Jonathan Kozol Quotes

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

  Jonathan Kozol

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Wonderful, Themselves, State

• When I was young, I was religious.

  Jonathan Kozol

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Young, Religious

• 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

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Great, True, Find

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

  Jonathan Kozol

  Topics in Children

  Tags in Evil, Worst

• 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

  Topics in Death

  Tags in Time, School

• 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

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in School, Bad, Understand

• The inequalities are greater now than in ’92. Some states have equalized per-pupil spending but they set the ‘equal level’ very low, so that wealthy districts simply raise extra money privately.

  Jonathan Kozol

  Topics in Money

  Tags in Simply, Level

• 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

  Topics in Children, Life

  Tags in Live

• The contrasts between what is spent today to educate a child in the poorest New York City neighborhoods, where teacher salaries are often even lower than the city averages, and spending levels in the wealthiest suburban areas are daunting challenges to any hope New Yorkers might retain that even semblances of fairness still prevail.

  Jonathan Kozol

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Hope, Teacher, Today

• The cause of homelessness is lack of housing.

  Jonathan Kozol

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Cause, Lack, Housing

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

  Jonathan Kozol

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Remember, Questions, Answer

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

  Jonathan Kozol

  Topics in Education

  Tags in Back, Come

• President Obama’s first term in office has been better for intentions than for actual changes in planning and policy. I do believe, and he has several things to this effect, that he would like to provide universal preschool or at least far more preschool for our children.

  Jonathan Kozol

  Topics in Children

  Tags in Believe, Better

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

  Jonathan Kozol

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Still, Far, President

• 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.

  Jonathan Kozol

  Topics in Children

  Tags in Struggle, Speak

• Our nation’s oldest sin and deepest crime is the isolation of minority children – black children, in particular – in schools that are not only segregated but shamefully unequal.

  Jonathan Kozol

  Topics in Children

  Tags in Black, 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.

  Jonathan Kozol

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Change, Done, Write

• No Child Left Behind’s fourth-grade gains aren’t learning gains, they’re testing gains. That’s why they don’t last. The law is a distraction from things that really count.

  Jonathan Kozol

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Learning, Law, Why

• No Child Left Behind widens the gap between the races more than any piece of educational legislation I’ve seen in 40 years. It denies inner-city kids the critical-thinking skills to interrogate reality.

  Jonathan Kozol

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Reality, Between, Kids

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

  Jonathan Kozol

  Topics in Goal

  Tags in Struggle, Young

Jonathan Kozol (64)

Birth:	5th September, 1936
Nationality:	American
Profession:	Activist, Educator, Writer

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Today's Anniversary - 23rd January

Births

• 1950 - Richard Dean Anderson
• 1974 - Tiffani Thiessen
• 1898 - Sergei Eisenstein
• 1897 - William Stephenson
• 1915 - Potter Stewart

Deaths

• 1995 - Ken Hill
• 1996 - Norman MacCaig
• 1997 - Richard Berry
• 1981 - Samuel Barber
• 2007 - Ryszard Kapuscinski