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.
In a sense, the better you adapt to school the less your chances are of later adapting to the actual world. So I figure, the worse you adapt to school, the better you will be able to handle reality when you finally manage to get loose at last from school, if that ever happens. But I guess I have what in the military they call a 'poor attitude,' which means 'shape up or ship out.' I always elected to ship out.
The thing I loved the most - and still love the most about teaching - is that you can connect with an individual or a group, and see that individual or group exceed their limits.
In college, I was an education major and qualified for several jobs. But the fame that came with the Olympic medals was too threatening to many people.
If you did not in your own mind distinguish between useful and erroneous information, then you were not learning at all, you were merely replacing ignorance with false belief, which was no improvement.
Every book in the world is out there waiting to be read by me.
What is the student but a lover courting a fickle mistress who ever eludes his grasp?
Subscribe for the occasional hand-picked quote. No noise.