Okay, so I am a little behind in my reading. But yesterday, I got a chance to catch up a bit. I took one of our cars for its every six months or so checkup, and was told that, because the car was now 6 years old, it was time for its major, major, major checkup, and it would take about 3 1/2 hours to complete the tasks (and cost almost as much money as my first car cost me to buy in the early 1960s). I wasn’t concerned, because I bought a book, I could walk to a breakfast place, and then I could walk to Montgomery Mall, where I could shop (ha ha), or walk, or drink more coffee while sitting in all sorts of fairly comfortable chairs. I could even grab a quick lunch at the food court.
All that went well enough, but it turned out that my 3 1/2 hour wait turned into almost a 6 hour wait. I had dropped the car off at about 9 a.m., and it was not ready for me to drive it home until almost 3 in the afternoon. (The reasons for this are not important, but it had something to do with the technician’s computer failure – after all, the biggest tool in testing and fixing automobiles today is a computer.)
So I first sat in Corner Bakery, then on the lower level of Montgomery Mall, then in the food court, and then in the Jim Coleman Toyota waiting room. And all of that time gave me the opportunity to read Jonathan Kozol’s Death at an Early Age, which I have thought about reading since it was first published in 1965. After 60 years, I have finally caught up in some of my reading.
It’s not a long book, and it is fairly easy to read. Kozol was under 30 when he wrote it (he is now 88), and my guess is that, if he wrote that book today, he would look on some of the things a bit differently, but that is okay. Kozol wrote this book after teaching at an inner city school in Boston’s Roxbury neighborhood. He taught 4th grade, until he was fired for sharing with his class a poem by Langston Hughes that dealt with the suffering of Blacks in America.
Kozol was a Boston (well, Newton) native, a Harvard summa cum laude graduate and a Rhodes Scholar, who had also studied writing in Paris with people like William Styron and Richard Wright. He had decided to teach in an inner city school, a choice which has led to a long career as an educator and activist. He became a substitute teacher in the Boston system and was very soon (too soon in his mind) given a fourth grade class, in an inner city, largely Black school, which was, to put it mildly, quite an experience.
Clearly, Boston of 1964 (the year I graduated Harvard, so I knew it fairly well then, or at least thought I did) is not Boston, or any other city, today, 60 years later. I do not know how much of what Kozol saw can be seen today.
But let’s talk about the school in 1964.
The school was overcrowded. Kozol did not have a classroom; his class met in the gym, which was cordoned into sections by decrepit freestanding blackboards, so that two 4th grade classes, the glee club and the drama class, could all meet there. Yes, this meant that no one could hear anything or concentrate on anything. The kids, he said, were understandably always confused.
The school was in terrible physical shape. Windows were broken and, even in winter, would take months to replace. Window frames cracked and fell on students’ desks, blackboards collapsed and were taped together unsuccessfully. And more.
There was corporal punishment (who knew?). Children who “misbehaved” were taken to a room in the school’s basement where they could be beaten with a switch made of rattan. And, in addition to this, occasionally a teacher would slap or beat a student; this had to be done out of sight.
There was no library, there were insufficient numbers of text books in the classrooms, the text books themselves were old, their contents portrayed a middle class White society totally unknown to the students. Blacks, when they were discussed, were simple, happy, and very primitive.
Virtually all of the teachers were White, and most of them had either a patronizing or a very biased feeling against their black students, something that Kozol demonstrates through his retelling of many conversations with his fellow instructors (he does not use anyone’s real name).
The Boston School Committee (i.e., its Board of Education) was determined to keep the city’s schools primarily segregated. They weren’t officially segregated and in integrated neighborhoods, the schools were integrated. Even in Kozol’s school, there were a few White children in each class. The schools were “neighborhood” schools, and the School Committee was determined to keep them that way. And they defined the neighborhoods to be as racially exclusionary as they could. Kozol tells of an adjoining neighborhood, which was predominantly White, and which had a school that was underutilized while his school was overcrowded. To him, it would have been easy to adjust the neighborhood boundaries to send some of the Black children to the predominantly White school, but this was not to be done.
Some of the children in his class were quite bright. Others could barely read or write and could not perform basic arithmetic.
Some children came from very disturbed backgrounds, but this did not seem something that most teachers were concerned with. It was easier to lash out at the kids than to try to understand their circumstances.
Kozol writes that even sympathetic teachers kept quiet, afraid that rocking the boat would end their careers. He thinks he could have been more outspoken during his short time at the school.
One additional point must be made. This was Boston, in the north. Any thought that racial problems in schools were confined to the segregated south are quickly dispelled.
The book became very well known. How much influence it had on schools, or on the sociology of racial minorities, I am not sure. And while I know that times have changed, I don’t really know how much they have changed. 1964 is obviously pre-DEI. 2025 is apparently post -DEI. Sadly, as I read this tale of pre-DEI, I see the same type of thinking that I see in many who are fighting to make any thought of working to ensure diversity, equality and inclusion recede into the past.
Can I end on a happier note? After my 6 hour wait, my service “advisor” told me that he had arranged for a discount since I had to wait so long. Without me asking, he actually took $300 off my bill.
Art is 80 