Books Not Bombs!

Community organizer and retired Paterson school teacher, John Sargis, of Inclusive Democracy states, “The best and easiest way to control people is by not educating them. Those who control the information, control society. Paterson youth are not being educated, but they are being misadjusted. Inclusive Democracy contends that the system is broken.”

Some statistics via Inclusive Democracy:

If the current United States system of public schooling claims to enhance social, political, and economic equity in closing the gap in educational access, expectations and results for the most advantaged and disadvantaged people of society then consider these brutal realities found in the 2004 Annual Report of Teachers College, Columbia University:

· Thirteen percent of African-American children are born with low birth weight—double the rate for whites. The infant mortality rate for African-Americans is double that of the white population.

· Median black family income is 64% of median white family income—and median black family net worth is only 12% of the white family worth.

· Twenty percent of low-income children are without consistent health insurance, versus 12% of all U.S. children. Thirteen percent of black children are without health insurance, versus 8% of white children. Approximately 42 million people are without health-care coverage. Black pre-schoolers are one-third less likely than whites to get standard vaccinations. Low income children have dangerously high blood levels of lead at five times the rate of middle-class children. Some 8 million schoolchildren are taking psychotrophic drugs to control their alleged emotional and intellectual disorders.

· African-American students are three times more likely than whites to be placed in special education programs, and only half as likely to be in gifted programs.

· By age three, children of professionals have vocabularies nearly 50% greater than those of working-class children, and twice as large as those of children on welfare.

· By the end of fourth grade, African-American and Latino students, and poor students of all races, are two years behind their wealthier, predominately white peers in reading and math. By eighth grade, they have slipped three years behind and by twelfth grade four years behind.

· One in three African-American males will be incarcerated in state or federal prison at some point in their lives. The rate is higher for those black males who do not finish high school. For Hispanic males, the rate is one in six, for white males, one in seventeen.