Sadly to say, however, the physical conditions are not the students biggest set backs in these schools. The biggest setback for these students are the leaders who view them as assembly line workers and robots. On pg. 98 Kozol quotes a head of a Chicago school saying "these robots are going to producing taxes", I find it absolutely dehumanizing to view these children are mindless robots trained to make money for the government. With this mindset we are limiting the children to only a few possibilities; we are telling them they are only good enough for one type of work. This type of mindset kills the dreams and self-confidence of these students; a child can only hear "you are not good enough, you wont amount to anything" so many times before they start to believe it. Kozol paints us a very grim picture of what our education system is doing to most of the children.
One criticism of Kozol's book so far is that it seems to be very repetitive. I am half way done with the book and I feel that I have read the same story over and over again. While I know it is important to show that each school that he visited had the same problems, I feel that time would have been better spent if he actually talked more about ways to fix these problems. Hopefully the next half of the book will focus more on the solutions instead of the problems.
"These robots are going to be producing taxes"
ReplyDeleteI agree, this comment is horrendous. I think I gasped outloud when I read it. I suppose its obvious how we let our schools sink to such horrible conditions if higher officials consider our students nothing more than robots that will pay taxes.
I also agree with you and Jeremy that I felt like the book was repetitive. I think it is necessary, to an extent, so that we see how many schools are affected by this problem. However, it does get to be a little overwhelming. I, like Jeremy, am hoping that all of these statistics about the terrible conditions will somehow lead to a way to fix it in the end.