agencies together, and develop a coordinated approach to the problems of disadvantaged youth. But the program had a number of serious weaknesses. It has given far too little attention to the juvenile justice system, including juvenile police, courts, probation, and institutions. It wisely emphasized projects to prevent delinquency, but unwisely neglected projects to rehabilitate adjudicated delinquents. We hope that funds authorized under S. 1248 will be allocated primarily to agencies, courts, and organizations which work with the adjudicated delinquent. This would help these organizations reduce the chances that first and second offenders will become third and fourth offenders. The much larger programs for public child welfare services in HEW, anti-poverty programs of OEO, model cities programs of HUD, and employment programs of Labor, are addressing the needs of youth who are suffering opportunity deprivation and are in danger of becoming delinquent. This program should, therefore, concern itself with the juvenile offender, because no other Federal agency or program intends to. We urge the Senate not to support construction of training schools under the Juvenile Delinquency bill. Twenty-five million dolars will not build many training schools; but a Congressional authorization will, in effect, be an approval of their construction. The NCCD has recently completed a three-year study of training schools throughout the United States and last year we conducted a study of all state and local juvenile and adult correctional services for the President's Commission on Law Enforcement and Administration of Justice. We found that more than 50 percent of the youth in state and local training schools in 1965 had not previously been supervised or helped on probation. Because about 80 percent of the nation's juvenile courts lack diagnostic and clinical services, most judges must makes their dispositions with insufficient information. And most judges do not have the probation staff with which to undertake community-centered care. Many programs, the latest of which is the intensive Community Supervision Project of the California Youth Authority, demonstrate that even hardened offenders can do better in their communities under close supervision than they can in institutions. In many instances, courts and probation officers are forced to give up too soon because of lack of staff and other resources necessary to treat delinquents in their own communities. In 1965 the annual operating costs of state training schools totaled $144,600,000. For the most part, these schools are still operating custodial programs. Despite the impressive successes of non-institutional, community-based programs, state and local government are planning a 42 percent increase in training school capacity by 1975, at a cost of $177,000,000. They are planning this without Federal grants and despite the lack of success with institutional programs. Very little financial support is planned for community-based programs, even though we are convinced that with comprehensive planning, much of the money planned for expanded institutional space could be diverted to community-based programs. An essential element of a good delinquency program, in our judgment, is strong support for replicating promising juvenile delinquency projects, and disseminating information on them. Hopefully the Office of Juvenile Delinquency, or whoever is to administer this program, will pull together what it has learned over the past six years, and not merely publish it, but begin training personnel in the use of these new techniques; and help states through grants and technical consultation to replicate what has been learned elsewhere. Promising experiments going on throughout the country should be supported, replicated, and publicized. The California I-level program, the Provo experiment in Utah, the Essex field, New Jersey project, and Project Challenge in Lorton, Virgina-these are examples of projects which shoud be known, supported, and replicated. We have done far too little of this under the 1961 Act. Another sorely needed function which should be undertaken in the 1967 Act is training for personnel working in probation, detention, courts, institutions, parole, and police interaction with youth. Even more important in training programs, to increase greatly the number of personnel entering these fields. These are the great needs; and there is no other program to meet them. Although we know it is not a popular view, we are convinced that the Congress must give strong support to experimental and demonstration projects which continue to be needed in this area. We do not know the answers in this field; and to end experimentation now would be, in our judgment, very unwise. Experimentation combined with technical aid programs to promote replication will be productive. Perhaps, one way to make research and demonstration more acceptable would be to write into S. 1248 stringent and specific evaluative procedures to be used by HEW in each project it supports; and to require independent evaluation by people other than those who conduct the demonstrations projects. Full and concrete reports annually will also help to codify information useful to agencies through the nation. S. 1248 should be