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Transcript

Jonathan Kozol

Letters to a Young Teacher

"My Hero Project"

http://www.myhero.com/go/hero.asp?hero=jkozol

Kozol's Critics

Langston Hughes

"A Dream Deferred

"Kozol is contemptuous of empirical research on education. Test scores, he says, tell us nothing about the number of times a day that a child smiles, which is what really counts in our schools. Kozol feels it unnecessary to rely on empirical measures of achievement because they “don’t speak of happiness.” We can understand schools only by walking around in them and talking with children. “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.”

"Unfortunately, what all but the most unusual children lack is perspective, foresight, and knowledge. This is why we don’t let children marry, imbibe alcohol, or, for that matter, decide what time they will go to sleep. We should be similarly hesitant to base decisions that cost billions of dollars and might affect the structure of society on their musings." (2006)

"I sometime think every education writer, every would-be education expert, and every politician who pontificates, as many do so condescendingly, about the 'failings' of the teachers in the front lines of our nation's public schools ought to be obliged to come into a class, not for just an hour with the TV cameras watching but for an entire day, and find out what it's like."

What happens to a dream deferred?

Does it dry up

like a raisin in the sun?

Or fester like a sore--

And then run?

Does it stink like rotten meat?

Or crust and sugar over--

like a syrupy sweet?

Maybe it just sags

like a heavy load.

Or does it explode?

Life Among Schoolchildren

Marcus A. Winters is a senior research associate at the Manhattan Institute for Policy Research

Wild Flowers

Teaching the Young but Learning from the Old

Mr. Rogers' Literacy Neighborhood

Reaching Out to the Parents of Our Children

A Cautionary Tale

Key Terms and Ideas

"At quiet times, young children give us glimpses of some things that are eternal."

The Parent Trap

"[As a new teacher I developed] a brisk, smart aleck certitude that within a mere ten months I'd somehow learned enough to turn my back upon the efforts of those tens of thousands of good teachers . . . who remained in the trenches of the public schools that served the vast majority of children."

"The problem in too many schools is not in the idea of an objective itself but of the fierce relentlessness with which the pursuit of that objective is enforced and in the disturbing fact that teachers seldom get to choose their own objective since these are, in large part, dictated by the state."

Establishing the Chemistry

" I think it's all too easy for young teachers, even quite unconsciously, to write of the parents who are not cooperative at first, instead of trying to discover why it is that some of them will not respond to messages we send home or seem reluctant to show up for meetings that we schedule."

First Days in the Classroom

"The best among [veteran teachers] bring a sense of personal stability and assimilated selflessness into a faculty, as well as all the nuts and bolts of classroom management and of the good instyructional approaches they've acquired."

  • Parents & School Success
  • Performance Standards & "Incandescent Chemistry"
  • "Remember like the Old"
  • "Bamboozled" by Diversity
  • The Littler Piper
  • Meta-lady and Efficacy-man
  • HIgh Stakes Testing: Scripted Lessons/Drill & Practice
  • School Choice and Vouchers
  • "The Horatory Lie"
  • "Small Schools"
  • Langston Hughes, "A Dream Deferred"

"The message I wish I could pass on to teachers who are entering the public schools for the first time is to enjoy what children say and not insist on what somebody tells us they're supposed to say."

"Establishing a chemistry of trust between the children and ourselves is a great deal more important than to charge into the next three chapters of the social studies text or packaged reading systems. . . . Entrap them first in fascination. Entrap them in a sense of merriment and hopeful expectations."

"I wish that syudents from a school of education could have been there in that room. They would have gotten a wonderful sense of what it's like when somebody who's not aftraid to open up her world a tiny bit, and doesn't feel she has to tighten up her personality to gain respect."

"[The] bond of trust and tenderness comes first. Without that, everything is merely dutiful--and, generally, deadening. It is not [out of duty] that people who love children become teachers."

Beware the Jargon Factory

The Uses of Diversity

"Meta-Lady" VS "Efficacy Man"

"The Ugly Little Secret"

"This kind of jargon, which relies upon pumping up of any simple notion by tacking on a fancy-sounding prefix or a needless extra syllable, infests the dialogue of public education nowadays like a strange syntactic illness that induce many educators to believe they have to imitate this language if they want to have a place in education."

