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

More quotes by Jonathan Kozol

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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
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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.
Jonathan Kozol
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Apartheid does not happen spontaneously, like bad weather conditions.
Jonathan Kozol
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Charity isn't a good substitute for justice.
Jonathan Kozol
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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
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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
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In public schooling, social policy has been turned back almost one hundred years.
Jonathan Kozol
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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
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I do get scared about the physical danger from drug dealers. But it's not in the same league as the danger I feel eating an $80 lunch with my privileged friends to discuss hunger and poverty. That's when my soul feels imperiled.
Jonathan Kozol
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Pick battles big enough to matter, small enough to win.
Jonathan Kozol
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I encourage teachers to speak in their own voices. Don't use the gibberish of the standards writers.
Jonathan Kozol
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President Obama still places far too much emphasis on relentless testing with standardized exams.
Jonathan Kozol
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The answers I remember longest are the ones that answer questions that I didn't think of asking.
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?
Jonathan Kozol
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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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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
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The cause of homelessness is lack of housing.
Jonathan Kozol
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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.'
Jonathan Kozol
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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
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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