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.
There is an old saying that the course of civilization is a race between catastrophe and education. In a democracy such as ours, we must make sure that education wins the race.
There are three schoolmasters for everybody that will employ them - the senses, intelligent companions, and books.
Humans are not ideally set up to understand logic; they are ideally set up to understand stories.
Kids are born curious about the world. What adults primarily do in the presence of kids is unwittingly thwart the curiosity of children.
Whatever may be the merits of a religious system, its effects upon the mass of mankind must depend in an important degree upon its teachers. All instruction and all truth, except simple mathematical truth, is modified by the medium through which it is conveyed.
We read to find out what the world is like, to experience lots of lives, not just the one we live. If it is true that our lives are chaotic and we crave a shape, stories are the shapes that we put on experience, containing all the wisdom in the world. We can even choose what kind of wisdom suits us.
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