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Shut Those Thick Lips: A Study of Slum School Failure Rosenfeld, Gerry

The realities of prejudice and denied opportunity Ethnographically focused on the urban black community of Harlem in New York City, this study gives the reader a clear idea of what it means to go to a slum school and to be a black child, as well as why the achievement of minority children is low A realistic assessment of the interaction between the teachers and students is given: teachers see children as uneducable; children see teachers as hostile, the school as forbidding, the experience as limiting and destructive The author shows how, as a teacher in the very school he describes, he captured some of the energy produced out of frustration and in so doing demonstrated potentials for learning that are usually assumed to be absent among children of the poor