Jonathan Kozol's Savage Inequalities By Jonathan Kozol

738 Words2 Pages

Savage Inequalities by Jonathan Kozol is an account of his travels to East St. Louis, Illinois; North Lawndale and the south side of Chicago; New York, New York; Camden, New Jersey; Washington, D.C.; San Antonio, Texas; and Cincinnati, Ohio, researching their school systems. Kozol’s book exposes the glaring inequalities present in these cities. Kozol devotes a chapter to each of these cities—with the exception of San Antonio and Cincinnati—identifying the inequalities children there face. His statistics expose these shocking injustices perpetrated by the powerful. The truths Kozol uncovers in Savage Inequalities challenge anyone’s misconceptions about equality in the United States. Jonathan Kozol is a schoolteacher who began his teaching career in 1964 in Boston. In 1988, he realized that he’d strayed from his passion for teaching children. This is when he began his two-year journey around the country, visiting schools and schoolchildren in cities where he was welcomed, or where he had acquaintances. The racial segregation he encountered shocked him, as did the indifference of influential people. In East St. Louis, a city that “is 98 percent black… has no obstetric …show more content…

Another school in the same district is located “in a former roller-skating rink” with a “lack of windows” an a scarcity of textbooks and counselors. The ratio of children to counselors is 930 to one. For 1,300 children, of which “90 percent [are] black and Hispanic” and “10 percent are Asian, white, or Middle Eastern”, the school only has 26 computers. Another school in the district, its principal relates, “‘was built to hold one thousand students’” but has “‘1,550.’” This school is also shockingly nonwhite where “’29 percent '” of students are “‘black [and] 70 percent [are]

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