But for the children of the poorest people we’re stripping the curriculum, removing the arts and music, and drilling the children into useful labor. We’re not valuing a child for the time in which she actually is a child.

Kozol is criticizing a two-tier educational system in which affluent children receive a broad, humanistic education while poor children are given a narrowed, test-driven curriculum aimed at producing compliant workers. By highlighting the removal of arts and music, he points to the loss of experiences that cultivate imagination, joy, and full personhood. The line about not valuing a child “for the time in which she actually is a child” argues that childhood has intrinsic worth, not merely instrumental value as preparation for labor. The quote fits Kozol’s long-standing moral critique of inequality: policy choices about curriculum become a form of social sorting that reproduces class divisions.