Quote

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

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

Jonathan Kozol
Age: 88
Born: 1936
Born: September 5
Author
Writer
Boston
Massachusetts
Political
Ideology
Reinforce
Children
Grown
Equanimity
Reputation
Ideologies
Secure
Civic
Image
Civics
Personal
Promote
Opinion
Unlike
Powerful
Defend
Superstructure

More quotes by Jonathan Kozol

Image
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
Image
Wonderful teachers should never let themselves be drill sergeants for the state.
Jonathan Kozol
Image
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
Image
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
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
You need massive recruitment to tell the poorest of the poor what is possible.
Jonathan Kozol
Image
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
Image
President Obama still places far too much emphasis on relentless testing with standardized exams.
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 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
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
I am opposed to the use of public funds for private education.
Jonathan Kozol
Image
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
Image
False hope is worse than despair.
Jonathan Kozol
Image
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
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
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
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
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
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