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Breaking Down the Walls of Apartheid Education in America
An eloquent and passionate call for educational reparations, from the New York Times bestselling author.
When Jonathan Kozol's Death at an Early Age appeared in 1967, it rocked the education world. Based on the Rhodes Scholar's first year of teaching in Boston's Black community, the book described the abuse and neglect of children for no reason but the color of their skin. Since that National Book Award–winning volume, Kozol has spent more than fifty years visiting with children and working with their teachers in other deeply troubled and unequal public schools.
Now, in the culminating work of his career, Kozol goes back into the urban schools, where racial isolation is at the highest level since he became a teacher and is now compounded by a new regime of punitive instruction and coercive uniformity that is deemed to be appropriate for children who are said to be incapable of learning in more democratic ways, like children in more privileged communities.
Kozol believes it's well past time to batter down the walls between two separate worlds of education and to make good, at long last, on the "promissory note" that Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. described on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial in 1963. Sure to resonate with current-day arguments for reparations in a broad array of areas, this is a book that points us to a future in which children learn together, across the lines of class and race, in schools where every child is accorded a full and equal share of the riches in this wealthiest of nations.
"The book thoroughly displays the author's eloquence, conviction, expertise, and attention to detail. Most impressive is Kozol's ability to draw connections among disparate events to illustrate the underlying systems driving the nation's greatest inequities. An inspired and insightful analysis of race-based challenges in the American school system." —Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
"[A] vigorous polemic...Kozol's vivid classroom scenes depict how mandated and rigidly controlled teaching practices negatively impact students' education, as well as teachers' ability to treat their students with respect. The result is an impassioned indictment of elementary school education in the U.S. and a cri de cœur for racial equity." —Publishers Weekly
"Jonathan Kozol's voice remains as fresh as ever, not least when he is examining the ongoing failure of the 1954 decision outlawing the lie of separate but equal. As he illustrates with numerous painful examples, the lie lives on in far too many schools where 'the shadow of plantation days is still a presence...' and the abusive treatment of young children an accepted practice. Jonathan spells out what we can do, and need to do, in order to move this nation towards a more perfect union." —Charlayne Hunter-Gault, journalist and author of My People: Five Decades of Writing About Black Lives
"In An End to Inequality, Kozol has relentlessly confronted an unfiltered reality. Why, after all these years, do millions of Black and brown children remain in segregated schools where squalor and dysfunctional facilities degrade them intellectually and physically? For Kozol's transformative proposals, I urge you to read this jolting book." —Ralph Nader, Center for the Study of Responsive Law
"A powerful and provocative cutting-edge analysis...Should be required reading for advocates, educators, students, and their teachers." —Iván Espinoza-Madrigal, executive director, Lawyers for Civil Rights
This information about An End to Inequality was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
In the passion of the civil rights campaigns of 1964 and 1965, Jonathan Kozol gave up the prospect of a promising career in the academic world, moved from Harvard Square into a poor black neighborhood of Boston, and became a fourth grade teacher. He has since devoted nearly his entire life to the challenge of providing equal opportunity to every child in our public schools.
Jonathan Kozol is the author of Death at an Early Age, Savage Inequalities, Amazing Grace, and other award-winning books about young children and their public schools.
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