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" I have an enormous sense of having failed in life. "
Jonathan Kozol
Enormous
Life
Having
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" Apartheid does not happen spontaneously, like bad weather conditions. "
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Weather
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Bad Weather
" 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
Classroom
Way
Consequences
" President Obama still places far too much emphasis on relentless testing with standardized exams. "
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Too Much
Places
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" No human being who wants to read and own a book should ever have to go on a bended knee to get it. "
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Go
Book
Own
" 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
" 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
" 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
" 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
College
Me
God
" We know that segregation is evil. We know that the sickest children should not go to the worst hospitals. "
Jonathan Kozol
Segregation
Know
Evil
" If you grow up in the South Bronx today or in south-central Los Angeles or Pittsburgh or Philadelphia, you quickly come to understand that you have been set apart and that there's no will in this society to bring you back into the mainstream. "
Jonathan Kozol
Los Angeles
Today
You
" 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
" 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
" 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
Education
Apartheid
Alive
" Racial segregation has come back to public education with a vengeance. "
Jonathan Kozol
Back
Education
Racial
" 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
" 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
Think
Moments
Seize
" 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
" It's sad that some people who have one exciting moment spend the rest of their lives rehashing it. "
Jonathan Kozol
Moment
Some People
Sad
" 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
Child
Need
Education
" 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
" 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
" The last thing the theatre owners wanted was for people who spent $200 to see 'Les Miserables' to come out again and see the real miserable children of America, right there on the sidewalk. "
Jonathan Kozol
People
America
Children
" The fact that a crime might have been committed with impunity in the past may make it seem more familiar and less gruesome, but surely does not give it any greater legitimacy. "
Jonathan Kozol
Crime
Past
Fact
" I beg people not to accept the seasonal ritual of well-timed charity on Christmas Eve. It's blasphemy. "
Jonathan Kozol
Accept
People
Christmas
" 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
" 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
America
Three
Nothing
" 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
" 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
" 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 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