Jonathan Kozol Quotes

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Jonathan Kozol

Profession : Writer

Birth : September 5, 1936

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.

Jonathan Kozol

We are now operating a school system in America that's more segregated than at any time since the death of Martin Luther King.

Jonathan Kozol

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.

Jonathan Kozol

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

Jonathan Kozol

There has been so much recent talk of progress in the areas of curriculum innovation and textbook revision that few people outside the field of teaching understand how bad most of our elementary school materials still are.

Jonathan Kozol

I once made a check of all books in my fourth-grade classroom. Of the slightly more than six hundred books, almost one quarter had been published prior to the bombing of Hiroshima; 60 percent were either ten years old or older.

Jonathan Kozol

When I was young, I was religious.

Jonathan Kozol

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.

Jonathan Kozol

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

Jonathan Kozol

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

Jonathan Kozol

The 'niche' effect of charter schools guarantees a swift and vicious deepening of class and racial separation.

Jonathan Kozol

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.

Jonathan Kozol

I have an enormous sense of having failed in life.

Jonathan Kozol

I hope to be remembered for writing books about social justice that also have enough aesthetic value to endure as works of literature.

Jonathan Kozol

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

Jonathan Kozol

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.

Jonathan Kozol

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.'

Jonathan Kozol

Discrimination is alive and soaring.

Jonathan Kozol

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.

Jonathan Kozol

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.

Jonathan Kozol