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" 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
America
Strange
True
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" You need massive recruitment to tell the poorest of the poor what is possible. "
Jonathan Kozol
Need
Possible
You
" Childhood ought to have at least a few entitlements that aren't entangled with utilitarian considerations. One of them should be the right to a degree of unencumbered satisfaction in the sheer delight and goodness of existence in itself. "
Jonathan Kozol
Satisfaction
Childhood
Goodness
" The 'niche' effect of charter schools guarantees a swift and vicious deepening of class and racial separation. "
Jonathan Kozol
Class
Effect
Niche
" 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
Book
Time
Me
" I am opposed to the use of public funds for private education. "
Jonathan Kozol
Private
Public
Use
" 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
Old
Books
Classroom
" 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
People
Young
Success
" 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
Thought
Book
City
" Discrimination is alive and soaring. "
Jonathan Kozol
Soaring
Discrimination
Alive
" My goal is to connect the young teachers to the old, to reignite their sense of struggle. "
Jonathan Kozol
Goal
Teachers
Young
" We know that segregation is evil. We know that the sickest children should not go to the worst hospitals. "
Jonathan Kozol
Segregation
Know
Evil
" I feel, in the end, as if everything I've done has been a failure. "
Jonathan Kozol
Everything
Done
End
" Businessmen are not in business to lose customers, and schools do not exist to free their clients from the agencies of mass persuasion. School and media possess a productive monopoly upon the imagination of a child. "
Jonathan Kozol
Imagination
Child
School
" 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
Black
Children
Crime
" In schools with a history of chaos, the teacher who can keep the classroom calm becomes virtually indispensable. "
Jonathan Kozol
Teacher
Chaos
Classroom
" 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
Class
Children
" All of my education at Harvard, then Oxford, then Paris was in literature - even my thesis was on Shakespeare. "
Jonathan Kozol
Harvard
Education
Literature
" The primary victims of Katrina, those who were given the least help by the government, those rescued last or not at all, were overwhelmingly people of color largely hidden from the mainstream of society. "
Jonathan Kozol
Color
People
Government
" 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
Hate
Opinions
Teachers
" 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
Life
Live
Training
" Pick battles big enough to matter, small enough to win. "
Jonathan Kozol
Win
Battles
Big
" 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
Money
Now
Low
" Competitive skills are desperately needed by poor children in America, and realistic recognition of the economic roles that they may someday have an opportunity to fill is obviously important, too. But there is more to life, and there ought to be much more to childhood, than readiness for economic functions. "
Jonathan Kozol
Opportunity
Children
Childhood
" 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
Generation
People
Believe
" 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
Teach
Kindergarten
School
" It is our nation which is blind, and needs our prayers. "
Jonathan Kozol
Prayers
Needs
Nation
" The answers I remember longest are the ones that answer questions that I didn't think of asking. "
Jonathan Kozol
Think
Remember
Questions
" 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
Moral
Believe
Know
" 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
Experience
Blame
Great
" 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
Way
Clever
Culture