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The Shame of the Nation: The Restoration of Apartheid Schooling in America

Book by Jonathan Kozol · 6 quotes · Children, Kids, School

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The Shame of the Nation: The Restoration of Apartheid Schooling in America Quotes

“I have been criticized throughout the course of my career for placing too much faith in the reliability of children's narratives; but I have almost always found that children are a great deal more reliable in telling us what actually goes on in public school than many of the adult experts who develop policies that shape their destinies.”

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“There is something deeply hypocritical in a society that holds an inner-city child only eight years old "accountable" for her performance on a high-stakes standardized exam but does not hold the high officials of our government accountable for robbing her of what they gave their own kids six or seven years before.”

YearsChildrenDoeGovernmentKidsCitiesSixPerformancesSevenEightOfficialsStakesSeven YearsExamHypocriticalRobbingInner City
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“As damaging as the obsessive emphasis on testing often proves to be for kids in general, I believe that the effects are still more harmful in those schools in which the resources available to help the children learn the skills that will be measured by these tests are fewest, the scores they get are predictably the lowest, and the strategies resorted to by principals in order to escape the odium attaching to a disappointing set of numbers tend to be the most severe.”

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“Childhood is not merely basic training for utilitarian adulthood. It should have some claims upon our mercy, not for its future value to the economic interests of competitive societies but for its present value as a perishable piece of life itself.”

ShouldValuesInterestPiecesEconomicChildhoodTrainingShould HaveMercyClaimsAdulthoodUtilitarianBasic Training
Book:The Shame of the Nation: The Restoration of Apartheid Schooling in America
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