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What is the shame of the American nation? 

Longtime American educator, civil rights advocate and activist, and award-winning author Jonathan Kozol believes it is the “restoration of apartheid schooling in American education,” and it is the subject of his recently released book The Shame of the Nation. 

An educator himself, Kozol began his teaching career in a black elementary school in his native Boston in 1964, shortly after the news of the assasination-murder of three Mississippi Freedom Summer workers had shocked the conscience of the nation. He has been an active advocate for reform of the nation’s education system ever since. 

Kozol brings his thoughts on the issue to Berkeley this Friday evening when he speaks at Martin Luther King Jr. Middle School on Rose Street at 7:30 p.m. A reception precedes the talk at 6:45, and a book-signing follows. 

Admission to the event is $10 ($8 for students), with proceeds to go to the Chez Panisse Foundation for Berkeley’s School Lunch Initiative. 

In The Shame of the Nation, Kozol charges that America’s public education system has reverted to a segregation that is in many ways worse than was seen before the Supreme Court’s historic Brown v. Board of Education decision in 1954. As in many of his previous books (among them Death at an Early Age, Children of the Revolution and Savage Inequalities), The Shame of the Nation takes its main sources not from newspaper articles or academic studies, but from the author’s tireless wanderings of the nation’s inner city school hallways and cafeterias and classrooms, probing, observing, chatting with principals and teachers and students alike. His conclusions, therefore, are drawn from the “is,” rather than what politicians or educational professionals might either want it or believe it “to be.” 

The re-segregation of American schools, he writes, has turned into a situation where mostly-white suburban schools are often havens for critical thinking and holistic personal advancement, while mostly-black and Latino inner-city schools are relegated to prepare their charges for entering the low-income working class. He chides the corporate takeover of large portions of inner-city public education. 

“When business and the world of commerce are permitted to invade the precincts of our public schools,” he writes, “they tell the urban school officials, sometimes in so many words, that what they need the schools to give them are ‘team players.’” He adds that “there will, I am afraid, be fewer fascinating mavericks, fewer penetrating questioners, and fewer powerful dissenters coming from our inner-city schools before too long if this agenda cannot be reversed. Team players may well be of great importance to the operation of a business corporation, and they are obviously essential in the military services; but a healthy nation needs its future poets, prophets, ribald satirists, and maddening iconoclasts at least as much as it needs people who will file in a perfect line to an objective they are told they cannot question.” 

It is to Kozol’s credit that he is one of the few national figures who has continued to point out the value to America of the production of such individuals in the nation’s less-affluent schools. 

Kozol’s condemnation of the current national educational policy is unrelenting. 

“I went to Washington to challenge the soft bigotry of low expectations,” he quotes President George W. Bush in a 2004 re-election campaign speech. “It’s working. It’s making a difference.” And, according to Kozol, “it is one of those deadly lies which, by sheer repetition, is at length accepted by large numbers of Americans as, perhaps, a rough approximation of the truth.” Kozol calls the president’s claim that the national policies to uplift the education of minority and low-income students is “not an innocent misstatement of the facts [but] a devious appeasement of the heartache of the parents of the black and brown and poor.” 

But while he sees a bleak picture in many inner-city schools both from lack of money and motivation, Kozol has high praise for the many highly-competent educational professionals who have stayed in the inner city and dug in deep and fought to make a difference. 

With a writing style like a man who has so many words to get out so fast that they seem to pile upon themselves as they fall out onto the page, Kozol notes that “beneath the radar of efficiency technicians and the stern disciplines of instructional approaches based on strict ... controls, one still may find humane and happy elementary schools ... within poor neighborhoods in which affectionate and confident and morally committed teachers do not view themselves as the floor managers for industry whose job it is to pump some ‘added value’ into undervalued children.” Kozol praises these teachers for ‘com[ing] into this very special world of miniature joys and miniature griefs out of their fascination and delight with growing children and are thoroughly convinced that each and every one of them has an inherent value to begin with.”