Jonathan Kozol Quotes - 9quotes.com

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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.
Written by Jonathan Kozol
At that time, I had recently finished a book called Amazing Grace, which many people tell me is a very painful book to read. Well, if it was painful to read, it was also painful to write. I had pains in my chest for two years while I was writing that book.
Written by Jonathan Kozol
But for the children of the poorest people we're stripping the curriculum, removing the arts and music, and drilling the children into useful labor. We're not valuing a child for the time in which she actually is a child.
Written by 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.
Written by Jonathan Kozol
During the decades after Brown v. Board of Education there was terrific progress. Tens of thousands of public schools were integrated racially. During that time the gap between black and white achievement narrowed.
Written by Jonathan Kozol
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.
Written by Jonathan Kozol
I am opposed to the use of public funds for private education.
Written by Jonathan Kozol
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.
Written by Jonathan Kozol
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.
Written by Jonathan Kozol
If we allow public funds to be used to support our relatively benign, morally grounded schools, we will have to allow those public funds to be used for any type of private school.
Written by Jonathan Kozol
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.
Written by Jonathan Kozol
In the book, I write about children in first grade who were taught to read by reading want ads. They learned to write by writing job applications. Imagine what would happen if anyone tried to do that to children in a predominantly white suburban school.
Written by Jonathan Kozol
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.
Written by Jonathan Kozol
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.
Written by Jonathan Kozol
Nationally, overwhelmingly non-white schools receive $1,000 less per pupil than overwhelmingly white schools.
Written by Jonathan Kozol
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.
Written by Jonathan Kozol
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.
Written by 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.
Written by Jonathan Kozol
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.
Written by Jonathan Kozol
What I tell these young people is, the world is not as dangerous as the older generation would like you to believe. Anyone I know who has ever taken a risk and lost a job has ended up getting a better one two years later.
Written by Jonathan Kozol
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.
Written by Jonathan Kozol
Pick battles big enough to matter, small enough to win.
Written by Jonathan Kozol
Apartheid does not happen spontaneously, like bad weather conditions.
Written by Jonathan Kozol
You need massive recruitment to tell the poorest of the poor what is possible.
Written by Jonathan Kozol
I feel, in the end, as if everything I've done has been a failure.
Written by Jonathan Kozol
The inequalities are greater now than in '92. Some states have equalized per-pupil spending but they set the 'equal level' very low, so that wealthy districts simply raise extra money privately.
Written by Jonathan Kozol
Separate and unequal didn't work 100 years ago. It will not work today.
Written by Jonathan Kozol
I think a moment of critical energy has suddenly emerged. But moments like this come and go unless we seize them at their height.
Written by Jonathan Kozol
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.
Written by 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.
Written by Jonathan Kozol

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