Jonathan Kozol Quotes

• 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

  Topics in America, Children

  Tags in School

• 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

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Book, Thought, City

• 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

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Student, Exception

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

  Jonathan Kozol

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Beg, Ritual

• 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

  Topics in Uncategorized

• 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

  Topics in Uncategorized

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

  Jonathan Kozol

  Topics in Uncategorized

• 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

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in National, Equal

• I encourage teachers to speak in their own voices. Don’t use the gibberish of the standards writers.

  Jonathan Kozol

  Topics in Uncategorized

• I emphasize teachers because they are largely left out of the debate. None of the bombastic reports that come from Washington and think tanks telling us what needs to be ‘fixed’ – I hate such a mechanistic word, as if our schools were automobile engines – ever asks the opinions of teachers.

  Jonathan Kozol

  Topics in Uncategorized

• 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

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Neurotic, Guilt

• 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

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Outside, Supports

• 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

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Apartheid, Press

• 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

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Districts, Instruction

• 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

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Segregated, Minority

• 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

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Washed, Harvard

• 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

  Topics in Failure

  Tags in Exciting, Young

• 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

  Topics in Justice

  Tags in Congress, Federal

• 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

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Suddenly, Consequences

• 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

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Romney, Crucial

Jonathan Kozol (64)

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

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