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The Shame of the Nation: The Restoration of Apartheid Schooling in America
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Key Figures
Jonathan Kozol
Jonathan Kozol is the author of The Shame of the Nation: The Restoration of Apartheid Schooling in America. Throughout the text, he weaves many of his own experiences in public schools across the nation into his arguments. These experiences, particularly his time as a teacher in Boston’s segregated schools, deeply influenced his advocacy for school integration and educational equality.
Kozol began teaching in Boston in the 1960s during the height of the Civil Rights Movement. Initially volunteering to teach at a summer “freedom school,” he enjoyed the experience so much that he decided to become a “real teacher.” Although he had no formal training or experience, he was easily hired because he agreed to work for very little pay in one of Boston’s segregated schools. During his years as an elementary school teacher there, Kozol was exposed to the often appalling conditions that Black children were forced to learn in. He was also mentored by leaders in the Black community, who taught him the importance of school integration in the fight for an equal society, and he befriended many of his students’ parents.
Kozol taught elementary school for many years. He eventually began writing books about his experiences and visiting other schools nationwide, advocating for greater educational equality. In his approach, Kozol speaks with teachers, principals, and schoolchildren. However, he most insistently advocates for listening to children’s accounts of their schooldays. To understand what is happening in public schools, Kozol argues that “you have to do what children do and breathe the air the children breathe”; it is the only “way to find out what the lives that children lead in school are really like” (163).
It’s also clear from Kozol’s writing that he is personally invested in the education of inner-city children. He describes developing close relationships with many children, their teachers, and their families. Kozol has continued to visit the classrooms of some teachers, like Louis Bedrock, for over 10 years. Kozol’s work is motivated by a genuine care for children and a desire to reduce the obstacles that stand in the way of educational equality.
Roger Wilkins
Roger Wilkins is one of the Black leaders that Kozol quotes extensively. According to Kozol, he is “[o]ne of the most enduringly respected figures in the older generation of black intellectuals” (237). As a teenager, Wilkins attended an almost all-white high school in Michigan. Although it was a challenging experience at times, he learned that Black and white people are not so different and developed the confidence to inhabit white spaces. In conversation with Kozol, Wilkins calls “the massive desolation of the intellect and spirits and the human futures of […] millions of young people” a “national horror hidden in plain view” and argues for building a national movement to expose it (238). However, he also recognizes the difficulty of such a movement, claiming that Americans are “morally exhausted” and no longer want to address the “profound” “racist beliefs […] and the supportive structures” in society (240).
Gary Orfield
Gary Orfield is a professor at Harvard University working at the Civil Rights Project, where he studies the resegregation of American public schools. Kozol quotes Orfield extensively, referring to his multiple books and studies on desegregation and resegregation in public schools. Orfield argues that public schools have been resegregating since the 1980s and notes that no effort has been made to reverse this trend. According to Orfield, the United States has “give[n] up on integration,” even while being “aware of its benefits” (20). This requires an “exercise in denial” that “is incompatible with the healthy functioning of a multiracial generation” (20). To combat the issue of segregation in public schools, Orfield argues that “a political movement is a necessary answer” (221), calling on educated Black and white adults who benefited from desegregated schooling to demand action. He claims that most proposed solutions remain “in the box,” trying to improve failing urban schools without trying to dismantle the system that created them.
Elwood Cubberley
Elwood Cubberley was an educator and advocate for “the business model of efficiency in education” in the early 1900s (209). Kozol quotes Cubberley extensively to show the long history of business management techniques in the education of children of color. Cubberley describes schools as “factories in which the raw products (children) are to be shaped and fashioned into products to meet the various demands of life” (210). Through the use of standards and testing, “the product” can be assessed and the efficiency of the education can be evaluated and improved. Cubberley also argued that “[t]heoretically, […] all the children of the state are equally important and are entitled to have the same advantages; practically, this can never be true” (212). He agrees that the state should provide “a minimum of good instruction” but warns that all education should not be “reduce[d] […] to this minimum” (212), a sentiment of inequality that continues to this day.
Pineapple
Pineapple is the first student that Kozol calls by name, and he refers to her throughout the text as an example of the hardships that students face in underfunded urban schools. When Kozol first met Pineapple, she was “a plump and bright-eyed” kindergartener at PS 65 (13), one of the Bronx’s segregated elementary schools. By the time she reached the fourth grade, following the implementation of the Success For All curriculum and the “chaos” caused by massive teacher turnover, Pineapple was “quite depressed” and was also very much aware of the disadvantage she faced, asking Kozol pointedly what it was like “over there—where other people are” (16).
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