“This is not a school, it’s a zoo. There are the animals”: Death at an early age by Jonathan Kozol and the injustices and violence promoted by the American school system in the 1960s

Abstract

This manuscript deals with the relationships between teachers and students and the oppressions, violence and inequalities present in the North American school system. For this purpose, the analysis of Jonathan Kozol’s memoirs, who in his book Death at an Early Age (1960) recounts his brief experience as a teacher in a segregated school in Boston-USA, is here presented. At the time when he published his teaching autobiography, Kozol offered an important work to question public education in his country. In addition, his story unfolds the school day by showing the pedagogical contents, teaching approaches and abusive behaviors of his professional colleagues to their students who, not corresponding to their representations of excellence, ended up suffering physical and symbolic violence, such as those perceiving the school as a “zoo” and the students as “animals”. His book evidences what we automate and naturalize and give us literature as a tool for education in the knowledge of social, historical and psychological reality.