Jonathan Kozol Quotes

106 quotes in 1787 categories

• More money is put into prisons than into schools. That, in itself, is the description of a nation bent on suicide. I mean, what is…
• We continue, however, to write about important people, prize-winning people, blacks of grandeur, women of great fire, fame or wit. We do not write about…
• 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…
• Let's concede that we have decided to let our children grow up in two separate nations, and lead two separate kinds of lives. If, on…
• I beg people not to accept the seasonal ritual of well-timed charity on Christmas Eve. It's blasphemy.
• The first goal and primary function of the U.S. public school is not to educate good people, but good citizens. It is the function which…
• If you could lead through testing, the U.S. would lead the world in all education categories. When are people going to understand you don't fatten…
• As damaging as the obsessive emphasis on testing often proves to be for kids in general, I believe that the effects are still more harmful…
• Childhood is not merely basic training for utilitarian adulthood. It should have some claims upon our mercy, not for its future value to the economic…
• Unlike these powerful grown-ups, children have no ideologies to reinforce, no superstructure of political opinion to promote, no civic equanimity or image to defend, no…
• So long as these kinds of inequalities persist, all of us who are given expensive educations have to live with the knowledge that our victories…
• Nationally, overwhelmingly non-white schools receive $1,000 less per pupil than overwhelmingly white schools.
• But what is now encompassed by the one word (“school”) are two very different kinds of institutions that, in function, finance and intention, serve entirely…
• Children, of course, don't understand at first that they are being cheated. They come to school with a degree of faith and optimism, and they…
• East St. Louis-which the local press refers to as "an inner city without an outer city"-has some of the sickest children in America. Of 66…
• The White House, in advancing the agenda for a [school] "choice" plan, rests its faith on market mechanisms. What reason have the black and very…
• Like grain in a time of famine, the immense resources which the nation does in fact possess go not to the child in the greatest…
• In public schooling, social policy has been turned back almost one hundred years.
• On Mondays and Fridays in early May, nearly 18,000 children-the equivalent of all the elementary students in suburban Glencoe, Wilmette, Glenview, Kenilworth, Winnetka, Deerfield, Highland…
• I went to Washington to challenge the soft bigotry of low expectations

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