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Children sometimes understand things that most grown-ups do not see.

Jonathan Kozol

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Jonathan Kozol
Age: 88
Born: 1936
Born: September 5
Author
Writer
Boston
Massachusetts
Grown
Understand
Sometimes
Children
Things

More quotes by Jonathan Kozol

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Nationally, overwhelmingly non-white schools receive $1,000 less per pupil than overwhelmingly white schools.
Jonathan Kozol
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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
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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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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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Childhood is not merely basic training for utilitarian adulthood. It should have some claims upon our mercy, not for its future value to the economic interests of competitive societies but for its present value as a perishable piece of life itself.
Jonathan Kozol
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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.
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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Wonderful teachers should never let themselves be drill sergeants for the state.
Jonathan Kozol
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Pick battles big enough to matter, small enough to win.
Jonathan Kozol
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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.
Jonathan Kozol
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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
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Apartheid does not happen spontaneously, like bad weather conditions.
Jonathan Kozol
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You need massive recruitment to tell the poorest of the poor what is possible.
Jonathan Kozol
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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.
Jonathan Kozol
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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.
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 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
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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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I am opposed to the use of public funds for private education.
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