Jonathan Kozol Quotes

Racial segregation has come back to public education with a vengeance.

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.

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

Pick battles big enough to matter, small enough to win.

Separate and unequal didn't work 100 years ago. It will not work today.

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.'

False hope is worse than despair.

The cause of homelessness is lack of housing.

Apartheid education, rarely mentioned in the press or openly confronted even among once-progressive educators, is alive and well and rapidly increasing now in the United States.

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.

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

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.

Unlike these powerful grown-ups, children have no ideologies to reinforce, no superstructure of political opinion to promote, no civic equanimity or image to defend, no personal reputation to secure.

Apartheid does not happen spontaneously, like bad weather conditions.

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

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

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

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.

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.

I went to Washington to challenge the soft bigotry of low expectations

Charity isn't a good substitute for justice.

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.

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.

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.

Political struggle is the most important thing any of us can do as a citizen in a democracy; and that means the old joining the young to fight for elemental kinds of justice.

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

If you could lead through testing, the U.S. would lead the world in all education categories. When are people going to understand you don't fatten your lambs by weighing them?

Young children give us glimpses of some things that are eternal.

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

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

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.

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

President Obama still places far too much emphasis on relentless testing with standardized exams.

If there are amazing graces on this earth, I believe that they are these good children sent to us by God and not yet soiled by the knowledge that their nation does not love them.

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.'

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.

Now, I don't expect what I write to change things. I think I write now simply as a witness. This is how it is. This is what we have done. This is what we have permitted.

When I was young, I was religious.

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

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

I think a moment of critical energy has suddenly emerged. But moments like this come and go unless we seize them at their height.

It is a commonplace by now to say that the urban school systems of America contain a higher percentage of Negro children each year.

We continue, however, to write about important people, prize-winning people, blacks of grandeur, women of great fire, fame or wit. We do not write about ordinary people.

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

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.

The recklessness with which we sacrifice our sense of decency to maximize profit in the factory farming process sets a pattern for cruelty to our own kind.

In public schooling, social policy has been turned back almost one hundred years.

I urge you to be teachers so that you can join with children as the co-collaborators in a plot to build a little place of ecstasy and poetry and gentle joy

In schools with a history of chaos, the teacher who can keep the classroom calm becomes virtually indispensable.

It's sad that some people who have one exciting moment spend the rest of their lives rehashing it.