The Shame of the Nation Blog #1

Blog #1: Rhetorical Analysis

    After sixty pages of reading, it comes with no surprise to me that The Shame of the Nation is a New York Times Bestseller. Author Jonathon Kozol has a clear, informative approach to enlightening readers on the hushed topic of apartheid schooling in America. With a blend of anecdotal evidence and statistical representation, Kozol pushes forth the issue of educational segregation - a true shame of the nation. 

    From the get-go, Kozol establishes his ethos by giving background information on himself; aiding his credibility. He talks about his Harvard education and the political climate during his college days-- civil rights campaigns, sit-ins, and freedom rides (2). Through his backstory, readers get a glimpse at what inspired Kozol to venture to sixty schools across the nation.  Ultimately, his background assures readers that he’s educated, and a man with a seasoned desire for equality and civility. 

    Having traveled to various schools in segregated, desegregated, and poor and rich areas, Kozol has seen it all. Throughout the novel, he shares his experiences in the inner-city schools to support his premise- that inner-city schools have failed to satisfy the ruling of Brown v. Board of Education. 

    On page 15, Kozol shares an emotional anecdote of a young black girl named Pineapple who attends elementary school in the South Bronx. The dialogue between Pineapple and Kozol reads 

“What’s it like?,” she asked me, peering through the strands of beaded cornrows that came down over her eyes, “over there where you live?”

“Over where?” I asked. 

“Over- you know…,” she said with another bit of awkwardness and hesitation in her eyes…. “Over there--where other people are,” she finally said. 

This scene encaptures the loss of innocence in a young girl, who despite looking like a naive child, knows a thing or two about the racial divide looming in America, for she lives it every day. Following this scene, Kozol dives into what prompted this fourth-grade girl, in the year 1998 to ask such a despairing question. He writes of the disgusting divide between black and white in the inner cities; writing “In racial terms, they’re almost totally cut off (17)." Throughout the novel, Kozol’s storytelling pushes readers to feel what it's like to be on the front lines of inner-city schools, pushing us to feel shame and anger for what we’ve dismissed all this time. Overall, Kozol’s experience and his storytelling aim to project the voices of the forgotten young children and educators of the black community. 

    Another strong suit of Kozol is his ability to push forth various forms of statistics. Initially, I felt that his arguments based off of analytics made the book seem a little overwhelming and boring. It felt like I was reading out of a statistics textbook. Nonetheless, after reading it over a second time, I did find that the abundance of statistics was nice because it made up the bulk of his arguments, which were then supported with his anecdotal evidence. Having the statistics tackle the bulk of the arguments such as the percentage of diversity in schools and per-pupil spending, and funding per city made his stories more reliable. It was like he was saying these statistics indicate such and such, and to prove it, listen to this story of mine. I felt that this approach was very logical and organized, and it made it easier to follow along and connect with the text.  One statistic that he rattled off was "the present per-pupil spending level in the New York City schools is $11, 700, which may be compared to a per-pupil spending level in excess of $22,000 in the well-to-do suburban district of Manhasset (45)." Statistics such as this open your mind and really make you question where Hopkinton sits along the spectrum of school funding. Sadly, we find ourselves, year after year, complaining about our school budget and how we should be maximizing our funds, and what we should be putting them towards. I think this really speaks to our inherent privilege and the radically different position we're put in as people in a more affluent community.

    While I do find Kozol's argument to be true, I would like to see some more information on how school segregation has come to be this bad in the first place. Through the first three chapters, it seems to me that Kozol has really worked to prove that there is an issue, but hasn't gotten to explain in detail what caused it. Only on two brief occasions has he expressed the causes of the segregation. The first time is when he claims "as serious cuts in social services and federal assistance for low-income housing took effect during the years when Ronald Reagan was in office, physical conditions in these neighborhoods became appreciably worse (7). The second claim was that "segregation in the schools of New York City and its suburbs, has been accomplished by a number of forces that include discrimination, court decisions, immigration trends, and government-enforced school boundaries...(32)" In the coming chapters, I hope to see a more detailed description of the discrimination, court decisions, and immigration trends that kept inner-city schools so segregated.

Works Cited

Kozol, Jonathan. The Shame of the Nation: The Restoration of Apartheid Schooling in America. New York, Three Rivers Press, 2005.