A Quote by Henry Giroux
Increasingly, poor minority and white youth are being funneled directly from schools into prison.
Related Quotes
Most new prison construction has occurred in predominately white, rural communities, and thus a new and bizarre form of segregation has emerged in recent years. Ghetto youth are transferred from their decrepit, underfunded, racially segregated schools to brand-new high-tech prisons located in white rural counties.
The discipline, particularly in these urban schools for the poor, it's not controlled by the administration - they're controlled by the police. This is an expression of a racist logic that has now seeped directly into schools.
Public schools are not simply being corporatized, they are also subjected increasingly to a militarizing logic that disciplines the bodies of young people, especially low income and poor minorities, and shapes their desires and identities in the service of military values and social relations.
When you live in a poor neighborhood, you are living in an area where you have poor schools. When you have poor schools, you have poor teachers. When you have poor teachers, you get a poor education. When you get a poor education, you can only work in a poor-paying job. And that poor-paying job enables you to live again in a poor neighborhood. So, it's a very vicious cycle.
The Republicans are looking at a country that is going to be a majority minority country in just over a generation. And they are an increasingly white party.
The brutal truth is, we're scarcely 'educating' children at all. Even if you overlook the guilt, fear, bigotry, and dangerous anti-intellectual flapdoodle being funneled into young brains by schools on the religious right, what we're doing is training kids to be cogs in the wheels of commerce.
The prison-industrial complex employs millions of people directly and indirectly. Judges, prosecutors, defense attorneys, prison guards, construction companies that build prisons, police, probation officers, court clerks, the list goes on and on. Many predominately white rural communities have come to believe that their local economies depend on prisons for jobs.
I'm worried about the future of America insofar as our academically most promising students are being funneled through the cookie-cutter Ivy League and other elite schools and emerging with this callow anti-American, anti-military cast to their thinking.
When it comes to our precious poor children of all colors, maybe disproportionally in percentage black and white and red, but all colors, yellow as well as white, we need to push toward integrated schools.
We must end the school-to-prison pipeline and create a pipeline from our high schools and community colleges directly to jobs for those who choose not to attend a four-year college.
Americans should understand that 50%, or something like, of the kids in inner-city schools, often poor and often minority, don't graduate. And the ones that do don't necessarily have the skills to get a job. That is the biggest disgrace in this country.
Education must be increasingly concerned about the fullest development of all children and youth, and it will be the responsibility of the schools to seek learning conditions which will enable each individual to reach the highest level of learning possible.
We have seven and a half times as many people in prison. And we have eight times as many black women in prison now as we did in 1981, when I left the White House. So that's been one of the major concerns I've had as a non-lawyer, to criticize the American justice system, which is highly biased against black people and poor people. And it still is.
Any society's insistence on how it takes democracy seriously can, in fact, be measured by the way it treats its children. And if we take that index as a measure of the United States, it's utterly failing. You have young people basically who - in schools that are increasingly modeled after prisons. You have their behavior being increasingly criminalized. And one of the most atrocious of all acts, you have the rise of debtors' prisons for children.
Nationally, overwhelmingly non-white schools receive $1,000 less per pupil than overwhelmingly white schools.
When children attend schools that place a greater value on discipline and security than on knowledge and intellectual development, they are attending prep schools for prison.
Related Authors
Andrea Dworkin Quotes
American
Critic
bell hooks Quotes
American
Critic
Charles Lamb Quotes
English
Critic
Charlie Brooker Quotes
English
Critic
Chuck Klosterman Quotes
American
Critic
Elvis Mitchell Quotes
American
Critic
Henry Louis Gates Quotes
American
Critic
Howard Rheingold Quotes
American
Critic
Jerry Saltz Quotes
American
Critic
Kimberly Guilfoyle Quotes
American
Critic
Mike Gallagher Quotes
American
Critic
Roger Ebert Quotes
American
Critic
Roland Barthes Quotes
French
Critic
Terry Eagleton Quotes
English
Critic
Walter Benjamin Quotes
German
Critic
William Hazlitt Quotes
English
Critic