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Who are these people that spend that much for performing clowns and $1,000 for toy sailboats? What kinda work they do and how they live and how come we ain’t in on it?

This comment by Sylvia comes when the children are riding the subway train back to their home neighborhood. Sylvia’s rumination proves that one thing she has learned from the lesson is that there is a group of people who can afford things she cannot even begin to imagine owning. She wants to know more about the people who can afford such things, but more importantly, she wants to know why no one she knows has told her about this or has been able to figure out how to attain that kind of success.

“Imagine for a minute what kind of society it is in which some people can spend on a toy what it would cost to feed a family of six or seven. What do you think?”

Miss Moore says this to the children after their trip to the toy store, in her final speech to them following the day’s lesson. Her comment is meant to sum up their experience by distilling the entire trip into a comparison between two concrete things. In challenging the children to think about such inequality, Miss Moore also implies there is something very wrong with a society in which an entire year of needs for a group of people can be met with the same amount of money that it costs to buy one toy for a single child elsewhere.

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