Love, savagely

Oh yes. It's that time again.

That inglorious manufactured holiday where retail exonerates you to spendspeND SPEND otherwise you must not truly love your boyfriend/girlfriend/partner/husband/wife/whatever and schoolchildren get hopped up on fifty different kinds of sugar while engaging in blatant popularity contests over who gets the most Valentines.

As you can probably tell, I'm not a big fan. I did go out to eat with my honey, but only because we are broke and had a Groupon to spend at the restaurant. The rest of the night I spent curled up with Jonathan Kozol's Savage Inequalities, which I've gotta say is a total mood-buster.

I can't even count how many times this book has already made me cry, and I'm only on the second chapter. Urban, minority school districts in toxic vicinity to industrial plants who can't even afford toilet paper much less textbooks are so far removed from the heated battles that rage in the bureaucracies of Texas and California. Entire school boards, administrative bodies, and citizen organizations are devoted to nitpicking every single element of textbooks. Yet as many critics note, even with this level of scrutiny textbooks lack a coherent voice or any level of compelling dialogue. And then there exist schools who will never get their hands on those hotly contested books, who need to deal with issues like sewage buildup, who are serving teen moms and gang members. What a disconnect between different sectors of America's education system. It seems like as a whole, there are a bunch of disparate groups running around hyper concerned with particular elements of education (textbook content! curriculum reform! school vouchers!), each of which are just tiny bandaids for a system in need of massive overhaul.