Public Education, Racial Inequality and the Struggle for Democracy: an Interview With Jonathan Kozol |
CounterPunch Exclusives
CounterPunch Exclusives
Public Education, Racial Inequality and the Struggle for Democracy: an Interview With Jonathan Kozol
Jonathan Kozol, screen grab from an interview in Brainwaves Video Anthology.
The following is a Q&A discussion about Jonathan Kozol’s new book, We Shall Not Bow Down Children of Color Under Siege: An Invocation to Resistance, published by Seven Stories Press.
1) You have long argued that educational inequality is not inevitable but the result of political decisions. Why do you think the idea that inequality is “natural” or unavoidable continues to have such influence in American education debates?
The notion that inequality in educational outcomes is “natural” or “unavoidable” has had a persistent history in American education thinking. As long ago as in the first decades of the nineteen hundreds, which historians have sometimes called the Era of Eugenics, prominent educators argued that certain categories of the nation’s populations were cognitively deficient in comparison with others and, for this reason, less likely to contribute to the national prosperity. They were to be given a different, and a lesser, form of public education.
These views were widely held by influential people, including Andrew Carnegie and John D. Rockefeller, both of whom provided funding for eugenics studies, as well as Lewis Ternan of Stanford University and Edward Thorndike of Columbia. The eugenics movement fell out of favor by the early 1930s but resurfaced in the 1990s in the writings, for example, of Charles Murray among others. A subcurrent of this thinking has continued to be present in much of the hard-nosed, pedagogic policy that shapes the education of Black and Latino and immigrant children in America today. All of this is reinforced and reified by our system of school funding, which is based primarily on local property wealth and guarantees inequity between school districts. Funds that are additionally contributed by the states and federal government have seldom been sufficient to narrow this inequity.
The system was challenged in the 1970s in a famous case in Texas, Rodriguez v. San Antonio, in which a district court found the system to be unconstitutional, but the US Supreme Court overruled the district court and, in a decision written by Justice Lewis Powell, who had been appointed to the court by Richard Nixon, stated that education is not a protected right under the US Constitution. That decision has never been revisited. Unless the Powell decision can someday be reversed, we will remain a deeply flawed and incomplete democracy.
2) In this new edition of your book, the struggle for public education is closely tied to the health of democracy itself. Why do you believe public schools are so central to a democratic society?
I would amend that question slightly. It is not just “public education” that is essential in a democratic nation, but public education in which children are empowered to ask discerning questions about their day-to-day reality and their place in our society, to grow into the kind of future adult citizens who are capable of vigorous dissent and sensible irreverence in the face of devious inducements from demagogues and despots.
But the suppression of intelligent irreverence and the silencing of questions have come in recent years to be a common practice in far too many schools that I’ve been visiting. In a segregated elementary school that I visited in Boston’s Black community, if children asked importunate questions that threatened to disrupt the standardized rout-and-drill curriculum, and could not be silenced by the........