Jonathan Kozol Quotes

When I was young, I was religious.

A great deal has been written in recent years about the purported lack of motivation in the children of the Negro ghettos. Little in my experience supports this, yet the phrase has been repeated endlessly, and the blame in almost all cases is placed somewhere outside the classroom.

Schooling should not be left to the whim or wealth of village elders. I believe that we should fund all schools in the U.S. with our national resources. All these kids are being educated to be Americans, not citizens of Minneapolis or San Francisco.

I encourage teachers to speak in their own voices. Don’t use the gibberish of the standards writers.

No human being who wants to read and own a book should ever have to go on a bended knee to get it.

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.

Our political establishment refuses to use the word ‘segregated.’ They call the schools diverse, which means half black, half Hispanic, and maybe two white kids and three Asians. ‘Diverse’ has become a synonym for ‘segregated.’

An awful lot of people come to college with this strange idea that there’s no longer segregation in America‘s schools, that our schools are basically equal; neither of these things is true.

No Child Left Behind‘s fourth-grade gains aren’t learning gains, they’re testing gains. That’s why they don’t last. The law is a distraction from things that really count.

Wonderful teachers should never let themselves be drill sergeants for the state.

I beg people not to accept the seasonal ritual of well-timed charity on Christmas Eve. It’s blasphemy.

No matter what happens in a child’s home, no matter what other social and economic factors may impede a child, there’s no question in my mind that a first-rate school can transform almost everything.

By far the most important factor in the success or failure of any school, far more important than tests or standards or business-model methods of accountability, is simply attracting the best-educated, most exciting young people into urban schools and keeping them there.

A culture in which guilt is automatically assumed to be neurotic and unhealthy has devised a remarkably clever way of protecting its self-interest.

Apartheid does not happen spontaneously, like bad weather conditions.

I feel, in the end, as if everything I’ve done has been a failure.

The fact that a crime might have been committed with impunity in the past may make it seem more familiar and less gruesome, but surely does not give it any greater legitimacy.

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.

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.

I am opposed to the use of public funds for private education.

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.

I think a lot of people don’t have any idea of how deeply segregated our schools have become all over again. Most textbooks are not honest in what they teach our high school students.

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.

Discrimination is alive and soaring.

The last thing the theatre owners wanted was for people who spent $200 to see ‘Les Miserables’ to come out again and see the real miserable children of America, right there on the sidewalk.

It is our nation which is blind, and needs our prayers.

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.

In many of the high schools in the South Bronx, more children will end up in prison than will go to college.

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.

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.

I tell young teachers who are determined to dissent from some of the Draconian aspects of the current orthodoxy that the best form of protection is to be incredibly good at what you do and keep good discipline in class.

We know that segregation is evil. We know that the sickest children should not go to the worst hospitals.

Childhood ought to have at least a few entitlements that aren’t entangled with utilitarian considerations. One of them should be the right to a degree of unencumbered satisfaction in the sheer delight and goodness of existence in itself.

The answers I remember longest are the ones that answer questions that I didn’t think of asking.

Public school was never in business to produce Thoreau. It is in business to produce a man like Richard Nixon and, even more, a population like the one which could elect him.

Congress has an opportunity to take advantage of the opening created by Justice Kennedy later this year when it reauthorizes the federal No Child Left Behind Act.

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.

You need massive recruitment to tell the poorest of the poor what is possible.

Nationally, overwhelmingly non-white schools receive $1,000 less per pupil than overwhelmingly white schools.

I wrote the first book, and I thought people would say: ‘Separate and unequal schools in the City of Boston? I didn’t know that. Let’s go out and fix it.’

So long as these kinds of inequalities persist, all of us who are given expensive educations have to live with the knowledge that our victories are contaminated because the game has been rigged to our advantage.

So long as the most vulnerable people in our population are consigned to places that the rest of us will always shun and flee and view with fear, I am afraid that educational denial, medical and economic devastation, and aesthetic degradation will be inevitable.

All of my education at Harvard, then Oxford, then Paris was in literature – even my thesis was on Shakespeare.

I believe we need a national amendment which will guarantee every child in America the promise of not just an equal education but a high-quality equal education.

People rarely speak of children; you hear of ‘cohort groups‘ and ‘standard variations,’ but you don’t hear much of boys who miss their cats or 6-year-olds who have to struggle with potato balls.

Even if you never do anything about this, you’ve benefited from an unjust system. You’re already the winner in a game that was rigged to your advantage from the start.

I don’t know if anything I write will endure, but I do try to write it as a narrative that will not only challenge but also entice the reader into the lives of children.

Many of those who argue for vouchers say that they simply want to use competition to improve public education. I don’t think it works that way, and I’ve been watching this for a longtime.

My goal is to connect the young teachers to the old, to reignite their sense of struggle.

Consider what it is like to go into a new classroom and to see before you suddenly, and in a way you cannot avoid recognizing, the dreadful consequences of a year’s wastage of so many lives.