The trash in the city is also a huge problem. It has not been picked up since 1987, because the city does not have the capital to pays laborers to do the necessary tasks. In essence East St. Louis is a wasteland with a multitude of reasons.
As I read this, I realized that it is easy for middle-class Americans to think that the students who are educated and raised in this type of environment are drug addicts or dealers, thieves, and truants with a high rate of violence. Kozol quickly dispelled this myth, however, by giving us a glimpse of elementary students in Chicago, who appear to possess none of these qualities and are still left to be educated in these unsatisfactory conditions. It seems that their confinement to this educational environment is merely an example of negative punishment rather than a well-deserved opportunity. Many of the classrooms in schools such as .
this, do not have sufficient supplies for conducting the lessons. For examples, there are classrooms without books, windows without glass, science labs without any lab tables and, most importantly .
Brown 4.
over crowded classrooms. Kozol paints a vivid picture, that declared in schools where conditions are so miserable, that attendance can be more like a punishment than an opportunity.
Kozol constantly reinforces that he is not only talking about poor, inner-city children who are being thrown away; he is talking about the shocking inequality between their schools and the suburban schools were kids broadcast from their own television stations and swim in Olympic-sized swimming pools. He finds the injustice especially galling because we pride ourselves in this country on offering equality of opportunity, yet most students in the ambling buildings are Black and Hispanic.
The concept of the "dual-society" is one that is prominent in this book. Kozol contrasts the bleak images of schools in East St. Louis and Chicago, with the bright images of schools such as New Trier High School.
