Top 80 Jonathan Kozol Quotes (2025 Update)
Page 2 of 2

51. “I’d love to go back and teach primary school. I used to teach fourth grade and fifth grade. I’d love to spend several years teaching kindergarten or maybe third grade.”

— Jonathan Kozol

52. “I write books to change the world. Perhaps I can only change one little piece of that world. But if I can empower teachers and good citizens to give these children, who are the poorest of the poor, the same opportunity we give our own kids, then I’ll feel my life has been worth it.”

— Jonathan Kozol

53. “On Mondays and Fridays in early May, nearly 18,000 children-the equivalent of all the elementary students in suburban Glencoe, Wilmette, Glenview, Kenilworth, Winnetka, Deerfield, Highland Park and Evanston-are assigned to classes with no teacher.”

— Jonathan Kozol

54. “Unlike these powerful grown-ups, children have no ideologies to reinforce, no superstructure of political opinion to promote, no civic equanimity or image to defend, no personal reputation to secure.”

— Jonathan Kozol

55. “Charity isn’t a good substitute for justice.”

— Jonathan Kozol

56. “If we allow public funds to be used to support our relatively benign, morally grounded schools, we will have to allow those public funds to be used for any type of private school.”

— Jonathan Kozol

57. “When I was young, I was religious.”

— Jonathan Kozol

58. “Wonderful teachers should never let themselves be drill sergeants for the state.”

— Jonathan Kozol

59. “President Obama still places far too much emphasis on relentless testing with standardized exams.”

— Jonathan Kozol

60. “The answers I remember longest are the ones that answer questions that I didn’t think of asking.”

— Jonathan Kozol

61. “In public schooling, social policy has been turned back almost one hundred years.”

— Jonathan Kozol

62. “We continue, however, to write about important people, prize-winning people, blacks of grandeur, women of great fire, fame or wit. We do not write about ordinary people.”

— Jonathan Kozol

63. “I am opposed to the use of public funds for private education.”

— Jonathan Kozol

64. “Good teachers don’t approach a child of this age with overzealousness or with destructive conscientiousness. They’re not drill-masters in the military or floor managers in a production system. They are specialists in opening small packages. They give the string a tug but do it carefully. They don’t yet know what’s in the box. They don’t know if it’s breakable.”

— Jonathan Kozol

65. “There has been so much recent talk of progress in the areas of curriculum innovation and textbook revision that few people outside the field of teaching understand how bad most of our elementary school materials still are.”

— Jonathan Kozol

66. “I beg people not to accept the seasonal ritual of well-timed charity on Christmas Eve. It’s blasphemy.”

— Jonathan Kozol

67. “Instead of seeing these children for the blessings that they are, we are measuring them only by the standard of whether they will be future deficits or assets for our nation’s competitive needs.”

— Jonathan Kozol

68. “Turning in his seat, he gestures at the street and shrugs. “If you don’t, as an American, begin to give these kids the kind of education that you give the kids of Donald Trump, you’re asking for disaster.”

— Jonathan Kozol

69. “People rarely speak of children; you hear of ‘cohort groups’ and ‘standard variations,’ but you don’t hear much of boys who miss their cats or 6-year-olds who have to struggle with potato balls.”

— Jonathan Kozol

70. “Well, teachers have been profoundly demoralized in recent years and are often treated with contempt by politicians. There’s a great deal of reckless rhetoric in Washington about the mediocrity of the teaching profession – and I don’t find that to be true at all.”

— Jonathan Kozol

71. “The primary victims of Katrina, those who were given the least help by the government, those rescued last or not at all, were overwhelmingly people of color largely hidden from the mainstream of society.”

— Jonathan Kozol

72. “Even if you never do anything about this, you’ve benefited from an unjust system. You’re already the winner in a game that was rigged to your advantage from the start.”

— Jonathan Kozol

73. “By far the most important factor in the success or failure of any school, far more important than tests or standards or business-model methods of accountability, is simply attracting the best-educated, most exciting young people into urban schools and keeping them there.”

— Jonathan Kozol

74. “My goal is to connect the young teachers to the old, to reignite their sense of struggle.”

— Jonathan Kozol

75. “As a matter of record, New York City spends a higher portion of its budget on instruction and associated costs within the schools themselves than any of the other 100 largest districts in the nation.”

— Jonathan Kozol

76. “But for the children of the poorest people we’re stripping the curriculum, removing the arts and music, and drilling the children into useful labor. We’re not valuing a child for the time in which she actually is a child.”

— Jonathan Kozol

77. “We should invest in kids like these,” we’re told, “because it will be more expensive not to.” Why do our natural compassion and religious inclinations need to find a surrogate in dollar savings to be voiced or acted on? Why not give these kids the best we have because we are a wealthy nation and they are children and deserve to have some fun while they are still less than four feet high?”

— Jonathan Kozol

78. “Nationally, overwhelmingly non-white schools receive $1,000 less per pupil than overwhelmingly white schools.”

— Jonathan Kozol

79. “What I tell these young people is, the world is not as dangerous as the older generation would like you to believe. Anyone I know who has ever taken a risk and lost a job has ended up getting a better one two years later.”

— Jonathan Kozol

80. “I emphasize teachers because they are largely left out of the debate. None of the bombastic reports that come from Washington and think tanks telling us what needs to be ‘fixed’ – I hate such a mechanistic word, as if our schools were automobile engines – ever asks the opinions of teachers.”

— Jonathan Kozol

81. “The idea that private money can solve our problems is very dangerous. Ultimately that’s charity. Charity is a lovely thing. I’ll never turn it down. But charity is not a substitute for systematic justice and equality.”

— Jonathan Kozol

82. “I once made a check of all books in my fourth-grade classroom. Of the slightly more than six hundred books, almost one quarter had been published prior to the bombing of Hiroshima; 60 percent were either ten years old or older.”

— Jonathan Kozol

83. “When I had asked Mrs. Flowers how she held up in the face of all the death and violence within her neighborhood, she had given me a simple answer: “This family talks to God.”

— Jonathan Kozol

84. “But when I went to Harvard, it kind of got washed out of me, partly because people made fun of you in college. If you said you believed in God, they would look at you clinically, you know, suggest that you needed a referral.”

— Jonathan Kozol

85. “Childhood does not exist to serve the national economy. In a healthy nation, it should be the other way around.”

— Jonathan Kozol

86. “But many human beings do take pleasure in inflicting pain on others, and those who have the least to be proud of or to be happy about are often the ones who take that pleasure most.”

— Jonathan Kozol