Final Service Learning Reflection #3

Out of all the readings from this semester, I feel the reading that connects the best to my experience at NALC is Salvage Inequalities. Reading the content in Salvage Inequalities was as if Jonathan Kozol saw Cohn High School and my experience at NALC, and then wrote about it. Referring to public schools, Kozol talks about the inequalities in the school system and I absolutely felt what he was talking about when I first entered the school. When I entered the front doors, I thought about Camden High School, the school Kozol talks about in chapter 4. I saw lockers falling apart, some missing lights, and signs that read "lockers are property of the school and can be searched anytime". The first time I walked into the NALC designated room, I saw all the books and lesson plans, and thats when it hit me that this was reality. Many people in the United States can bearly or all together cannot read. These people that were coming in to get tutored were some of the students that fell through the cracks of the public school system and now they are at NALC. I knew these people did not choose to fall through the cracks of the school system and this is when I started to feel guilty. Though lots of NALC students are not from the United States, there are still some that are. How did these students go through life without becoming literate? With guilt came gratefulness for my own personal literacy experience and for the staff and volunteers at NALC. If these organizations like NALC did not exist, what would happen to these students? Would they keep on going through life, never being literate? It's for these organizations like NALC and authors like Jonathan Kozol that acknowledge these inequalities and challenges people to fix this problem.