot harder because there would have been a far larger applicant pool of highly capable minority kids to compete with you.

In a sense, those of us - and I've had a privileged education, too - those of us who have those benefits have to live with the uncomfortable knowledge that all our victories in life will be contaminated by the fact that we were winners in a game that was never played on a level playing field.

Your new book focuses on what you call apartheid in the American educational system. A lot of people think of apartheid as a term referring to a moment now relegated to political history. How do you see it happening here and now?

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