Jonathan Kozol
Jonathan Kozol
Jonathan Kozolis an American writer, educator, and activist. best known for his books on public education in the United States...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionWriter
Date of Birth5 September 1936
CountryUnited States of America
accepted anesthetic children excellent ghetto grow machines oblivion privilege produced schools servants suburban trouble work
The trouble is not that schools don't work; they do. They're excellent machines for achieving historically accepted purposes. In suburban schools are children of the rich, who grow up to privilege and anesthetic oblivion to pain - and who then use the servants produced by ghetto schools.
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'Death at an Early Age' was about racial segregation in Boston. 'Illiterate America' was about grownups who can't read. 'Rachel and Her Children' was about people who were homeless in the middle of Manhattan.
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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.
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If you grow up in the South Bronx today or in south-central Los Angeles or Pittsburgh or Philadelphia, you quickly come to understand that you have been set apart and that there's no will in this society to bring you back into the mainstream.
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At present, black children are more segregated in their public schools than at any time since 1968. In the inner-city schools I visit, minority children typically represent 95 percent to 99 percent of class enrollment.
aesthetic economic fear flee medical people places population rest shun view vulnerable
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.
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The 'niche' effect of charter schools guarantees a swift and vicious deepening of class and racial separation.
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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.
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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.
help
we do not have the things you have ... Can you help us?
agencies business clients exist imagination lose mass monopoly possess productive schools
Businessmen are not in business to lose customers, and schools do not exist to free their clients from the agencies of mass persuasion. School and media possess a productive monopoly upon the imagination of a child.
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I have always felt my role was to do anything I could to enable the powerless to speak. I want America to hear these voices because they are beautiful voices.
life
I have an enormous sense of having failed in life.
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No Child Left Behind widens the gap between the races more than any piece of educational legislation I've seen in 40 years. It denies inner-city kids the critical-thinking skills to interrogate reality.