"' The ugly little secret,' as you put it, is that there is almost no diversity at all in most of the schools in which diversity curricula are generally used."

Aesthetic Merriment

The Little Piper

"There are , it seems, two languages of public education. One of them is, what I would call "expert talk" or "conference talk" and one is Normal English. Some teachers learn to be adept at "conference talk" in order to protect themselves in public situations where they do not seem to think that their real voices will be heard and treated with respect."

"A Few Reflections on the Kids Who Make It Clear That They're Determined Not to Like Us"

"Wiggly" and "Wobbly" and "Out"!

"The secret curriculum in almost any class, in my belief, is not the message that is written in a lesson plan or a specific book but the message of impliit skepticism or, conversely, of passivity or acquiescence that is written in the teacher's eyes and in the multitude of other ways in which her critical intelligence, her reservations about given truths, or else the absence of these inclinations and these capabilities, arre quietly revealed."

"We need to encourage future teachers not to be bamboozled. Reject the clankety vocabularies. Defend the freshness of your voice. Defend its authenticity."

"There is no 'happiness index' for the children in our public schools, and certainly not for children in inner-city schools where happiness is probably the last thing on the minds of overburdoned state officials. Perhaps there ought to be."

"Many young teachers, as compassionate and patient as they try to be, tend to react to kids like these by making what is basically a surgical decision: 'I cannot do a good job for the other children in the room of I permit this boy to take up so much of my time and ruin things for everybody else.' So, even though it goes against their principles, they tend to isolate that child."

"[Wonderment is] a word you seldom find in any of those documents that tabulate the items of essential knowledge children are supposed to learn in order to assume their place someday in the national economy and help 'to sharpen our competitive edge' in 'the global marketplace.' Why on earth should kids in elementary school care about their future in the global marketplace?"

"None of us should make the error of assuming that a child who is hostile to us at the start or who retreats into a sullenness and silence or sarcastic disregard for everything that's going on around him in the room, does not have the will to learn, and plenty of interesting stuff to teach us too."

"We need teachers who are coming into our classrooms making up their minds, before they even get here, which side they are on."

The Single Worst, Most Dangerous Idea

Educational Vouchers and the Privatization of Our Public Schools

High Stakes Tests and Other Miseries

"One of the most compelling ways some voucher advocates advance their argument is by giving parents in poor neighborhoodes the incorrect impression that a voucher will enable them to send their children to the knids of private schools attended by the children of the affluent even though they know that this enticing invitation is outrageously misleading [vouchers are based on the per-pupil cost of of the home district which in these cases represent at most one quarter to one-third of the tuition of private schools]."

Ernest Hemingway and "S__t Detectors"

It Is Evil to Tell Lies to Children

"Thousands of inner-city [as well as suburban and rural elementary schools, for instance, have dramatically cut back the time permitted for instruction in the content areas--science, social studies, literature, and the arts in order to create long periods of time, typically at least a quarter of the year, in which the children can be drilled on strategies to try to boost their scores."

The Hortatory Lie

"The exercise of school choice, then, under a market system would belong only in small part to the parents of the poor. The ultimate choices would be made by those who own or operate a school."

"So, apart from all the other thefts they undergo, children in these schools are robbed of any understanding that the reason, certainly the best of reasons, human beings read books is for the pleasure that they give us."

"One of these I call the Hortatory Lie," which gives children in some of the worst, most poorly funded, most hypersegregated public schools the relentless message that success or failure in their academic work is a matter of wholly of their own self-will, heir own determination, theirt own perseverance, and that the external world--the governor, the school board, the determination of the white society to keep them at a distance where they can't contaminate the education ofthe middle class--has no role at all in preventing them from learning."

"High stakes testing is, at best, a miserable game we're forced to play, but . . .our judgment of our students' intellect and character and ultimate potential will have no connection with the numbers tabulated by a person who is not an educator working in a test score factory 1,000-3,000 miles away."

"The answers I remember longest are the ones

that answer questions that I didn't think of asking."

So long as myths and misconceptions about equal education remain unexamined . . . these kids are left to wrestle with the crippling belief that their repeated failings . . . are entirely the result of an inherent defect in their character or cultural inheritance, a lack of will, or, as many have no choice but to believe, a deficit in their intelligence."

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