Savage Inequalities (Children in America's Schools); Jonathan Kozol - Introduction: Looking Backward: 1964 - 1991

"None of the national reports I saw made even passing references to inequality or segregation.  Low reading scores, high dropout rates, poor motivation - symptomatic matters - seemed to dominate discussion.  In three cities - Baltimore, Milwaukee and Detroit - separate schools or separate classes for black males had been proposed.  Other cities - Washington, D.C., New York and Philadelphia among them - were considering the same approach.  Black parents or black school officials sometimes seem to favor this idea.  Booker T. Washington was cited with increasing frequency, Du Bois never, and Martin Luther King only with cautious selectivity.  He was treated as an icon, but his vision of a nation in which black and white kids went to school together seemed to be effaced almost entirely.  Dutiful references to "The Dream" were often seen in school brochures and on wall posters during February, when "Black History" was celebrated in the public schools, but the content of the dream was treated as a closed box that could not be opened without ruining the celebration." (p. 3)

"To the extent that school reforms such as "restructuring" are advocated for the inner cities, few of these reforms have reached the schools that I have seen.  In each of the larger cities there is usually one school or one subdistrict which is highly publicized as an example of "restructured" education; but the changes rarely reach beyond this one example.  Even in those schools where some "restructuring" has taken place, the fact of racial segregation has been, and continues to be, largely uncontested." (p. 4)

"Liberal critics of the Reagan era sometimes note that social policy in the United States, to the extent that it concerns black children and poor children, has been turned back several decades.  But this assertion, which is accurate as a description of some setbacks in the areas of housing, healthy and welfare, is not adequate to speak about the present-day reality in public education.  In public schooling, social policy has been turned back almost one hundred years." (p. 4)

Clock Without Hands; Carson McCullers (Chapters 1 and 2)

"Malone did not understand.  Shock bewildered him and the room seemed suddenly cold.  He understood only that something strange and terrible was happening to him in the cold and swaying room.  He was mesmerized by the paper knife that the doctor turned in his stubby, scrubbed fingers.  A long dormant memory stirred so that he was aware of something shameful that had been forgotten, although the memory itself was still unclear.  So he suffered a parallel distress - the fear and tension of the doctor's words and the mysterious and unremembered shame." p. 3


"As he sat holding the pestle there was in him enough composure to wonder at those alien emotions that had veered so violently in his once mild heart.  He was split between love and hatred - but what he loved and what he hated was unclear.  For the first time he knew that death was near him.  But the terror that choked him was not caused by the knowledge of his own death.  The terror concerned some mysterious drama that was going on - although what the drama was about Malone did not know.  The terror questioned what would happen in those months - how long? - that glared upon his numbered days.  He was a man watching a clock without hands." p. 25

"But later a strange dissonance appeared, a jolt in the usual harmony, a sense of cross purposes and communication deflected and estranged." p. 27

"Jester asked, 'How?'
'Why, boy, I'm referring to segregation itself.'
'Why are you always harping on segregation?'
'Why, Jester, you're joking.'
Jester was suddenly serious. 'No, I'm not.'