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" 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. "

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" 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

" 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. "

" You need massive recruitment to tell the poorest of the poor what is possible. "

" 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. "

" Pick battles big enough to matter, small enough to win. "

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

" The cause of homelessness is lack of housing. "

" In schools with a history of chaos, the teacher who can keep the classroom calm becomes virtually indispensable. "

" 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. "

" I don't know if anything I write will endure, but I do try to write it as a narrative that will not only challenge but also entice the reader into the lives of children. "

" Discrimination is alive and soaring. "

" I am opposed to the use of public funds for private education. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" Nationally, overwhelmingly non-white schools receive $1,000 less per pupil than overwhelmingly white schools. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" When I was young, I was religious. "

Jonathan Kozol

Religious

Young

" 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. "

" 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. "

" But for the children of the poorest people we're stripping the curriculum, removing the arts and music, and drilling the children into useful labor. We're not valuing a child for the time in which she actually is a child. "

" Children are not simply commodities to be herded into line and trained for the jobs that white people who live in segregated neighborhoods have available. "

" 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. "

" All of my education at Harvard, then Oxford, then Paris was in literature - even my thesis was on Shakespeare. "

" 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. "

" I have always felt my role was to do anything I could to enable the powerless to speak. I want America to hear these voices because they are beautiful voices. "

" Instead of seeing these children for the blessings that they are, we are measuring them only by the standard of whether they will be future deficits or assets for our nation's competitive needs. "

" 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. "

" It is our nation which is blind, and needs our prayers. "