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[chillyrodent]

The Shame of the Nation, by Jonathan Kozol.

Blue Pastures, by Mary Oliver.

... We are all wild, valorous, amazing. We are, none of us, cute.

Comments

[samwibatt]

I haven't read Kozol, but I had a college classmate who worshipped Kozol as though a god so I'm basically familiar with his work. The book sounds pretty grim - how did you like it?

[chillyrodent]

I read bits of Savage Inequalities for a sociology course, but never read an entire book until now. It wasn't as viscera-poking as I would have expected, but pretty grim, yes.

His main point, as you might imagine, is that our de facto segregation hurts all children, and hurts poor children of color most of all. White children are hurt by cultural deprivation, but that loss for minority children is compounded by craptacular schools without the tax base to improve them.

[samwibatt]

Well, I can't argue with that.

It amazes me sometimes that there is still such a thing as public schools after the right wing spent the entire cold war insisting that such things were "socialism communism" and fighting really hard against them, and the pinhead racist bigots doing much the same. Certainly, the onslaught has taken its toll. One big problem to overcome with all this is that these anti-school people don't see minorities' substandard education as a problem.

Here in Utah there isn't a lot of room for racial segregation since a lot of neighborhoods are 99% or more white folks (though SLC is more diverse, and certainly in the smaller cities there's getting to be a larger number of Mexican people, which I'm sure is causing some stress). However, people here are unbelievably militantly anti-anything-that-needs-tax-money (at least until it's time for them to expect benefits from it). That kind of sentiment has hurt our schools quite a bit nationwide, I imagine.

[chillyrodent]

One of his quotes is Before we abandoned desegregation, we ought to have tried it. His feeling, from 40+ years of visiting schools, is that integration, even when it was by force and therefore stressful, raised the overall quality of education. A lot of what he said seems to be more applicable to big-city schools where parents can opt in or out of a particular school, and schools are redistricted with huge disparities in income on either side of a line.

I tried thinking of our local schools, and it was hard to draw a hard correlation. Our local small-town school is about 1% non-white, because that's what the town looks like. In the city of I, there is still only one high school (with its share of racial unrest), but the difference seems to be that parents of all colors speak out against it and demand redress. I'm not saying that the city is free of racism by a long shot, but there seems to be a helluva lot of dialog about it, compared to most places.

Our local school always gets its budget passed. With groans, but it passes.

[chillyrodent]

Well, we once thought so, but apparently not.

Wouldn't you rather be wild, valorous and amazing, though?

[chillyrodent]

Exciting!

I wish I could perform some sort of service, like what a realtor should do, but often doesn't. I'd go with the realtor after talking extensively with my clients, and rule houses in or out.

I don't care that it has two bathrooms, it is a Cape Cod, and they hate that. No! I said Good Day!

Hell, I'd do it for free just to get inside the houses. I'd be a Real Estate Screener.

[compostwormbin]

I beg to differ. My cats are cute. :P

[chillyrodent]

No. I'm sorry. Mary Oliver has spoken, and she says your cats are not cute. Wild. Valorous. Amazing. Not cute.