Kozol, Jonathan (1936–)

Jonathan Kozol was born in Newton, Massachusetts, a wealthy Boston suburb, in 1936. He is best known as an activist and writer, using firsthand accounts of individuals who are directly affected to illuminate social issues, such as segregated schools, inequities in education, illiteracy, and homelessness.

Kozol graduated summa cum laude from Harvard University in 1958 with a degree in English literature. He received a Rhodes Scholarship for Magdalen College, Oxford, but went to Paris instead, where he lived for 4 years, and wrote The Fume of Poppies, his only work of fiction. In 1964 Kozol returned to Boston. He was not particularly interested in political issues; however, the murder of three young civil rights workers by the Ku Klux Klan greatly affected him, and he developed an interest in civil rights issues. He began teaching in the Boston Public Schools in Roxbury, Massachusetts, a poor black neighborhood in Boston. Kozol was fired from his position there for teaching Langston Hughes's poetry, which was not on the approved curriculum list, to his students. His experiences in Roxbury became the basis for his book Death at an Early Age: The Destruction of the Hearts and Minds of Negro Children in the Boston Public Schools published in 1967.

Since then he has written several bestselling books that highlight social problems, especially race and poverty, in the United States. Savage Inequalities: Children in America's Schools (1991), which is used as a textbook in many schools of education in American universities, examines the discrepancies in funding for schools in urban areas, areas which are usually segregated by race and social class. He describes the deplorable conditions of some of the poorest schools in the nations, schools that are underequipped, understaffed, and underfunded, and compares them to schools in more affluent areas.

Amazing Grace: The Lives of Children and the Conscience of a Nation (1995) explores the lives of inner city residents in the South Bronx, New York, one of the poorest areas in the United States. Kozol situates the educational inequalities of the South Bronx within the context of the effects of poverty, such as inadequate health care, lack of adequate housing, lack of job opportunities, and violence.

Through the voices of teachers and students, The Shame of the Nation: The Restoration of Apartheid Schooling in America (2005) documents the segregation, and resulting inequalities, of education for black and Hispanic students that are prevalent in public schools in almost every major city in the United States. Kozol examines the intensification of racial segregation and the dismantling of Brown v. the Board of Education of 1954, two factors that are believed to be creating apartheid conditions in American cities.

Kozol has won awards and fellowships for his work as an outspoken advocate for equitable education for all children. He is not, however, without his critics. In 2003, he was booed for telling the graduating class at Pennsylvania State University College of Liberal Arts that they should be ashamed to be graduating from college while there were people in the United States who were unable to get an education.

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