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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.
Jonathan Kozol
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Jonathan Kozol
Age: 88
Born: 1936
Born: September 5
Author
Writer
Boston
Massachusetts
Lines
Commodities
White
Neighborhoods
Jobs
Commodity
Live
Trained
Children
Neighborhood
People
Available
Line
Herded
Simply
Segregated
More quotes by Jonathan Kozol
The answers I remember longest are the ones that answer questions that I didn't think of asking.
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The cause of homelessness is lack of housing.
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You need massive recruitment to tell the poorest of the poor what is possible.
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I encourage teachers to speak in their own voices. Don't use the gibberish of the standards writers.
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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.
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I am opposed to the use of public funds for private education.
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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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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.
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You have to remember. . .that for this little boy whom you have met, his life is just as important to him, as your life is to you. No matter how insufficient or how shabby it may seem to some, it is the only one he has.
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The rich...should beg the poor to forgive us for the bread we bring them. Healthy people sometimes feel they need to beg forgiveness too, although there is no reason why. Maybe we simply ask forgiveness for not being born where these poor women have been born, knowing that if we lived here too, our fate might well have been the same.
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We know that segregation is evil. We know that the sickest children should not go to the worst hospitals.
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Nationally, overwhelmingly non-white schools receive $1,000 less per pupil than overwhelmingly white schools.
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Competitive skills are desperately needed by poor children in America, and realistic recognition of the economic roles that they may someday have an opportunity to fill is obviously important, too. But there is more to life, and there ought to be much more to childhood, than readiness for economic functions.
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The White House, in advancing the agenda for a [school] choice plan, rests its faith on market mechanisms. What reason have the black and very poor to lend their credence to a market system that has proved so obdurate and so resistant to their pleas at every turn?
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A dream does not die on its own. A dream is vanquished by the choices ordinary people make about real things in their own lives.
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Charity isn't a good substitute for justice.
Jonathan Kozol
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.
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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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Apartheid does not happen spontaneously, like bad weather conditions.
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My goal is to connect the young teachers to the old, to reignite their sense of struggle.
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