Word: kozol
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Eight months into a public school-teaching career in Boston, Jonathan Kozol was fired in 1965 for reading an angry poem by Black Poet Langston Hughes to his class in the Roxbury ghetto. He detailed his frustrating experiences in Death at an Early Age, and set out to reform U.S. education by helping to found "free" schools: small private schools where parents are "free" to decide what their children should be taught. He concentrated first on Roxbury and later on such cities as New York, Chicago and St. Louis. His target was the ghetto, but the idea caught on with...
...Kozol has spent much of the last two years visiting free schools across the country and evaluating what was partly his own handiwork. In general, he reports in the current Harvard Educational Review, he was pleased by what he found in ghetto storefront schools, where the chief problem was constant staff turnover. All too often, Kozol writes, the teachers are young whites who spend a year in "the race and conscience bag," then discover new slogans and bywords and leave for "a new dedication." Nevertheless, the ghetto schools' education programs, by virtue of their locations, have inherently "a strong...
...deep animus toward "athletic bastards who stick together," see Bouton, Meggyesy, et al. And as for my hatred of those teachers who overinstruct but undernourish, yelling "digression!" in Oral Expression every time a student gets interesting, the romantic critiques of Kozol and Herndon have left me winded...
Basically Herndon is in desperate agreement with John Holt, George Dennison, Jonathan Kozol, Edgar Friedenburg, Charles Silberman & Co. that U.S. schools are too foolishly over-administered to successfully nurture either reading and writing or the ability to cope humanely with the complex choices of modern life. But unlike most apocalyptic critics, Herndon sees no easy solution. He proceeds, moreover, by meandering parable rather than polemic, and uses a ruefully genial tone of voice that might have come from Mark Twain or Kurt Vonnegut. As a result, he is just about the only education reformer alive whose writing could...
...from Now York and quickly told me how crummy the New York school system was. I am from Boston, so I quickly told Jed how crummy the Boston school system is. And from that we got into a discussion about how crummy education in general is. I mentioned Jonathon Kozol (whose Death at an Early Age was just appearing in the Atlantic ) and Jed mentioned Peter Schragg and both of us felt vaguely impressed with the other, although, most of all, we were each gratified with ourselves. (Since all this time the shower was still struggling to warm itself...