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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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Jonathan Kozol
Age: 88
Born: 1936
Born: September 5
Author
Writer
Boston
Massachusetts
Dies
Lives
Dream
Doe
Real
Make
Vanquished
Things
Ordinary
People
Choices

More quotes by Jonathan Kozol

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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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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.
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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.
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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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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.
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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.
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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?
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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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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.
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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.'
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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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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.
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Charity isn't a good substitute for justice.
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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.
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Wonderful teachers should never let themselves be drill sergeants for the state.
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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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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
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My goal is to connect the young teachers to the old, to reignite their sense of struggle.
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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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.
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