"Children are not simply commodities to be herded into line and trained for the jobs that white people who live in segregated neighborhoods have available"
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Kozol drops the velvet glove and names the machinery: schooling as a pipeline that pretends to be meritocratic while quietly sorting poor children of color into roles pre-approved by a distant, whiter labor market. The word "commodities" is the moral insult that powers the line. It doesn’t just accuse schools of being ineffective; it accuses them of treating kids as inventory, managed for throughput rather than cultivated for agency.
The syntax does a lot of political work. "Herded into line" evokes crowd control, not education; it frames discipline and standardization as forms of containment. Then Kozol pivots to "trained for the jobs" - not "prepared for lives" or "educated for citizenship". Training is narrow by design, an obedience curriculum dressed up as pragmatism.
The sharpest blade is the clause "white people who live in segregated neighborhoods have available". Kozol locates the decision-makers offstage, insulated by geography and property values. Segregation isn’t treated as an unfortunate backdrop; it’s the operating system. The subtext is that the economy and housing policy dictate the horizon of what schools imagine for certain children, and that the horizon is deliberately low.
In Kozol’s broader work on urban schools, this is less a rhetorical flourish than a recurring indictment: unequal funding, crumbling facilities, test-driven remediation, and vocational tracking function as a moral bargain. Society keeps its spatial and racial order; schools help maintain it, then call the result "opportunity."
The syntax does a lot of political work. "Herded into line" evokes crowd control, not education; it frames discipline and standardization as forms of containment. Then Kozol pivots to "trained for the jobs" - not "prepared for lives" or "educated for citizenship". Training is narrow by design, an obedience curriculum dressed up as pragmatism.
The sharpest blade is the clause "white people who live in segregated neighborhoods have available". Kozol locates the decision-makers offstage, insulated by geography and property values. Segregation isn’t treated as an unfortunate backdrop; it’s the operating system. The subtext is that the economy and housing policy dictate the horizon of what schools imagine for certain children, and that the horizon is deliberately low.
In Kozol’s broader work on urban schools, this is less a rhetorical flourish than a recurring indictment: unequal funding, crumbling facilities, test-driven remediation, and vocational tracking function as a moral bargain. Society keeps its spatial and racial order; schools help maintain it, then call the result "opportunity."
Quote Details
| Topic | Equality |
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