![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Salon has a spectacular interview with Jonathan Kozol about public education in America. Well worth the ads or signing up for a day pass even if you don't subscribe.
The genius of segregation in America is that it never gives most decent white Americans the opportunity to meet a child like Pineapple. And because they don't know these children in their years of innocence, they are protected from their own best instincts. If they knew them, most good people in this country could not tolerate the destruction of these children's destinies.
....
And if you read the newspapers, you know how it works -- every year there is a new plan. This year it's small segregated and unequal schools, last year it was segregated and unequal schools with scripted phonics texts and kids in uniforms, and another year it was segregated and unequal schools with self-help incantations plastered on the walls. .... But if interesting and even benevolent innovations on the part of school reformers were able to create successful segregated schools, we would have learned it in the past 100 years.
