The Shame of the Nation: The Restoration of Apartheid Schooling in America

“The goal was not to find a more efficient way of governing a segregated school. The goal was not to find a more ingenious way of teaching vowel sounds and consonant blends to segregated children. The goal was not to find a more inventive way of introducing pieces of ‘essential knowledge’—dates of wars, or names of kings, or multiples of nine—into the minds of segregated children. The goal was not to figure out a way to run a more severe and strictly regimented school for segregated children or, at the opposite extreme, a more progressive and more ‘innovative’ school for segregated children. Nor, as welcome as this might have been, was it to build a smaller school or physically more pleasing school for segregated children. The goal was to unlock the chains that held these children within caste-and-color sequestration and divorced them from the mainstream of American society.”

Here, Kozol describes how the integration of public schools fits into the larger battle for civil rights, as explained to him by his mentors in Boston’s Black community. Kozol describes how his goal is not to make segregated schools better or more efficient. The goal is to address the fundamental problem of Black children’s exclusion from mainstream American culture and society.

“One of the consequences of their isolation, as the pastor has observed, is that they have little knowledge of the ordinary reference points that are familiar to most children in the world that Pineapple described as ‘over there.’ In talking with adolescents, for example, who were doing relatively well in school and said they hoped to go to college, I have sometimes mentioned colleges such as Columbia, Manhattanville, Cornell, or New York University, and found that references like these were virtually unknown to them.”

Kozol describes how complete Black children’s isolation is in the Bronx. Even if they might have academic aspirations or dream of college, they do not know their options. Universities like Columbia and Cornell are well-known to most New Yorkers and even most of white society outside of New York City, so they should be common reference points for New York children preparing for college.

“It is notable in this respect that, in all the many writings and proposals dedicated to the alteration of self-image among inner-city youth and the reversal of debilitating pressures from their peers, the suggestion is virtually never made that one of the most direct ways to reduce the damage done to children by peer pressure is to change the make-up of their peers by letting them go to schools where all their classmates are not black and brown and poor, and children and grandchildren of the poor, but where a healthy confidence that one can learn is rooted in the natural assumptions of Americans who haven’t been laid waste by history.”

Kozol discusses the need to counteract inner-city children’s “self-doubt,” observing how some schools employ various motivational chants at the start of the school day. However, Kozol argues that the students’ self-confidence would be most improved by integrating schools, thereby eliminating the source of feelings of inferiority.