emembers that the educational system is the children. Theories for improving the system which forget this essential fact are not likely to truly or effectively address the problems.
Kozol puts himself in the position of the children as he returns to the schools where he had started teaching twenty-five years earlier. He tries to imagine what sort of place they would be for the child who was going there to try to learn. Would such schools be conducive to learning:
These urban schools were . . . extraordinarily unhappy places. . . . They reminded me of "garrisons" . . . in a foreign nation. Housing projects, bleak and tall
. . . often stood adjacent to the schools. . . . Doors were guarded. Police sometimes patrolled the halls.
I often wondered why we would agree to let our children go to school in places where no politician, school board president, or business CEO would dream of working (Kozol 5).
Kozol's examination of East St. Louis is a most discouraging portrait of a segregated city in which the children suffer most. East St. Louis is an almost all-black, poverty-stricken area which has been all but abandoned by those with the power to bring about healthy change. The failure of the educational system is shown by Kozol to be merely a part of the failure of the entire city to address the needs of its children.
Again, however, Kozol does not deal merely in statistics or abstract analysis of the macro issues, but rather with the real needs and concerns of the children themselves. The children tell their stories directly to Kozol and to the reader, and we come to feel deeply their anger and their despair. A 14-year-old girl, for example, says "We have a school in East St. Louis named for Dr. King. . . . The school is full of sewer water and the doors are locked with chains. Every student in that school is black. It's like terrible joke on history" (Kozol 35).
Kozol cannot be accused of a false optimism. In fact, he...