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" 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
You
Winner
System
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" I hope to be remembered for writing books about social justice that also have enough aesthetic value to endure as works of literature. "
Jonathan Kozol
Value
Writing
Enough
" 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
Reading
Children
Book
" Racial segregation has come back to public education with a vengeance. "
Jonathan Kozol
Back
Education
Racial
" The trouble is not that schools don't work; they do. They're excellent machines for achieving historically accepted purposes. In suburban schools are children of the rich, who grow up to privilege and anesthetic oblivion to pain - and who then use the servants produced by ghetto schools. "
Jonathan Kozol
Achieving
Work
Rich
" I tell young teachers who are determined to dissent from some of the Draconian aspects of the current orthodoxy that the best form of protection is to be incredibly good at what you do and keep good discipline in class. "
Jonathan Kozol
Discipline
Good
Teachers
" You need massive recruitment to tell the poorest of the poor what is possible. "
Jonathan Kozol
Need
Possible
You
" 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
Child
Law
Testing
" In schools with a history of chaos, the teacher who can keep the classroom calm becomes virtually indispensable. "
Jonathan Kozol
Teacher
Chaos
Classroom
" 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
" 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
" 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
" 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
" 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
True
Teachers
Rhetoric
" Nationally, overwhelmingly non-white schools receive $1,000 less per pupil than overwhelmingly white schools. "
Jonathan Kozol
Receive
Than
Per
" 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
White
Children
More
" It is our nation which is blind, and needs our prayers. "
Jonathan Kozol
Prayers
Needs
Nation
" 'Savage Inequalities' was about school finance, and 'Amazing Grace' primarily dealt with medical and social injustices in New York. But with 'Ordinary Resurrections,' I had no predetermined agenda. When I met with the children, I was not in pursuit of any line of thinking. In our conversations, I let them lead me where they wanted to go. "
Jonathan Kozol
School
Children
Grace
" 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
More
Behind
Skills
" I think a lot of people don't have any idea of how deeply segregated our schools have become all over again. Most textbooks are not honest in what they teach our high school students. "
Jonathan Kozol
Think
High School
School
" I beg people not to accept the seasonal ritual of well-timed charity on Christmas Eve. It's blasphemy. "
Jonathan Kozol
Accept
People
Christmas
" No human being who wants to read and own a book should ever have to go on a bended knee to get it. "
Jonathan Kozol
Go
Book
Own
" 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
King
Air
Boston
" I encourage teachers to speak in their own voices. Don't use the gibberish of the standards writers. "
Jonathan Kozol
Standards
Own
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
Black
Children
Crime
" 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
Opening
Opportunity
Child
" 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
" Pick battles big enough to matter, small enough to win. "
Jonathan Kozol
Win
Battles
Big
" 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
" I am opposed to the use of public funds for private education. "
Jonathan Kozol
Private
Public
Use
" 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
America
Death
Time