Reading exceptional historian Jon Zimmerman’s latest, Small Wonder: The Little Red School house in History and Memory, and found the following quotes:

“Some of our children are paupers and some are millionaires in educational opportunity. An American public school at the moment may connote anything from an unheated, dilapidated one-room shack, closed without further notice, to a 200-room palace whose frescoed walls, swimming pool, and air-conditioned interior a Roman emperor might envy.” –Journalist Eunice Barnard (p.102)

James Agee on a new white school in Alabama in the late 1930s: “A recently built, windowy, ‘healthfully’ red brick and white-trimmed structure which perfectly exemplifies the American genius for sterility, unimagination and general gutlessness in meeting any opporunity for ‘reform’ or ‘improvement.'” (p.107)