Brown Versus Board of Education - The Movie
If Brown v. Board of Education was the script, "Death At An Early Age" was the movie. Each point made by the Supreme Court is acted out and described in melodramatic prose in Jonathan Kozol's 1968 fictionalized account of his teaching experiences in a segregated school. Kozol, a recent Harvard graduate, took up substitute teaching in the Boston public schools in 1964. For most of the academic year, 1964-1965, he taught a fourth grade class in a Roxbury elementary school. In the spring, he was fired for using literary materials (poetry by Langston Hughes) not on the approved curriculum list. Diane Ravitch, in The Troubled Crusade, characterizes Kozol (referring to his book) as a romantic; but he was not a romantic. He was simply a journalist providing illustrations for the social science dogma of the time.
The social scientists who advised the Supreme Court believed that Black society is pathological. So Kozol begins his account by describing a beaten Black student, "Stephen". Of Stephen's life, Kozol says:
"Nobody has complained about the things that have happened to Stephen because he does not have any mother or father. Stephen is a ward of the State of Massachusetts and, as such, he has been placed in the home of some very poor people who do not want him now that he is not a baby any more. They money that they are given for him to pay his expenses every week does not cover the other kind of expense--the more important kind which is the immense emotional burden that is continually at stake. Stephen often comes into school badly beaten. If I ask him about it, he is apt to deny it because he does not want us to know first-hand what a miserable time he has."(P. 1.)
Stephen had been rejected by his Black parents, by his foster parents, and ultimately by the state.
The social scientists told the Supreme Court that segregated Black children were damaged by segregation and made to feel inferior. Kozol describes Stephen:
"I think that much of his life, inwardly and outwardly, must have involved a steady and, as it turned out, inwardly at least, a losing battle to survive. He battled for his existence and, like many defenseless humans, he had to use whatever odd little weapons came to hand. Acting up at school was part of it. He was granted so little attention that he must have panicked repeatedly about the possibility that, with a few slight mistakes, he might simply stop existing or being seen at all."(P. 6.)
The Supreme Court stated that the inequality of segregated education could not be overcome by providing high quality physical facilities for the segregated students. Segregation as a social policy made the Black pupil feel inadequate and crushed her motivation. Here are selected observations in which Kozol makes this point:
"I received confirmation of the belief that even a modern structure and new equipment could not do away with the problems inherent in a segregated school. The slave-master and black child feeling was prevalent here anyway, and discipline remained the overriding problem."(p.42.)
"There was nothing wrong with his motivation, and there was nothing wrong with his home or home-life, either. It was the public schools, pure and simple, which had held him back and made the situation of his life pathetic."(P. 48.)
"... there still was not going to be a real opportunity for me to teach here or for the children to learn. It was not a school. And it wasn't a center for disturbed children. And it wasn't an institution dedicated to salvage. It was a place in which the school system kept is unteachable out of sight and turned them into untouchables."(P.49.)
"The problem is the waste of years, the loss of chances, the closing of avenues, the end of hopes which that kind of institution represents."(P. 50.)
[To be continued.]
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Jonathan Kozol, Death At An Early Age ([1967]Boston: Bantam Edition, 1968).
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