Jonathan Kozol Quotes - Page 3

Quotes about:

• The rich...should beg the poor to forgive us for the bread we bring them. Healthy people sometimes feel they need to beg forgiveness too, although there is no reason why. Maybe we simply ask forgiveness for not being born where these poor women have been born, knowing that if we lived here too, our fate might well have been the same.

  Jonathan Kozol

  Fate, Knowing, People

  7 Copy quote

• 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.

  Jonathan Kozol

  Art, Children, People

  8 Copy quote

• 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.

  Jonathan Kozol

  Pain, Book, Writing

  The Education World Interview, www.educationworld.com.

  7 Copy quote

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

  Jonathan Kozol

  Teacher, Struggle, Goal

  4 Copy quote

• 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.

  Jonathan Kozol

  School, Support, Type

  7 Copy quote

• The White House, in advancing the agenda for a [school] "choice" plan, rests its faith on market mechanisms. What reason have the black and very poor to lend their credence to a market system that has proved so obdurate and so resistant to their pleas at every turn?

  Jonathan Kozol

  Education, School, White

  4 Copy quote

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

  Jonathan Kozol

  Done, Ends, Feels

  4 Copy quote

• 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

  School, People, Accountability

  7 Copy quote

• 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

  Fun, College, People

  4 Copy quote

• Well, teachers have been profoundly demoralized in recent years and are often treated with contempt by politicians. There's a great deal of reckless rhetoric in Washington about the mediocrity of the teaching profession - and I don't find that to be true at all.

  Jonathan Kozol

  Teacher, Teaching, Years

  4 Copy quote

• 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.

  Jonathan Kozol

  Children, Believe, Grace

  4 Copy quote

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

  Jonathan Kozol

  President, Too Much, Exam

  "Keeping Faith With the Kids". Interview with Michael Busch, www.huffingtonpost.com. October 25, 2012.

  4 Copy quote

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

  Jonathan Kozol

  Clever, Self, Guilt

  4 Copy quote

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

  Jonathan Kozol

  Expectations, Challenges, Lows

  Jonathan Kozol (2005). “The Shame of the Nation: The Restoration of Apartheid Schooling in America”, p.284, Broadway Books

  8 Copy quote

• East St. Louis-which the local press refers to as "an inner city without an outer city"-has some of the sickest children in America. Of 66 cities in Illinois, East St. Louis ranks first in fetal death, first in premature birth, and third in infant health.

  Jonathan Kozol

  Children, Illinois, Cities

  Jonathan Kozol (2012). “Savage Inequalities: Children in America's Schools”, p.25, Broadway Books

  4 Copy quote

• On Mondays and Fridays in early May, nearly 18,000 children-the equivalent of all the elementary students in suburban Glencoe, Wilmette, Glenview, Kenilworth, Winnetka, Deerfield, Highland Park and Evanston-are assigned to classes with no teacher.

  Jonathan Kozol

  Friday, Teacher, Monday

  Jonathan Kozol (2012). “Savage Inequalities: Children in America's Schools”, p.65, Broadway Books

  4 Copy quote

• 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.

  Jonathan Kozol

  Children, Powerful, Political Opinions

  Jonathan Kozol (2005). “The Shame of the Nation: The Restoration of Apartheid Schooling in America”, p.12, Broadway Books

  13 Copy quote

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

  Jonathan Kozol

  Needs, Poor, Massive

  53 Copy quote

• As damaging as the obsessive emphasis on testing often proves to be for kids in general, I believe that the effects are still more harmful in those schools in which the resources available to help the children learn the skills that will be measured by these tests are fewest, the scores they get are predictably the lowest, and the strategies resorted to by principals in order to escape the odium attaching to a disappointing set of numbers tend to be the most severe.

  Jonathan Kozol

  Children, Believe, Kids

  Jonathan Kozol (2005). “The Shame of the Nation: The Restoration of Apartheid Schooling in America”, p.110, Broadway Books

  4 Copy quote

• 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

  Teaching, School, People

  4 Copy quote

• 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.

  Jonathan Kozol

  Teaching, School, Years

  The Education World Interview, www.educationworld.com.

  8 Copy quote

• 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.'

  Jonathan Kozol

  Book, School, Boston

  4 Copy quote

• 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

  Book, Years, Six

  4 Copy quote

• 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.

  Jonathan Kozol

  New York, School, Cities

  4 Copy quote

• 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.

  Jonathan Kozol

  Kings, Teaching, Boston

  The Education World Interview, www.educationworld.com.

  7 Copy quote

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