coordinated with S. 917, the Safe Streets bill, If, as we hope, S. 917 gives broad support to comprehensive planning and programs in criminal justice, this will certainly include juvenile justice. In that case, this bill might be best conducted as it has been-an experimental and demonstration program, but with improved evaluative procedures and increased emphasis on training. S. 1248 should not include comprehensive state planning, if such planning is provided for in S. 917. If, on the other hand, Congress decides to limit S. 917 to law enforcement, we would strongly urge that S. 1248 be changed to a program of assistance to all other aspects of both the juvenile and criminal justice systems as had earlier been intended under S. 917. Senator CLARK. Our final witness this morning is Mr. Jonathan Kozol. Mr. Kozol, as you know, Senator Kennedy of Massachusetts was most anxious to be here when you testify because you are dealing largely with public schools in Boston. Unfortunately he is detained at a meeting of the Judiciary Committee which he feels he cannot leave. I had an opportunity to scan your testimony, and will ask to have it printed in full in the record. I find your testimony disturbing and provocative. But I would suggest that while you are in the right church, you are in the wrong pew. This is really a matter for the Subcommittee on Education rather than for this Subcommittee on Manpower and Employment, and Poverty, which has before it two specific bills on juvenile delinquency, which I do not find treated in your testimony. Nevertheless, with all those disabilities, I want to turn you loose to say anything you have to say. I am on the Subcommittee on Education and also am very deeply interested in the poverty program. These things you speak of in the Boston schools are shocking. Do you have any comments on the specific legislation, which is supposed to be what we are considering? Mr. Kozol. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. STATEMENT OF JONATHAN KOZOL, TEACHER, NEWTON, MASS., PUBLIC SCHOOLS, AND AUTHOR OF "DEATH AT AN EARLY AGE” Mr. Kozol. Well, it will be difficult for me to make concrete recommendations about this legislation, specifically because I did not see any of it until early this morning when I came down here. Senator CLARK. I guess you were induced to come down perhaps under not exactly false pretenses, but nobody told you what the purpose of this hearing was. Mr. Kozol. I wasn't sure. All I understood from Senator Kennedy's office was that he was interested to some extent in the roots of juvenile violence in an urban classroom. Senator CLARK. Why don't we give you, let's say, 15 minutes, to say whatever you want, and then I would highly recommend to you that you get in touch with Senator Kennedy and his staff, so he may be familiarized with this statement. Mr. Kozol. Fine. I would like to ask also that you put into the record, if you can, two documents which seem relevant to me. One is a lead article from the Atlantic Monthly magazine of September—it is a portion of my book. Senator CLARK. Without objection, that will be done. Mr. Kozol. The other document is an article from Newsweek magazine, October 16, which discusses the problems of corporal punishment in an urban public school. Senator CLARK. That, too, will be made part of the record. [From the Atlantic Monthly magazine, September 1967] "DEATH AT AN EARLY AGE" (By Jonathan Kozol) Countless sociological studies and official reports have described the "Someday, maybe," Erik Erikson has written "there will exist a well-informed, well-considered and yet fervent public conviction that the most deadly of all possible sins is the mutilation of a child's spirit." If that day ever comes, American educators may be able to reflect with some horror upon the attitudes and procedures that have been allowed to flourish within a great many urban public schools. It is a commonplace by now to say that the urban school systems of America contain a higher percentage of Negro children each year. More than anywhere else, it is here within these ghetto systems that the mutilation of which Erikson speaks becomes apparent. My own experience took place in Boston, in a segregated fourth-grade classroom. The Boston school system is not perhaps the worst offender, but it provides a clear example of the kind of education being offered the disadvantaged children of many cities. There are, admittedly, in Boston a cluster of unusually discouraging problems, chief among them the school administration's refusal for a great many years to recognize that there was any problem. Only slightly less troubling has been the exceptional virulence of the anti-Negro prejudice, both among teachers and the general public. Yet Boston's problems are not much different from those of other cities, and the solutions here as elsewhere will have to await a change in attitude at all levels of society. Stephen is an eight-year-old pupil in the Boston public schools. A picture of him standing in front of a bulletin board on Arab bedouins shows a little lightbrown person staring with unusual concentration at a chosen spot upon the floor. Stephen is tiny, desperate, unwell. Sometimes he talks to himself, or laughs out loud in class for no apparent reason. He is also an