Jonathan Kozol Quotes (32 Quotes)

So long as these kinds of inequalities persist, all of us who are given expensive educations have to live with the knowledge that our victories are contaminated because the game has been rigged to our advantage.

I am opposed to the use of public funds for private education.

Nationally, overwhelmingly non-white schools receive $1,000 less per pupil than overwhelmingly white schools.

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.

I write books to change the world. Perhaps I can only change one little piece of that world. But if I can empower teachers and good citizens to give these children, who are the poorest of the poor, the same opportunity we give our own kids, then I'll feel my life has been worth it.

He came from a family like mine, with sort of decent liberal parents who were progressive in their views about racial justice. I realized, gee, that could have been me. And I just felt I couldn't go on with my plan.

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.

Children are not simply commodities to be herded into line and trained for the jobs that white people who live in segregated neighborhoods have available.

What I tell these young people is, the world is not as dangerous as the older generation would like you to believe. Anyone I know who has ever taken a risk and lost a job has ended up getting a better one two years later.

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.

At that time, I had recently finished a book called Amazing Grace, which many people tell me is a very painful book to read. Well, if it was painful to read, it was also painful to write. I had pains in my chest for two years while I was writing that book.

More mony is put into prisons than into schools. That, in itself, is the description of a nation bent on suicide. I mean, what is more precious to us than our own children We are going to build alot more prisons if we do not deal with the schools and their inequalities.

These are children whom this nation does not truly value and of whom, despite our president's rhetoric of 'high expectations,' we in fact expect so little that we will not let them go to the same schools our white children attend. The kind of schooling that we give to children is the most important determinant of their future options in life.

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.

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.

Many of those who argue for vouchers say that they simply want to use competition to improve public education. I don't think it works that way, and I've been watching this for a longtime.

The greatest difference between now and 1964, when I began teaching, is that public policy has pretty much eradicated the dream of Martin Luther King.

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.

I do feel heartsick that the inequalities, if anything, are worse today than they were when I wrote 'Savage Inequalities,' and that segregation is now back at the point where it was when I published my first book,

The ones I pity are the ones who never stick out their neck for something they believe, never know the taste of moral struggle, and never have the thrill of victory.

You need massive recruitment to tell the poorest of the poor what is possible.

I think a lot of people don't have any idea of how deeply segregated our schools have become all over again. Most textbooks are not honest in what they teach our high school students.

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.

Apartheid does not happen spontaneously, like bad weather conditions.

Instead of seeing these children for the blessings that they are, we are measuring them only by the standard of whether they will be future deficits or assets for our nation's competitive needs.

An awful lot of people come to college with this strange idea that there's no longer segregation in America's schools, that our schools are basically equal; neither of these things is true.

Even if you never do anything about this, you've benefited from an unjust system. You're already the winner in a game that was rigged to your advantage from the start.

There's a reason why politicians and the pedagogic establishment keep churning out these lists of new 'how to fix it' plans. It's because they don't dare speak about the central point. It is not that we don't know what works in public education.... All we have to do is go out and visit Glencoe, Ill., Scarsdale, N.Y., or any of the wealthiest districts in California and we find out right away.

Pick battles big enough to matter, small enough to win.

Let's concede that we have decided to let our children grow up in two separate nations, and lead two separate kinds of lives. If, on the other hand, we have the courage to rise to this challenge to name what's happening within our inner-city schools, then we also need the courage to be activist and go out and fight like hell to change it.

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

If you grow up in the South Bronx today or in south-central Los Angeles or Pittsburgh or Philadelphia, you quickly come to understand that you have been set apart and that there's no will in this society to bring you back into the mainstream.