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

• 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

• 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

• 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

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

  Jonathan Kozol

  Vengeance, Segregation, Public Education

  56 Copy quote

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

  Jonathan Kozol

  Needs, Poor, Massive

  53 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

• 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

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

  Jonathan Kozol

  Thinking, Height, Energy

  4 Copy quote

• Apartheid does not happen spontaneously, like bad weather conditions.

  Jonathan Kozol

  Weather, Doe, Apartheid

  13 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

• 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.

  Jonathan Kozol

  Children, Order, Years

  Jonathan Kozol (2012). “Ordinary Resurrections: Children in the Years of Hope”, p.166, Crown

  4 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

• 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

• Let's concede that we have decided to let our children grow up in two separate nations, and lead two separate kinds of lives. If, on the other hand, we have the courage to rise to this challenge to name what's happening within our inner-city schools, then we also need the courage to be activist and go out and fight like hell to change it.

  Jonathan Kozol

  Growing Up, Children, School

  7 Copy quote

• 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.

  Jonathan Kozol

  Jobs, Children, Book

  7 Copy quote

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

  Jonathan Kozol

  Children, School, Years

  4 Copy quote

• 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.

  Jonathan Kozol

  Jobs, Taken, Believe

  4 Copy quote

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