DEATH AT AN EARLY AGE

by Jonathan Kozol ‧ RELEASE DATE: Oct. 2, 1967

Mr. Kozol spent a year teaching the fourth grade in a Boston school at just the same time that Peter Schrag was gathering his material for Village School Downtown (Beacon) which has just appeared and which was intended to be a report on urban schools with deprived minorities and presumed a nationwide application. The two books are really not comparable since Mr. Kozol's book, whatever wider implications it unquestionably has, is intended to be primarily the story of his own experience, with a strong, personal, immediate undertow.... of Stephen, eight, artistic, ""desperate, unwell,"" brutalized in a foster home, terrorized by an art teacher; or Frederick, whose hand was scarred for life--in school. Or of other children beaten with bamboo whips in cellars where, also, in the dank (urine) and in the dark, classes were held. Kozol's report card proceeds from there to the books used (the only new ones--a boxed set of The Bobbsey Twins; or out of 140 biographies, only one dealing with a Negro); to the textbooks and the curriculum; to the attitudes of the other teachers (all discriminatory); to the shame of the cities--particulary Boston--and its School Committee. The redoubtable Mrs. Hicks and her ""Open Enrollment manifesto""; another officer--""We have no inferior education in our schools. What we have been getting is an inferior type of student."" Or still another--""The Negro majority was like the stain of blackness on a child's pants."" Mr. Kozol's year ended with his dismissal after he read a poem of Langston Hughes to his children--""the danger of reading to Negro children poems written in bad grammar."" Perhaps the book will do more for his children than his year there (his ""inferior"" charges made startling progress). It is written with implacable understatement which does not minimize its power to reach and touch almost anyone. An eloquent documentary.

Pub Date: Oct. 2, 1967

ISBN: N/A

Page Count: -

Publisher: Houghton Mifflin

Review Posted Online: N/A

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 1967

Categories: NONFICTION