You have to remember. . .that for this little boy whom you have met, his life is just as important to him, as your life is to you. No matter how insu….

Separate and unequal didn't work 100 years ago. It will not work today..

Apartheid education, rarely mentioned in the press or openly confronted even among once-progressive educators, is alive and well and rapidly increasi….

Good teachers don't approach a child of this age with overzealousness or with destructive conscientiousness. They're not drill-masters in the militar….

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

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 need but to the child….

Charity isn't a good substitute for justice..

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….

Children sometimes understand things that most grown-ups do not see..

There is something deeply hypocritical in a society that holds an inner-city child only eight years old "accountable" for her performance on a high-s….

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 more precious to u….

I always want to tell these young idealists that the world is not as dangerous as many in the older generation want them to believe...The [people] fo….

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 we call - in….

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 th….

I encourage teachers to speak in their own voices. Don't use the gibberish of the standards writers..

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 ….

But what is now encompassed by the one word (“school”) are two very different kinds of institutions that, in function, finance and intention, serve e….

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 advanta….

Political struggle is the most important thing any of us can do as a citizen in a democracy; and that means the old joining the young to fight for el….

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 are c….

Young children give us glimpses of some things that are eternal..