indescribably mild and unmalicious child. He cannot do any of his schoolwork very well. His math and reading are poor. In third grade his class had substitute teachers much of the year. Most of the year before that he had substitute teachers too. He is in the fourth grade now, but his work is barely at the level of the second. Nobody has complained about Stephen's situation because he does not have a real family. Stephen is a ward of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, and as such has been placed in the home of some very poor people who do not want him now that he is not a baby anymore. He often comes to school badly beaten. If I ask him about it, he is apt to deny it because he does not want us to know what a miserable time he has. He lied to me first when I asked him how his eye got battered, claiming that it was an accident. Later, he admitted that his foster mother had flung him out onto the porch. Although Stephen did poorly in his schoolwork, there was one thing he could do well: he made delightful drawings. They were not neat and orderly and organized, but random and casual, messy, somewhat unpredictable. For these drawings Stephen received terrific and steady embarrassment from the art teacher.1 The art teacher was a lady no longer very young who had a number of fixed opinions about children and teaching. Her most common technique of instruction was to pass out mimeographed designs, which the pupils then were asked to color according to a dictated or suggested plan. An alternate approach was to stick up on the wall or the blackboard some of the drawings that had been done in previous years by predominantly white classes. These drawings, neat and ordered and very uniform, would serve as models for the children. The neatest and most accurate reproductions would receive the greatest applause. Stephen was unable to cope with a teacher of this sort. He turned off his signals when she was speaking and withdrew into his own private world. With a pencil, frequently stubby and bitten, he would scribble and fiddle, and he would cock his head and whisper to himself. After a while, he would push aside his little drawing and try the paint and paper that he had been given, usually using the watercolors freely and a little defiantly, and he would produce paintings that were very full of his own nature. If Stephen began to fiddle around during a lesson, he and I and the children near him would prepare for trouble. The art teacher would rush at his desk and shriek at him, "Give me that! You've made a mess! Look what he's done! He's mixed up the colors! I don't know why we waste good paper on this child!" Then: "Garbage! Junk! He gives me garbage and junk! And garbage is one thing I will not have!" I do not know a great deal about painting, but the art teacher did not know much about it either, and furthermore, she did not know or care at all about the way a human being can be destroyed. Stephen, in many ways already dying, died many more times before her anger. Much of Stephen's life, inwardly and outwardly, involved a steady, and as it turned out, losing, battle to survive. Like many defenseless humans, he had to use whatever little weapons came to hand. Acting-up at school was part of it. He was granted so little attention that he must have panicked repeatedly about the possibility that with a few slight mistakes, he might simply stop existing or being seen at all. This is why, I imagine, he seemed so often to invite a tongue-lashing or whipping. Outside school, he might pull a firealarm level and then have the satisfaction of hearing the sirens and seeing the fire engines, and knowing that it was all his doing, so that at least he could have proof in this way that his hands and arm muscles and his mischievous imagination did count for something measurable in the world. It must have seemed better than not having any use at all. One time, seeing him curled up in one of the corners, I tried to get him to look up to me and smile and talk. He refused, and remained shriveled and silent, and so I said to him: "Stephen, if you curl up like that and will not even look up at me, it will just seem as if you want to make me think you are a little rat." He looked down at himself hurriedly, and then up at me, chuckled grotesquely, and said, with a pitiful little smile: "I know I couldn't be a rat, Mr. Kozol, because a rat has got to have a little tail." When I later repeated this to a child psychiatrist, he suggested that the absence of a tail was all that remained to convince Stephen that he had not yet become a rat. Although this comment might smack a bit of psychiatric dogmatism, I do not really think it carried the point too far. For Boston schoolteachers for years have been speaking of their Negro children as "animals" and the school building that houses them as a "zoo." The repercussions of this attitude probably affected Stephen more than other children, but the price it exacted was paid ultimately by every child, and in the long run, I am convinced that it was paid by every teacher too. 1 Our school was assigned a number of experts in different subject areas, which was the result of our participation in the Boston version of a compensatory program for Negro children. The compensation involved was, in