BOOK: Death at an Early Age - Jonathan Kozol (1967)

Death at an Early Age - Jonathan Kozol

My libertarian streak tells me that government shouldn't be directly involved in education.  It runs the risk of becoming indoctrination or rigid and uniform, as it has in so many states with standardized testing.  What is an elementary education?  What is its purpose?  And if government is to be responsible for it and taxpayers are to fund it, how do we guarantee that it is democratized in both availability and content?

Jonathan Kozol doesn't address these questions in his National Book Award winning expose on the Boston Public Schools.  He takes the democratizing of education for granted.  Everyone deserves an education.  An education should be made available to all who seek it (or are forced to attend school.)  The Boston public schools, if you were black, especially poor and black, appear to be the worst kind of institution.  Their racism is hidden behind a facade of caring, though you wouldn't be able to tell by the descriptions that Mr. Kozol provides.

To say that the contents of this book are mere reflections of their time is to dismiss it as a simple piece of history.  What it is, is a window on racism, not the overt racism of the American south at that time, but the unrecognized paternalistic racism of the master.  Yet, even as paternalism, this racism fails.  Black children are treated as unwanted step-children who should be happy that even a little money is being spent on them.  They should sing the praises of the whites who deign to teach them.

The ingrained condescension found on nearly every page of this book is too much to bear for 21st century minds.  I doubt my children would understand this.  They would think it a work of fiction.  Yet, this still exists today.  Maybe it isn't as obvious, though I think it is.  Maybe it isn't tied to race, but it seems tied directly to class, to lack of wealth, and, unfortunately, this falls disproportionately on blacks.

I'm not going down the slippery slope of the causes of high rates of poverty among African Americans.  But one has to wonder, what effect would the same per capita spend on students at poorer schools have on educational outcomes.  Mr. Kozol heard constantly about how education begins in the home.  "If these children had a decent home life, maybe they would be better students," and other such comments appear frequently.

We want, as a society we believe, that education can break a cycle of poverty, that it is a lever in which to lift  suffering masses out of their soul-deadening lives.  I think we've proven that education alone is not enough.  There are other things that might help, which will undoubtedly be covered in other essays, but to name a few: drop the war on drugs and take the profitability out of the market; eliminate barriers to starting and sustaining a business--end silly licensing laws that only protect the status quo and eliminate all taxes and paperwork burdens for small businesses; stop equating education with passing a battery of standardized tests--let kids learn trades, music, liberal arts, sciences, whatever captures their fancy.  We don't need cookie-cutter outcomes.  We need successful happy citizens.

One last point about this book: Mr. Kozol sees busing as the primary solution to the problems he encounters (aside from more spending on basic infrastructure).  From our vantage point, we think that is a rather draconian and inconvenient solution to a basic problem of funding.  What Mr. Kozol and other liberal-minded people knew (assumed) was that unless you mixed the races in the various schools, there would always be a problem with predominantly black schools because racism would always make them a lower priority; they would inevitably get the crumbs.  By stirring the pot and mixing the student bodies, it would be impossible to play favorites with a particular school without creating benefits for the black students, too.  This is just treating the symptoms, but to attempt to change the culturally ingrained racism would take decades and black cynicism and lack of progress would steadily worsen.

How can we strike at the roots of racism?  Is racism an inherent quality of humanity?  Do we always suspect, in general terms, that which is different from us?