If you don't get Harper's, please take the time to read Riggsveda's outstanding post on this month's cover story by Jonathon Kozol, Still Separate, Still Unequal:
Who gets carried into the field hospitals, appendages dangling by threads of skin, brains scrambled by blast-induced concussions, and who gets forgotten and left to fend for themselves the moment they make it home, turned out of the military that betrayed them as useless for further cannon-fodder?
The children of the poor, that's who. Children of the poor and ghettoized, forgotten, thrown away, then suddenly remembered when the recruiters need warm bodies. Children who grow up in a nation that has abdicated its responsibility to educate and integrate its people, that has used every downturn in the economy as an excuse to fracture the public school system, and failed to restore funding cuts when times got good again. Children in a country that increasingly sees them, if it sees them at all, as widgets to plug into the cheap labor market, or in the case of the military, the cheap life department, and whose schooling options seldom include paths to creative, well-paying opportunities, but more likely offer "sewing", or "hairdressing".
In the most recent edition of Harper's, Jonathan Kozol, a former teacher and ongoing observer of the nation's schools, writes the cover story, "Still Separate, Still Unequal". Kozol is the author of two of the most powerful books ever written on the American education system: Savage Inequalities, and Amazing Grace: Lives of Children and the Conscience of a Nation. And his latest foray shows that not only has nothing changed, but despite Bush's much ballyhooed "Texas miracle", the situation seems to have been exacerbated by the kind of apartheid not seen in this country since 1965.
Thanks for the link! And we made Mother Jones!
Posted by: Riggsveda | August 22, 2005 at 02:21 PM