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.
Interpretation
Education should be a national priority, not dependent on local wealth or resources.
In this quote, Jonathan Kozol emphasizes the need for equitable funding for schools across the United States, arguing that education is a fundamental right for all children, regardless of their local context. He believes that children should be educated as Americans with a shared national identity, rather than being limited by the resources of their specific communities, which can lead to significant disparities in educational opportunities.
In practice
This quote can be used during a school board meeting to advocate for more equitable funding policies.
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.
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.
Children are not simply commodities to be herded into line and trained for the jobs that white people who live in segregated neighborhoods have available.
Study as if you were going to live forever; live as if you were going to die tomorrow.
The teacher can seldom afford to miss the questions: What is the unknown? What are the data? What is the condition? The student should consider the principal parts of the problem attentively, repeatedly, and from from various sides.
Had I pursued my education long enough to learn all the conventional dos and don'ts of starting a business, I often wonder how different my life and career might have been.
Learning is pleasurable but doing is the height of enjoyment.
Working with great writers can be humbling and frightening, but it can also change you for good, forever.
I have nothing against investment banking, but it's like massaging money rather than creating money. If you're in physics, you create inventions, you create lasers, you create transistors, computers, GPS.
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