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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.
Jonathan Kozol
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Jonathan Kozol
Age: 88
Born: 1936
Born: September 5
Author
Writer
Boston
Massachusetts
Love
Spend
Grade
Teaching
Grades
Teach
Primaries
Maybe
Primary
School
Fourth
Used
Several
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Third
Kindergarten
Years
Thirds
Fifth
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
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
I am opposed to the use of public funds for private education.
Jonathan Kozol
Wonderful teachers should never let themselves be drill sergeants for the state.
Jonathan Kozol
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
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.
Jonathan Kozol
Nationally, overwhelmingly non-white schools receive $1,000 less per pupil than overwhelmingly white schools.
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
Apartheid does not happen spontaneously, like bad weather conditions.
Jonathan Kozol
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.
Jonathan Kozol
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
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
A culture in which guilt is automatically assumed to be neurotic and unhealthy has devised a remarkably clever way of protecting its self-interest.
Jonathan Kozol
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.
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
You need massive recruitment to tell the poorest of the poor what is possible.
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
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
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
We know that segregation is evil. We know that the sickest children should not go to the worst hospitals.
Jonathan Kozol