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Quote by Jonathan Kozol

“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.”

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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“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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“The first ten, twelve or fifteen years of life are excavated of inherent moral worth in order to accommodate a regimen of basic training for the adult years that many of the poorest children may not even live to know.”

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“The primary victims of Katrina, those who were given the least help by the government, those rescued last or not at all, were overwhelmingly people of color largely hidden from the mainstream of society.”

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“There has been so much recent talk of progress in the areas of curriculum innovation and textbook revision that few people outside the field of teaching understand how bad most of our elementary school materials still are.”

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