Jonathan Kozol lecture this evening
Our university, well known for its department of education, is 150 years old this year, and has a celebratory lecture series on account of it.
MrsDoF and I heard a lecture tonight by Jonathan Kozol, the educator and author. Here (allowing for the well-known inaccuracy of my memory) are a few quotes from his talk:
“Very few great intellectuals devote themselves to writing educational standards. Can you picture one of the great minds devoting a year or more of their lives chopping cognition into little bits of pretentious curricular sausage?“
“I have dinner with rich people who send their elementary school kids to private academies that cost fifty thousand dollars a year - and they have three in school at once. That’s a hundred and fifty thousand dollars a year. These are the same people who ask me; ‘Is money really the answer? Can we buy our way to better education?‘ If small class size and lots of individual attention is good for the children of the rich, it is good for the children of the poor. ‘All our children have equal value in the eyes of God’, they say, and that’s true; but not in the eyes of America.
“I can’t tell you how much pleasure it gives me as a Jew, to preach the words of Jesus to delinquent Christians”
“There is an infinitely deep hypocrisy in a government that tries to hold an 8-year-old ‘accountable’ for the failings of a deeply unequal, fear-driven system.“
Kozol isn’t going to many dinner parties these days. He is on a hunger strike, and has lost thirty pounds (at 71, he looks terrible) to protest the failed ‘No Child Left Behind’ law that is up for renewal. He invites us to write to one of the original co-sponsors of the law, Senator Ted Kennedy, to ask that it be scrapped and educational equality be perused.
“I have dinner with rich people who send their elementary school kids to private academies that cost fifty thousand dollars a year - and they have three in school at once. That’s a hundred and fifty thousand dollars a year. These are the same people who ask me; ‘Is money really the answer? Can we buy our way to better education?’ If small class size and lots of individual attention is good for the children of the rich, it is good for the children of the poor. ‘All our children have equal value in the eyes of God’, they say, and that’s true; but not in the eyes of America.
Strikingly, the research suggests that mobility within America’s middle-income bands is similar to that in many other countries. The stickiness is at the top and the bottom. According to one much-cited study, for instance, more than 40 percent of American boys born into the poorest fifth of the population stay there; the figure for Britain is 30 percent, for Denmark just 25 percent. In America, more than in other advanced economies, poor children stay poor. Other data show that in America, more than in, say, Britain, rich children stay rich as well.
I’ll write Ted Kennedy. It can’t hurt, although expecting much from the Democrats is expecting much.
Posted by Ted on 11/15/07 at 09:43 AM
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