Quote

The first ten, twelve or fifteen years of life are excavated of inherent moral worth in order to accommodate a regimen of basic training for the adult years that many of the poorest children may not even live to know.

Jonathan Kozol

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

Jonathan Kozol
Age: 88
Born: 1936
Born: September 5
Author
Writer
Boston
Massachusetts
Live
Basic
Excavated
Firsts
Ten
Regimen
First
Adults
Accommodate
Many
Training
Poorest
Children
Worth
Fifteen
Even
Moral
Inherent
Years
Order
Twelve
Life
May
Adult

More quotes by Jonathan Kozol

Image
Children sometimes understand things that most grown-ups do not see.
Jonathan Kozol
Image
We know that segregation is evil. We know that the sickest children should not go to the worst hospitals.
Jonathan Kozol
Image
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.
Jonathan Kozol
Image
Wonderful teachers should never let themselves be drill sergeants for the state.
Jonathan Kozol
Image
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
Image
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
Image
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
Image
You need massive recruitment to tell the poorest of the poor what is possible.
Jonathan Kozol
Image
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
Image
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
Image
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
Image
Pick battles big enough to matter, small enough to win.
Jonathan Kozol
Image
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
Image
The primary victims of Katrina, those who were given the least help by the government, those rescued last or not at all, were overwhelmingly people of color largely hidden from the mainstream of society.
Jonathan Kozol
Image
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
Image
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
Image
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
Image
But when I went to Harvard, it kind of got washed out of me, partly because people made fun of you in college. If you said you believed in God, they would look at you clinically, you know, suggest that you needed a referral.
Jonathan Kozol
Image
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
Image
False hope is worse than despair.
Jonathan Kozol