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.
Interpretation
This quote critiques the educational system's failure to nurture children's moral development, particularly for impoverished youth who may not experience the benefits of adulthood.
Jonathan Kozol's quote emphasizes the tragic reality that the early years of a child's life, which should be filled with moral growth and nurturing, are instead often consumed by a rigid system of basic training. This system prioritizes conformity and preparation for adult life, yet it neglects the inherent worth of children's moral and emotional development, especially for those from low-income backgrounds who may not even survive to experience the adult world the system prepares them for.
In practice
During a speech at a school board meeting, one could use this quote to highlight the importance of nurturing all children's moral development.
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.
Schooling should not be left to the whim or wealth of village elders. I believe that we should fund all schools in the U.S. with our national resources. All these kids are being educated to be Americans, not citizens of Minneapolis or San Francisco.
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.
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.
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.'
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.
A child who is protected from all controversial ideas is as vulnerable as a child who is protected from every germ. The infection, when it comes- and it will come- may overwhelm the system, be it the immune system or the belief system.
Extemporaneous speaking should be practised [sic] and cultivated. It is the lawyer's avenue to the public. However able and faithful he may be in other respects, people are slow to bring him business if he cannot make a speech. And yet there is not a more fatal error to young lawyers than relying too much on speech-making. If any one, upon his rare powers of speaking, shall claim an exemption from the drudgery of the law, his case is a failure in advance.
We have a complex system of government. You have to teach it to every generation.
Reviewing good puzzle books is frustrating, because you get to page one of the introduction, find a curious puzzle, become engrossed for 20 minutes, miss your stop and then fail to get home in time to say goodnight to the kids.
I went away in my head, into a book. That was where I went whenever real life was too hard or too inflexible.
Schools teach you how to work for money, but don't teach how to make money work for you
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