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.
Interpretation
The quote highlights the neglect of individual children's unique experiences in educational discourse.
Jonathan Kozol's quote points out the tendency in educational discussions to focus more on abstract concepts and statistics, such as 'cohort groups' and 'standard variations,' and less on the real, emotional lives of children. By mentioning specific examples like boys who miss their cats or young children struggling with simple tasks, Kozol emphasizes the importance of recognizing and valuing the personal experiences and feelings of children in education.
In practice
Using this quote in a speech about the importance of personalized education.
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.
The libraries of America are and must ever remain the home of free and inquiring minds. To them, our citizens-of all ages and races, of all creeds and persuasions-must be able to turn with clear confidence that there they can freely seek the whole truth, unvarnished by fashion and uncompromised by expediency.
I believe that good questions are more important than answers, and the best children's books ask questions, and make the readers ask questions. And every new question is going to disturb someone's universe.
There are perhaps no days of our childhood we lived so fully as those we spent with a favorite book.
It was important to me to become day-to-day fluent and functional in another language, and about 10 years ago, I went to Rome for the first time and felt an instant gut connection and wanted to get to know the city.
Life-Enriching Education: an education that prepares children to learn throughout their lives, relate well to others, and themselves, be creative, flexible, and venturesome, and have empathy not only for their immediate kin but for all of humankind.
In the '70s and '80s there was an attempt in K-12 to teach science through art or art through science. The challenge today is how do you build the ethos of art and design into the academy of science.
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