Savage Inequalities

This paper is a discussion of Jonathan Kozol's bleak analysis of the failure of the U. S. educational system to adequately serve children of poverty, Savage Inequalities. Kozol presents evidence from a variety of schools that serve students from lower socioeconomic classes and primarily black families, comparing them with observations of wealthier schools, primarily white, and showing the desperate inequalities of money (and the lack thereof). His principal thesis is that the economic systems that fund public education in America perpetuate these inequalities on a dramatic and pervasive level. He argues that even where schools share a common curriculum, the unspoken things that are taught within such a system are most responsible for maintaining an unfair and disastrous status quo, harming even the students who seem to benefit from the privilege of their birth.

Elliot W. Eisner (1994) observes that curriculum is based on ideologies, and that, in America, the most fundamental ideology is that education is supposed to prepare children to become productive members of their society. School, in contemporary America, teaches its young citizens to be punctual, to compete, and to achieve (p. 55). While curriculum should teach explicit facts and skills - giving all children the ability to read, perform at least basic math problems, and share common knowledge, such as an essential understanding of American history - Eisner (1994) argues that school should also teach students how t

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or more money as the ultimate solution to the devastating problem he outlines, this shining example is not one that would be provided by more money. Mrs. Hawkins is not especially well paid, nor does she seem to be motivated by her paycheck. Her classroom is no better equipped than those around her, and her class is as full as any of those of her colleagues. The changes that Kozol argues for would not produce more classrooms like those of Mrs. Hawkins. They would not turn more teachers into the model he obviously values. They would not change the curriculum in more schools into one capable of teaching the values she considers so vital for her students. Nonetheless, teaching self-motivation, self-esteem, and the willingness to help one another should be, to Kozol's way of thinking, central to any curricular plan, and Eisner in his own way agrees with him. Although students must also learn to read and write, to think critically, to perform basic tasks, and to understand essential facts, these skills will not meet the basic needs of society if they are not founded on Mrs. Hawkins's list of individual strengths. Kozol comes to his thesis from the background of being a teacher himself. He starts his career in 1964, teaching four

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