fact, of a questionable nature. When Boston lost $2 million in federal aid for compensatory education, the reason given was that the federal government did not consider Boston's program to be offering any kind of legitimate compensation. It should be added, of course, that experts, teachers, and administrators described in this article are composites. Stephen's misery at school was only partially caused by the psychological harassment that I have been describing, for Stephen was also subjected to corporal punishment regularly, in spite of the fact that he was obviously mentally unstable and had very little control over his behavior. Corporal punishment is still sanctioned in the Boston public schools and takes the form of beatings on the hand with a thin bamboo whip or rattan. I don't know exactly how many times Stephen underwent these whippings, but unquestionably they occurred at least as often as once a month, and probably more often, closer to once or twice a week. They happened frequently when the class was having math instruction, and this, I came to believe, was connnected with the unfriendliness that the math teacher felt toward Stephen. She spoke of it on more than one occasion, yet she was also aware of his mental instability, and she was the first to acknowledge it. I remember when she discussed this with me, snapping out the words with sureness: "The child's not in his right mind." When I asked her whether she had thought of recommending psychiatric help for him, she replied that it was no use, since he would only tell the psychiatrist that all the teachers were prejudiced. A few days after this conversation, Stephen was sent to the cellar for another rattaning, and her comment, in accusation, not diagnosis or sympathy, was that he was "not in his right mind." I would like to describe how Stephen behaved when he went downstairs to take his beating. I have said how little he was. Sixty pounds isn't very heavy, and he couldn't have been more than four feet tall. He had terrified tiny hopeless eyes. He had on a Red Sox baseball jersey, baggy corduroy pants, and baseball sneakers which looked a few sizes too large. His hair had oil on it, and it had been shaved down almost to the scalp. He was standing near the men's smoke room. Above were the pipes of the cellar ceiling, nearby the door to the basement boys' toilet. Out of that doorway came the stink of urine. His elbows froze at his sides. The teacher who administered the whipping gave the order to hold out his hands. He wouldn't respond. Again the teacher, standing above him, passed down the order. To no effect. The teacher, now losing patience, ordered it a third time. And still he wouldn't answer or comply. A fourth time. Still this frozen terror. So the decision is made: he will get it twice as many times. He can't hold out forever. Finally he breaks down and stops resisting. The teacher who gives the beating may, in all other instances, seem a decent man. Even in giving this beating he may do it absolutely as he is supposed to. Yet, properly done or not, and whatever the man's intent, the tears still come, and the welts are formed upon the light-brown hand. One obvious question immediately comes to mind. Why would any teacher whip a child for acts that the teacher has already acknowledged, both to himself and to others, to be beyond the child's ability to prevent? Perhaps a partial explanation lies in the fact that segregated schools seem to require this kind of brutal discipline because of the bitter feelings which are so often present in the air. The children-enough of them anyway-are constantly smoldering with a generally unrecognized awareness of their own degradation. The resulting atmosphere is deeply threatening to teachers and administrators. Possibly in most cases, this is the entire story. Thinking of some of the teachers, however, I am convinced that something else was happening at times, and once you had watched it, you would know exactly what it was and would never deny that it was there. "This hurts me," goes the saying, "more than it hurts you." Yet there are moments when the visible glint of gratification becomes unmistakable in the white teacher's eyes. White Bostonians sometimes argue that corporal punishment did not begin with Negro children, that it is, in fact, a very old tradition within the school system. I have never found this a convincing argument. The fact that a crime might have been committed with impunity in the past may make it seem more familiar and less gruesome, but surely does not give it any greater legitimacy. Whether Irish children were once whipped by Yankee teachers or Jewish children, in turn, by Irish, is immaterial. What does matter is that corporal punishment today is being used by whites on Negroes, and being used in too many cases to act out, on a number of persuasive pretexts, a deeply seated racial hate. If just any tough teen-ager is beaten on the fingers by his teacher, one can assume that school officials will be able to pass it off as discipline. But when a sixty-pound mentally ill fourth-grader is whipped for acts that are manifestly crazy, and when the teacher who prepares the punishment has, not ten days before, been speaking calmly of the niggers down South, or the little bastards caus |