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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.

Jonathan Kozol

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Jonathan Kozol
Age: 88
Born: 1936
Born: September 5
Author
Writer
Boston
Massachusetts
Policy
Eradicated
Differences
Martin
Pretty
Luther
Greatest
Began
Public
King
Dream
Kings
Much
Teaching
Difference

More quotes by Jonathan Kozol

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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.
Jonathan Kozol
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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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If there are amazing graces on this earth, I believe that they are these good children sent to us by God and not yet soiled by the knowledge that their nation does not love them.
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East St. Louis-which the local press refers to as an inner city without an outer city-has some of the sickest children in America. Of 66 cities in Illinois, East St. Louis ranks first in fetal death, first in premature birth, and third in infant health.
Jonathan Kozol
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Pick battles big enough to matter, small enough to win.
Jonathan Kozol
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The answers I remember longest are the ones that answer questions that I didn't think of asking.
Jonathan Kozol
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Nationally, overwhelmingly non-white schools receive $1,000 less per pupil than overwhelmingly white schools.
Jonathan Kozol
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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.
Jonathan Kozol
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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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You need massive recruitment to tell the poorest of the poor what is possible.
Jonathan Kozol
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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.
Jonathan Kozol
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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.
Jonathan Kozol
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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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It is a commonplace by now to say that the urban school systems of America contain a higher percentage of Negro children each year.
Jonathan Kozol
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I am opposed to the use of public funds for private education.
Jonathan Kozol
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Wonderful teachers should never let themselves be drill sergeants for the state.
Jonathan Kozol
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Children, of course, don't understand at first that they are being cheated. They come to school with a degree of faith and optimism, and they often seem to thrive during the first few years. It is sometimes not until the third grade that their teachers start to see the warning signs of failure. By the fourth grade many children see it too.
Jonathan Kozol
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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.
Jonathan Kozol
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Apartheid does not happen spontaneously, like bad weather conditions.
Jonathan Kozol
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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.
Jonathan Kozol