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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
Much
Teaching
Difference
Policy
Eradicated
Differences
Martin
Pretty
Luther
Greatest
Began
Public
King
Dream
Kings

More quotes by Jonathan Kozol

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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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Childhood is not merely basic training for utilitarian adulthood. It should have some claims upon our mercy, not for its future value to the economic interests of competitive societies but for its present value as a perishable piece of life itself.
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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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Children sometimes understand things that most grown-ups do not see.
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As a matter of record, New York City spends a higher portion of its budget on instruction and associated costs within the schools themselves than any of the other 100 largest districts in the nation.
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False hope is worse than despair.
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The answers I remember longest are the ones that answer questions that I didn't think of asking.
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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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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.
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Pick battles big enough to matter, small enough to win.
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You need massive recruitment to tell the poorest of the poor what is possible.
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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.
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The cause of homelessness is lack of housing.
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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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Wonderful teachers should never let themselves be drill sergeants for the state.
Jonathan Kozol
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A culture in which guilt is automatically assumed to be neurotic and unhealthy has devised a remarkably clever way of protecting its self-interest.
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Charity isn't a good substitute for justice.
Jonathan Kozol
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In public schooling, social policy has been turned back almost one hundred years.
Jonathan Kozol
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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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President Obama still places far too much emphasis on relentless testing with standardized exams.
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