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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
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Boston
Massachusetts
Policy
Eradicated
Differences
Martin
Pretty
Luther
Greatest
Began
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King
Dream
Kings
Much
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Difference
More quotes by Jonathan Kozol
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
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.
Jonathan Kozol
Wonderful teachers should never let themselves be drill sergeants for the state.
Jonathan Kozol
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?
Jonathan Kozol
Charity isn't a good substitute for justice.
Jonathan Kozol
President Obama still places far too much emphasis on relentless testing with standardized exams.
Jonathan Kozol
The first goal and primary function of the U.S. public school is not to educate good people, but good citizens. It is the function which we call - in enemy nations - 'state indoctrination.'
Jonathan Kozol
You need massive recruitment to tell the poorest of the poor what is possible.
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.
Jonathan Kozol
We continue, however, to write about important people, prize-winning people, blacks of grandeur, women of great fire, fame or wit. We do not write about ordinary people.
Jonathan Kozol
Hypersegregated inner-city schools - in which one finds no more than five or ten white children, at the very most, within a student population of as many as 3,000 - are the norm, not the exception, in most northern urban areas today.
Jonathan Kozol
If you could lead through testing, the U.S. would lead the world in all education categories. When are people going to understand you don't fatten your lambs by weighing them?
Jonathan Kozol
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.
Jonathan Kozol
I am opposed to the use of public funds for private education.
Jonathan Kozol
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.
Jonathan Kozol
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.
Jonathan Kozol
Unlike these powerful grown-ups, children have no ideologies to reinforce, no superstructure of political opinion to promote, no civic equanimity or image to defend, no personal reputation to secure.
Jonathan Kozol
On Mondays and Fridays in early May, nearly 18,000 children-the equivalent of all the elementary students in suburban Glencoe, Wilmette, Glenview, Kenilworth, Winnetka, Deerfield, Highland Park and Evanston-are assigned to classes with no teacher.
Jonathan Kozol
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
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
