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In the passion of the civil rights campaigns of 1964 and 1966, Jonathan Kozol moved from Harvard Square into a poor black neighborhood of Boston and became a fourth grade teacher in the Boston Public Schools. He has devoted the subsequent four decades to issues of education and social justice in America.
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Jonathan Kozol
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Death at an Early Age, a description of his first year as a teacher, was published in 1967 and received the 1968 National Book Award in Science, Philosophy, and Religion. Now regarded as a classic by educators, it has sold more than two million copies in the United States and Europe.
Among the other highly honored books that he has written since are Rachel and Her Children, which received the Robert F. Kennedy Book Award in 1989 and the Conscience in Media Award of the American Society of Journalists and Authors, and Savage Inequalities, which won the New England Book Award and was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award in 1992.
His 1996 best-seller, Amazing Grace, The Lives of Children and the Conscience of a Nation, described his visits to the South Bronx of New York, the poorest congressional district of America. Praised by scholars such as Robert Coles and Henry Louis Gates, and children's advocates and theologians all over the nation, Amazing Grace received the Anisfieid-Wolf Book Award in 1996, an honor previously granted to the works of Langston Hughes and Dr. Martin Luther King.
Nobel Laureate Toni Morrison wrote that Amazing Grace was "good in the old-fashioned sense: beautiful and morally worthy." Pulitzer Prize-winning author David Garrow called Amazing Grace "elegiac, memorable, and haunting." Elie Wiesel said, "Jonathan's struggle is noble. What he says must be heard. His outcry must shake our nation out of its guilty indifference."
In a front-page review, The Washington Post described the book as "devastating" in its portrayals but "as good as a blessing" In its tribute to the courage of the mothers of the poor. Amazing Grace has since joined Savage Inequalities and Death at an Early Age as required reading at most universities and is part of the curriculum for future teachers and religious leaders.
Jonathan's next book, Ordinary Resurrections, was a more introspective work about the spiritual and moral qualities of children he had come to know in the South Bronx. A favorite among schoolteachers because of its narratives of daily life seen through the eyes of children, the book was described by The Washington Post as "an eloquent love letter to a set of children" whom Jonathan had "grown to know, cherish, and delight in." The New York Times described it as "deeply moving..., the most personal of Kozol's efforts." The poet Gwendolyn Brooks praised it as "a magnificent gift to us all."
Looking back on Ordinary Resurrections, Jonathan writes, "I think that I needed to write that book in order to give myself a respite from the fierce political battles that had been provoked by Savage Inequalities and Amazing Grace. I needed to step beak from those battles for a time in order to enjoy the daily presence of these children who had come to be my friends over the course of many years.
Now, in The Shame of the Nation, Jonathan returns to the battle with his strongest, most disturbing work to date: a powerful expose of the conditions he has found in visiting and revisiting nearly 60 public schools in 30 different districts in 11 states throughout the past five years. Virtually everywhere, he finds that inner-city children are more isolated racially than they have been anytime since federal courts began dismantling the landmark ruling in Brown v. Board of Education. "They live an apartheid existence and attend apartheid schools. Few of them know white children any longer." The proportion of black children who are now attending integrated public schools, he notes, is at a lower level than in any year since 1968. "No matter how complex the reasons that have brought us to the point at which we stand," he writes, "we have, it seems, been traveling a long way to a place of ultimate surrender that does not look very different from the place where some of us began. If we have agreed to give up on the dream for which so many gave their lives, perhaps at least we ought to have the honesty to say so."
In many of the schools that Jonathan has visited, a protomilitary form of teaching has emerged, modeled on stick-and-carrot methods of behavioral control traditionally used in prisons and targeted exclusively at black and Hispanic children -- robotic methods that would be rejected out of hand by schools that serve white children in the mainstream of society. Children in these schools no longer learn out of a normal thirst for learning but out of the fear of punishment and personal humiliation.
Then, too, as high stakes testing takes on pathological and punitive dimensions in these schools, hundreds of hours of education have been sacrificed to drilling children for exams. Principals tell Jonathan that more than a quarter of the school year is devoted solely to test-preparation. Many segregated schools have now abolished recess for their children - in soma cases, even "nap time" for their kindergarten children -- in order to carve out more time for testing regimens. "Kindergarten isn't like it used to be," one principal reports. Yet, despite the obsessive emphasis on drilling children of color for exams, the achievement gap between white students and the children of the ghetto has increased during the years in which these practices have been in piece while racial isolation has intensified.
New York is now the epicenter of apartheid schooling in America. Only one in seven black students in New York goes to an integrated public school, and hundreds of thousands of black and Hispanic students go to schools in which they make up 95 to 99 percent of the enrollment. "Less than five percentage points," the author writes, "now mark the difference between legally enforced apartheid in the South during the years before Brown v. Board of Education and socially and economically enforced apartheid in these northern neighborhoods today."
Much of this book, therefore, takes place in Jonathan's old stamping-grounds in the South Bronx and other sections of New York. But the book casts a wider net to schools and neighborhoods all over the United States. From Seattle to Los Angeles, from Oklahoma to Chicago, from New York and New England to Ohio and Kentucky and to small and segregated suburbs that are now evolving outside of our urban areas, the author introduces us to children who attend schools that are almost guaranteed to bring about their intellectual decapitation for no reason but the accident of birth.
Written with deep respect rind empathy for our embattled teachers and filled with the voices of some of the most revered and trusted leaders in the black community, The Shame of the Nation is a triumph of firsthand reporting that pays tribute to those undefeated educators who persist against the odds, but directly challenges the chilling practices now being forced upon our urban systems by the Bush administration. In their place, this passionate narrative offers a humane, dramatic challenge to our nation to fulfill at last the promise made some 60 years ago to all our youngest citizens.
Jonathan received a summa cum laude degree in English literature from Harvard in 1958, after which he was awarded a Rhodes scholarship to Oxford University. He has been called by The Chicago Sun-Times "today's most eloquent spokesman for America's disenfranchised." But he believes that children speak most eloquently for themselves; and in this book, so full of the vitality and honesty of youth, we hear their testimony.