Blog Post 5

The solution that I most saw to this problem was to change the school system. After reading several excerpts from "Savage Inequalities" by Jonathan Kozol, I began to more understand how this cycle of poverty works and how it affects children and families of color. 

“It, is a matter of national pride that every child's ship be kept afloat.  Otherwise our nation would be subject to the charge that we deny poor chil­dren public school.  But what is now encompassed by the one word ('school") are two very different kinds of institutions that, in function, finance and inten­tion, serve entirely different roles.  Both are needed for our nation’s governance.  But children in one set of schools are educated to be governors; children in the other set of schools are trained for being governed.  The former are given the imaginative range to mobilize ideas for economic growth; the latter are pro­vided with the discipline to do the narrow tasks the first group will prescribe.
Societies cannot be all generals, no soldiers.  But, by our schooling pat­terns, we assure that soldiers' children are more likely to be soldiers and that the offspring of the generals will have at least the option to be generals.  If this is not so, if it is just a matter of the difficulty of assuring perfect fairness, why does the unfairness never benefit the children of the poor?”

Children who grow up in lower socioeconomic classes have very little opportunity to rise from that. Our education system is designed to help those with privilege advance and keep those who are less fortunate in their respective place. Being a student at Payton where we have access to so many resources and tools to help us achieve the highest level of success, it is not something that has even crossed my mind. That helped me decide to want to contact the U.S. Department of Education as well as volunteer at my local elementary school to help educate kids about their options and the importance of education.