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The Restoration of Apartheid Schooling in America
Crown
September 2005
416 pages
ISBN: 1400052440
Hardcover
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Non-Fiction
"The nation needs to be confronted with the crime that
we're committing and the promises we are betraying. This is
a book about betrayal of the young, who have no power to
defend themselves. It is not intended to make readers
comfortable." Over the past several years, Jonathan
Kozol has visited nearly 60 public schools. Virtually
everywhere, he finds that conditions have grown worse for
inner-city children in the 15 years since federal courts
began dismantling the landmark ruling in Brown v. Board of
Education. First, a state of nearly absolute apartheid now
prevails in thousands of our schools. The segregation of
black children has reverted to a level that the nation has
not seen since 1968. Few of the students in these schools
know white children any longer. Second, a protomilitary form
of discipline has now emerged, modeled on stick-and-carrot
methods of behavioral control traditionally used in prisons
but targeted exclusively at black and Hispanic children. And
third, as high-stakes testing takes on pathological and
punitive dimensions, liberal education in our inner-city
schools has been increasingly replaced by culturally barren
and robotic methods of instruction that would be rejected
out of hand by schools that serve the mainstream of
society.
Filled with the passionate voices of
children and their teachers and some of the most revered and
trusted leaders in the black community, The Shame of the
Nation is a triumph of firsthand reporting that pays
tribute to those undefeated educators who persist against
the odds, but directly challenges the chilling practices now
being forced upon our urban systems by the Bush
administration. In their place, Kozol offers a humane,
dramatic challenge to our nation to fulfill at last the
promise made some 50 years ago to all our youngest citizens.
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