Schools Described by Jean Anyon and Jonathon Kozol - Coursework Example

Download file to see previous pages According to her, this is attributable solely to the economic capability of parents of children studying in various schools. The first type enumerated by Anyon is “working-class school” that meets the educational needs of students, whose parents are unskilled and semiskilled employees such as security guards, gas station attendants, and welders, among others. The second category elaborated by her, “the middle-class school” pertains to students whose parents are employed as supervisors, technicians, and other white-collar job profiles. Anyon names the third type of school as an “affluent professional school”, where the occupation of respective parents encompasses the realms of interior design, cardiology, advertising, to cite a few. And finally, the last category is “the executive elite school” where the children hail from the highly affluent capitalist class. Here, the parents are in the topmost position in the topmost companies of the country. 
In this essay, the writer Jonathan Kozol, backed by irrefutable statistical figures, focuses on the racial discrimination that is still prevalent in the system of school education of the US. Kozol points out to the fact that an overwhelming majority of children pursuing education in the public schools pertains to the racial minorities. He says “Schools that were already deeply segregated twenty-five or thirty years ago are no less segregated now”. He also adds that most of these schools lack even the basic amenities including medical care, leave alone the advanced teaching methods, which are there in the ones (schools) where the children related to the affluent classes are getting educated. Kozol infers, owing to the fact that it is mostly the children of racial minorities who study in public schools; even the concerned departments have been adopting an indifferent approach (towards such schools). In his essay, Kozol mentions a letter written to him by a girl, “Dear Mr. Kozol," wrote the eight-year-old, "we do not have the things you have. You have Clean things. We do not have. You have a clean bathroom. We do not have that. You have Parks and we do not have Parks.”
The above-mentioned words spoken by a small girl give a heart-rending picture of the pitiable conditions in which the tender bodies (children) are attempting to obtain knowledge. As a matter of fact, Kozol focuses on many such direct interviews that he had had with the less fortunate children of the public schools. If corrective measures are not initiated for rectifying the aforesaid scenario, it would be detrimental to the long-run interests of the US, for the long-existent issue of Apartheid then cannot be totally eliminated. That would be projecting a very bad image of the United States on the global landscape. ...Download file to see next pagesRead More