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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
In public schooling, social policy has been turned back almost one hundred years.
Jonathan Kozol
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
We know that segregation is evil. We know that the sickest children should not go to the worst hospitals.
Jonathan Kozol
The answers I remember longest are the ones that answer questions that I didn't think of asking.
Jonathan Kozol
Children, of course, don't understand at first that they are being cheated. They come to school with a degree of faith and optimism, and they often seem to thrive during the first few years. It is sometimes not until the third grade that their teachers start to see the warning signs of failure. By the fourth grade many children see it too.
Jonathan Kozol
Apartheid does not happen spontaneously, like bad weather conditions.
Jonathan Kozol
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
Well, teachers have been profoundly demoralized in recent years and are often treated with contempt by politicians. There's a great deal of reckless rhetoric in Washington about the mediocrity of the teaching profession - and I don't find that to be true at all.
Jonathan Kozol
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
Nationally, overwhelmingly non-white schools receive $1,000 less per pupil than overwhelmingly white schools.
Jonathan Kozol
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
False hope is worse than despair.
Jonathan Kozol
President Obama still places far too much emphasis on relentless testing with standardized exams.
Jonathan Kozol
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
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
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
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
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
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
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