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Quote by Jonathan Kozol

“When I was teaching in the 1960s in Boston, there was a great deal of hope in the air. Martin Luther King Jr. was alive, Malcolm X was alive; great, great leaders were emerging from the southern freedom movement.”

Quote by Jonathan Kozol

Author

Jonathan Kozol (born September 5, 1936) is an American writer, educator, and civil rights activist, best known for his sharp critiques of inequality in the U.S. public education system. Born in Boston and a Harvard graduate, he taught in Chicago public schools, where witnessing racial segregation and resource disparities led him to advocate for educational equity. His seminal works, including 'Savage Inequalities' (1991) and 'Amazing Grace' (1995), expose the struggles of impoverished schools and have sparked national debate. Kozol's writing blends personal narrative with social analysis, emphasizing education as a fundamental human right. He has received awards such as the National Book Award and the Robert F. Kennedy Book Award, and continues to speak and write on educational justice. more

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“But when I went to Harvard, it kind of got washed out of me, partly because people made fun of you in college. If you said you believed in God, they would look at you clinically, you know, suggest that you needed a referral.”

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“During the decades after Brown v. Board of Education there was terrific progress. Tens of thousands of public schools were integrated racially. During that time the gap between black and white achievement narrowed.”

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“Hypersegregated inner-city schools - in which one finds no more than five or ten white children, at the very most, within a student population of as many as 3,000 - are the norm, not the exception, in most northern urban areas today.”

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“I once made a check of all books in my fourth-grade classroom. Of the slightly more than six hundred books, almost one quarter had been published prior to the bombing of Hiroshima; 60 percent were either ten years old or older.”

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“I wrote the first book, and I thought people would say: 'Separate and unequal schools in the City of Boston? I didn't know that. Let's go out and fix it.'”

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“I'd love to go back and teach primary school. I used to teach fourth grade and fifth grade. I'd love to spend several years teaching kindergarten or maybe third grade.”

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“If we allow public funds to be used to support our relatively benign, morally grounded schools, we will have to allow those public funds to be used for any type of private school.”

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“In the book, I write about children in first grade who were taught to read by reading want ads. They learned to write by writing job applications. Imagine what would happen if anyone tried to do that to children in a predominantly white suburban school.”

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“The contrasts between what is spent today to educate a child in the poorest New York City neighborhoods, where teacher salaries are often even lower than the city averages, and spending levels in the wealthiest suburban areas are daunting challenges to any hope New Yorkers might retain that even semblances of fairness still prevail.”

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