Dean Arnica
Professor Young
English 1100


1) “Whether the issue is inequity alone or deepening resegregation or the labyrinthine intertwining of the two, it is well past the time for us to start the work that it will take to change this.”

This quote is a good summation of the reading as well as a “call to arms” by which Jonathan Kozol tells us to begin the long overdue change necessary to fix the defacto racism that goes on in schools today.  In the reading he discusses the impact that inequity and segregation have on the racial achievement gap.  This quote shows that whatever the cause of the problem, the problem still exists, and it is up to us to fix it by creating more equal schools and promoting desegregation.

2) “Childhood is not merely basic training for utilitarian adulthood.  It should have some claims upon our mercy, not for its future value to the economic interests of competitive societies but for its present value as a perishable piece of life itself.”

This quote demonstrates Kozol’s belief that schools should not be factories that turn out future workers, but places where children are happy to learn and can enjoy their childhood.  Kozol writes extensively on his experiences visiting schools where children have been turned into “robots.”  Everything in these schools has been defined, standardized, and reduced to rote experiences from curriculum to classroom discourse to walking in the hallways.

3) One of the most disheartening experiences for those who grew up in the years when Martin Luther King Jr. and Thurgood Marshall were alive is to visit public schools today that bear their names, or names of other honored leaders in integration struggles that produced the temporary progress that took place in the three decades after Brown v. Board of Education, and to find out how many of these schools are bastions of contemporary segregation."

This quote is toward the beginning of the article and sets up the gist of the rest of the article.  Kozol goes on to explain the existence of  racial segregation in modern day schools.  This quote grabbed my attention because, even though I was not alive during that time period, I spent a lot of time learning about it in elementary school as well as in high school.  It seems so farfetched that this sort of segregation could be existent in modern society, but I'm sure it is.

4) "Racial segregation has come back to public education with a vengeance."

This quote represents how a huge part of history, racial segregation, has, in a way, returned to the public education because of how terrible these public schools are being treated as well as the children. The public schools, as Kozol preaches, are not getting the treatment they need for the children to succeed and its getting overlooked, as if nothing is wrong.