Symposium: Quest for Social Justice



Symposium: Quest for Social Justice Br. Dennis Beach, OSB

Paper on Jonathan Kozol’s Savage Inequalites Fall 1999

The paper that is a “focused book review” is due Thursday, October 14, 1999. Here are some guidelines that say more than was on the web site.

1. The essay will be like a book review in that I expect your primary audience, even if you have a specialized group in mind, to be people who have not read Jonathan Kozol’s Savage Inequalities. This means that part of your job is to tell potential readers what they will discover in the pages of the book.

2. Your essay will be more focused than most book reviews, in that I want you to choose one theme, or perhaps two or more themes that you can relate very closely. It is fine to suggest Kozol’s general concerns, but I will expect and evaluate how well you focus on a specific theme. “Inequality” just by itself is a general theme, one that you can hardly avoid using. But root causes or implications or attitudes toward that inequality are more specific. For example, racism, both hidden and overt, emerges as a specific theme. Defense of privilege or double-standards for the well-to-do are specific themes. The politics or legal battles could be a theme. The attitudes that blacks students, teachers and administrators develop could be a theme. The way the system perpetuates itself or perhaps even grows worse could be a theme. Etc.

3. You will use various passages or conversations or commentaries by Kozol to help make your points concrete and vivid. You can also use examples form your own experience, for talking about our shared world and your experience of it can help readers understand why Kozol’s book is relevant or important.

4. When you quote Kozol, normally you will introduce the quotation with what our text calls a “signal phrase.” For longer quotations (more than four lines typed), you should indent the whole quotation one inch (click the indent button twice if using Word, since each indent is ½”). You can find this instruction in the “P” section fo our handbook, under “Quotation Marks” and “Long Quotations.” At least it’s there in last year’s edition, which is all that I have here in the dorm.

5. Your review article should have an original title. For example, the one I chose on Robert Coles’ The Moral Intelligence of Children was entitled “Truths that Wake.” (I recognize this as part of a line of poetry about a child’s adolescent discoveries of “truths that wake to perish never.”) In general, creating titles is a skill you should work on.

6. We’ll be able to ask questions on Tuesday; bring your composition handbook, A Writer’s Reference, to class.

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