Certain ideas about the relationship among education, poverty, and employment opportunities are assumed by much of society. It is assumed first that gaining a formal education is a key to achieving advancement and to attaining employment opportunities. Poverty is seen as reducing one's ability to gain an education, just as gaining an education is seen as a way of overcoming poverty. The social importance of education is emphasized again and again in the literature on education and also in the literature on various social problems. The writers under discussion here analyze these questions in various ways.
Jonathan Kozol in Savage Inequalities takes the position that the structure of education in American society is based on a two-tiered system which leaves the poorer children behind in terms of the education they can receive. This is a new form of segregation in Kozol's view, a segregation based on race that continues long after the Supreme Court in Brown v. Board of Education ruled that such inequalities in the public schools had to be eliminated. Kozol travels to real schools to observe, and he finds that little has changed:
Most of the urban schools I visited were 95 to 99 percent nonwhite. In no school that I saw anywhere in the United States were nonwhite children in large numbers truly intermingled with white children (Kozol 3).
Kozol also finds that most people simply believe that the segregation of the past is just that -- something of the past, something that has been eliminated, when in fact it is still a potent force in the public schools and produces results in society at large. Those results are evident in the employment situation faced by nonwhites because they lack the basic skills that are supposed to be taught by the schools.
Education in a democratic society holds a special place for improving social standing, educating the electorate, and providing opportunity to all. Educational level is a...