Death at an Early Age - Essay Example

An eight-year-old student, Stephen is used as a protagonist many times to portray what goes on inside the classrooms and how the Black children are treated. He makes spectacular drawings in the Arts class but the teacher instead of appreciating him scold him inhumanly. Since Kozol taught at the Boston schools during the time when a lot of public outcry about taking black children into white schools, A large portion of Mr. Kozol's book is an outspoken word war against ghettoized schools, particularly in America.

If anyone is not already mindful of the fears that can sometimes or even recurrently be observed in segregated schools, this book will be quite revealing. Kozol incorporates words like "bigot" and “racist” quite without restrictions, and in his view, the self-pursuing, racist administrators who control over these ghettoized institutes are the proxies of the white community's whose task it is to monitor that the black schools stay detached and wanting.  Together with the acquainted theme of insufficiency of schooling that is offered to the children of minorities and underprivileged, the emphasis is on the homecoming of a considerable degree of isolation in urban educational institutes.

Hispanic and Black students are put in schools where they comprise almost the whole of the student body. This segregation leads them to notions and ideas about their self that are degrading and self-doubting. Stephen is just one example portrayed in the book but it is the story of many ‘Colored’ children and of teachers like Kozol.