Response to Blog, Analysis of One Aspect discussed in Kozol’s “Savage Inequalities” (pg. 40-53)

Chayse Adams

ENG: 100-20

10-26-2010

Response to Blog, Analysis of One Aspect discussed in

Kozol’s “Savage Inequalities” (pg. 40-53)

            One aspect that particularly caught my attention and interest was where Kozol talked about the kinder garden classrooms. 3,000 infants from the Chicago neighborhoods are delivered with brain damage or other neurological impairments; however upon walking into one of the kinder garden classrooms, one wouldn’t have noticed a thing wrong with any of the children. They acted like normal kids when their teacher was trying to settle them down for nap time.

            Their classroom was not filled with any books, art work, and works of their writing or anything the students had done. The walls were blank except for a few posters of the seasons and zoo animals donated by some a few companies. The small bookcases and cubbies were painted brightly and colorful as you might expect of any kindergarten classroom but was still rather cheerless.

            The statistics about what will happen to this seemingly normal class is very depressing. The high school they will attend has an 18% graduation rate. If the neighborhood statistics of this class hold true, 14 of the 23 will have dropped out of school by their junior year. 14 years after kindergarten, 4 of the students will be going to college, and 18 years from now 1 of them will graduate from college, but 3 of the 12 boys in that class will already have spent time in prison. As Kozol believes, I agree that it is very depressing and sad to see kids in our own country suffer all over our country like this in our public schools and we as citizens of the U.S. donate loads of money to Africa and other places around the world. It would be so much more beneficial for our society if that money was devoted to solving our crisis of public schools here in the States. The return in such investments would be very great as well.