Savage Inequalities

As an American, it is all too easy to nostalgically reminisce in the carefree essence of your childhood-days filled with schooling, endured with the promising sunshine and laughter that would fill your free time that afternoon spent with cherished friends in your neighborhood.

Now, imagine living in a country where these memories were replaced with days of murder, rape, pollution, hunger, and sickness, endured only with the bleak knowledge that even worse circumstances would otherwise fill your time. Which country to I speak of? The exact one in which we live.

"A man who hasn't discovered something to die for is not fit to live." In the midst of the battle for civil rights, Martin Luther King Jr. died with the dream it would some day end. Turning its cheek, our own government heavily curtains today's reality of which few are aware--the battle remains.

Jonathan Kozol's Savage Inequalities exposes the harsh reality of the vast rift among America's education system. Traveling from the suburbs to inner cities, spacious classrooms are replaced with run-down closets and urinals. Cafeteria menus are replaced with a $2.40 daily food expenditure. Playgrounds are replaced with raw sewage and pornography theaters. Diplomas are replaced with empty certificates, given out to children who have yet to be taught how to even read. As middle class America knows it, education has increasingly become the passport to one's future. For America's inner cities, this is not so; education is simply a shelter from the streets, where crime and pregnancy are increasing at an alarming rate. Some have recognized their education's pretense of legitimacy. Among inner cities, only 10-15% of the students are in truly academic programs, and only 20% of the 55% that may graduate may go to college. Furthermore, 90% of these cities' prisoners are those who have dropped out of school. Those who cling on to the hope racial integration continue to look to our country's flag with hands on their hearts, awaiting the fulfimment of the promise, "one nation...with liberty and justice for all."

“Children get used to feeling constant pain. They go to sleep with it.” Pain has become the norm for the children of East St. Louis, Chicago, Camden, and our nation's capital. What in the past has caused the qualitative rift among America's education system to become so vast, and what, if anything, will be done about it in the future? What has emerged is a pattern of poor education followed by an equally impoverished lifestyle. Children are caught in this vicious cycle with no way out. How has our government refuse to offer one? Quite easily. It is up to the privileged American people to battle these savage inequalities and make our country one in which all can be proud to live.