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"In the book, I write about children in first grade who were taught to read by reading want ads. They learned to write by writing job applications. Imagine what would happen if anyone tried to do that to children in a predominantly white suburban school."
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"But in the real world, you couldnt really just split a family down the middle, mom on one side, dad the other, with the child equally divided between. It was like when you ripped a piece of paper into two: no matter how you tried, the seams never fit exactly right again. It was what you couldn't see, those tiniest of pieces, that were lost in the severing, and their absence kept everything from being complete."
"LEONATOWell, niece, I hope to see you one day fitted with a husband.BEATRICENot till God make men of some other metal than earth. Would it not grieve a woman to be overmastered with a pierce of valiant dust? to make an account of her life to a clod of wayward marl? No, uncle, I'll none: Adam's sons are my brethren; and, truly, I hold it a sin to match in my kindred."
"Sometimes we're so concerned about giving our children what we never had growing up, we neglect to give them what we did have growing up."
"Mothers care in volumes of tears and earnestness of prayers and a depth of emotion others cannot fathom."
"Things that remind me of Mother are these:the truth 'mid deception, a warm summer breeze,the calm within chaos, a stitch in a rip,a comforting blanket, the smile on her lip,an ocean of love in a heart big as whales,the morals in everyday stories she tells,a wink amid laughter, the wisdom in books,the peace in humility, beauty in looks,the light and the life in a ray of the sun,the hard work accomplished disguised as pure fun,concern in a handclasp, encouragement too,the hope in a clear morning sky azure blue,the power in prayers uttered soft and sincere,the faith in a promise, and joy in a tear.These things all attest to the wonder and graceof my precious mother, none else could replace."
"Family isn't something that's supposed to be static, or set. People marry in, divorce out. They're born, they die. It's always evolving, turning into something else."
"He who loses his mother loses a pure soul who blesses and guards him constantly."
"All happy families resemble one another, each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way."
Explore more quotes by Jonathan Kozol
"The ones I pity are the ones who never stick out their neck for something they believe, never know the taste of moral struggle, and never have the thrill of victory."
"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."
"I think a lot of people don't have any idea of how deeply segregated our schools have become all over again. Most textbooks are not honest in what they teach our high school students."
"Many of those who argue for vouchers say that they simply want to use competition to improve public education. I don't think it works that way, and I've been watching this for a longtime."
"When I was teaching in the 1960s in Boston, there was a great deal of hope in the air. Martin Luther King Jr. was alive, Malcolm X was alive; great, great leaders were emerging from the southern freedom movement."
"So long as these kinds of inequalities persist, all of us who are given expensive educations have to live with the knowledge that our victories are contaminated because the game has been rigged to our advantage."
"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."
"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."
"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."
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