Chapter 3 discusses how Jonathan Kozol witnessed uniform activities and heard teacher’s words that controlled and muted the expressiveness of children in a South Bronx elementary school. Any school system that promotes teachers and students acting like lifeless puppets should be shut down. Children at these schools were labeled at 4 different levels based off of their academic achievements. These levels also defined these children as who they were. Shamefully, level one students ( the lowest achievers academically ) were treated as if they did not even exist where as level four students ( the highest achievers academically ) were applauded. Teachers at these schools work from a curriculum that they fear and have to teach students how to parrot language instead of truly understanding or exploring the true meanings of the vocabulary they are forced to use.
Chapter 4 speaks of how schools in Ohio are preparing and developing the minds of children at very young ages to meet a market demand. Learning itself – the learning of a skill, or the enjoying of a book, and even having an idea – is now defined increasingly not as a process or preoccupation that holds satisfaction of its own but in proprietary terms, as if it were the acquisition of an object or stock-option or the purchase of a piece of land. Because these schools are not providing opportunities for children to learn about a variety of occupations, many students are simply being taught how to become a production that enhances our marketing economy. This is so disheartening because many of these students could be future artists, lawyers, scientists, musicians, etc. Without being educated and having the opportunity to explore what these children are best at, these underprivilaged schools are producing students who are slaves to jobs that they have no passion for.
