Jonathan Kozol. Amazing Grace & Bernard Goldberg. “Jonathan Kozol” from 100 People Who Are Screwing Up America

Premise:
~ Frustrations
~ Awareness
~ Unfairness
~ Disease
~ Decline
~ Life of children in poverty
~ Poverty
~ Drug abuse
~ America
~ Families
~ Tragedy
~ Helplessness
~ Religion
~ Death
~ Tragedy
~ Unlivable conditions
~ Suffering

Author’s argument:
Kozol and Goldberg both argue that declining conditions that children face due to poverty, disease, death and other issues causes them to lack the education that they deserve and the support for their American culture that hasn’t seemed to have treated them fairly.
Evidence:
1. “At the elementary school that serves the neighborhood across the avenue, only 7 of 800 children do not qualify for free school lunches.’ five of those seven’ says the principal,’ gets reduced-price lunches, because they are classified”(Kozol pg3)
2. “ in humid summer weather, roaches crawl on virtually every surfaces of the houses in which many of the children live .Rats emerge from holes in bedroom walls, terrorizing infants in their cribs”(kozol pg 5)
3. “ in 1981, 84 people, more then half of whom were 21 or younger were murdered in the prescient”(Kozol pg 5)

Points to share:
This article to me was a huge eye opener I can’t even start to imagine how hard it is for these children. They not only have to worry about school and playing that normally child do they have to worry about disease and death and everything in between. I can’t even being to comprehend going to bed at night on the coldest winter night and not being able to have heat. These conditions are awful. I thought this article was very easy to read and kept my attention throughout. I liked how this article included personal accounts from many different people throughout the neighbor I believe that their stories help to paint a better picture in my head of the situations that they were living in.