Jonathan Kozol Quotes

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.
Jonathan Kozol

Society, Today, Understand

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

Win, Small, Enough

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.
Jonathan Kozol

Game, Start, Winner

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.
Jonathan Kozol

True, America, Strange

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

Time, Amazing, Book

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.
Jonathan Kozol

Live, Children, Simply

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.
Jonathan Kozol

Greatest, Pretty, Between

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.
Jonathan Kozol

Struggle, Victory, Moral

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.
Jonathan Kozol

Education, Alive, United

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

Music, Time, Children

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

Culture, Guilt, Clever

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

Poor, Tell, Possible

A great deal has been written in recent years about the purported lack of motivation in the children of the Negro ghettos. Little in my experience supports this, yet the phrase has been repeated endlessly, and the blame in almost all cases is placed somewhere outside the classroom.
Jonathan Kozol

Great, Experience, Children

Apartheid does not happen spontaneously, like bad weather conditions.
Jonathan Kozol

Bad, Happen, Weather

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

Matter, Nation, Themselves

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.
Jonathan Kozol

Time, Children, Black

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

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

Success, Failure, School

Congress has an opportunity to take advantage of the opening created by Justice Kennedy later this year when it reauthorizes the federal No Child Left Behind Act.
Jonathan Kozol

Justice, Child, Year

Consider what it is like to go into a new classroom and to see before you suddenly, and in a way you cannot avoid recognizing, the dreadful consequences of a year's wastage of so many lives.
Jonathan Kozol

Before, Cannot, Year

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.
Jonathan Kozol

Education, Time, Black

Governor Romney has said nothing about preschool. I think that giving the poorest kids in America wonderful preschool, and three years of it, starting when they are two-and-a-half, is absolutely crucial.
Jonathan Kozol

Nothing, Giving, America

Hypersegregated inner-city schools - in which one finds no more than five or ten white children, at the very most, within a student population of as many as 3,000 - are the norm, not the exception, in most northern urban areas today.
Jonathan Kozol

Today, Children, Student

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

Education, Public, Private

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

Christmas, Accept, Charity

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Biography

Nationality: American

Type: Writer

Born: September 5, 1936

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