Kozol, Jonathan (1936–)

Jonathan Kozol is recognized as one of America's most high-profile and influential advocates for public education. He is one of the primary educational thinkers who put the nation's public schools on the national public and policy agenda. Advocates of his ideas would describe him as someone who fights tirelessly for the rights and needs of children and especially for those who come from high-poverty environments.

His books, which have been read widely by both educators and noneducators, set the agenda for social change in America's urban centers. His book Death [Page 503]at an Early Age, which was published in 1967, has sold over 2 million copies. In this book Kozol describes his first year of teaching in the Boston Public Schools and the unique way in which he began to understand the world of high-poverty students and also to think about new ways of teaching content to them so that they could realize their personal potential. In 1986 he published Illiterate America and made public the debate about adult illiteracy, another issue of considerable importance to those who evidence strong social justice concerns.

In 1985, Kozol spent a year working in a homeless shelter, and his book, Rachel and Her Children, gave voice to the people living in desperate poverty and to the tragic death of an 8-month-old child. His more recent books have included Savage Inequalities, Amazing Grace, and most recently, Ordinary Resurrections. All of these books deal with children in high-poverty environments and the unique problems they face, as well as the way in which policies at the local, state, and federal level often mitigate the potential for those in urban environments to receive a quality education.

Kozol questions why, in a nation of such economic abundance, so many children go without a decent education. What are the true costs of childhood poverty, and why does the American educational and political system seem incapable of addressing the problems of poverty? Kozol has spent his career fighting for the rights of young people who often cannot fight for themselves or who are without adult advocates who can help them realize their full potential.

Kozol is an accomplished writer and speaker. His public presentations are searing accounts of the tragedy of childhood poverty and substandard education. They also develop in audiences a deeper understanding of, and provide an arsenal of practical solutions for, the ways in which the educational establishment can more effectively address the rights and needs of children.

Jonathan Kozol (born September 5, 1936, in Boston, Massachusetts) graduated from Noble and Greenough School in 1954, and Harvard University summa cum laude in 1958, with a degree in English Literature. He was awarded a Rhodes Scholarship to Magdalen College, Oxford. He did not, however, complete his Rhodes appointment, deciding instead to go to Paris to write a novel, where he spent 4 years writing his only published work of fiction, The Fume of Poppies. While in Europe, and during this time of personal searching, he befriended a number of exceptional individuals, including the writer William Styron. It was upon his return to the United States that Kozol began to tutor children in Roxbury, Massachusetts, and soon became a teacher in the Boston Public Schools. He was fired for teaching a Langston Hughes poem, an “event” that he describes in Death at an Early Age, and then became deeply involved in the civil rights movement. After being fired, he was offered a job to teach in the Newton Public Schools, which was the school district that he had attended as a child. He taught there for several years before becoming more deeply involved in social justice work; he also began to dedicate more time to writing the books that have subsequently established his prominent place in American education.

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