THE PROGRESSIVE INTERVIEW JONATHAN KOZOL

...There have been eight books since—on the "free school" movement, the politics of education, adult illiteracy, and homeless families...

...Kozol: It was pure chance...

...It was just a joy to be able to teach children individually, instead of making them all sit and use the same page of the same textbook...

...I'm glad I had the experience because it taught me what a good school is...

...Perhaps I was a bit harsh on people who just wanted to breathe some fresh air and see some grass...

...I don't feel I've ever done that...

...It's what Paulo Freire called "narration sickness...

...But you returned to the United States to become a teacher...

...Both ideas have never been adopted because they are expensive...

...Because of this ceaseless recycling of the same models, education writing is so boring...

...And so forth...

...But I just thought that a reader can only absorb so many instances of the same story...

...Publishers' Weekly gave it an unprecedented plug on the front cover, urging President Bush to read the book and calling it "crucial to any serious debate on the current state of American education...

...If journalists had a better sense of history they would be saying it like this: For the tenth time in twenty years teachers in New York City are rediscovering the old idea of individualized instruction...

...I saw what happened when they were in a beautiful building with a lawn outside where they could play...

...The best reason to give a child a good school with a teacher who is confident enough to be relaxed and pleasant in a cheerful building with a green playing field outside is so that child will have a happy childhood, and not so that it will help IBM in competing with Sony, or GM in competing with Toyota...

...After you hear six revolutionary ideas like this, you are told that we are turning things around...

...That was my first taste of brutal inequality: In the course of two years I went from the worst to the best school system in Massachusetts...

...That's why it's dull...

...it was never shared with poor children...

...the librarian in Oregon...

...We can do such complicated things...

...This country can do almost anything it wants to do...

...So I am going to tell you this story again, but don't raise your hopes too high...

...When I read those other early books, I'm a bit shocked at how vindictive I sounded toward the United States...

...a threat to democracy...

...They didn't throw that much money at the poor, and it did a lot of good...

...if we could find just three million teachers like that young teacher, and 90,000 principals like that principal, and package what they're doing, itemize it, parcel it out, we'll transform the system without spending money and without embarrassing society by talking about race...

...It is quieter than the way I was writing twenty-five years ago...

...In a way I moved out here to keep my politics alive...

...its worth was proven before...

...Louis, Illinois, because there is no working sewage system—it is a travesty of what we stand for...

...After Chicago, New York, Camden, Paterson, Washington, and San Antonio, I was drained...

...But look, let me tell you something...

...Kozol: I was heartsick because I felt it was a terrible misuse of U.S...

...In some of your more recent books—in particular, the 1990 reissue of The Night Is Dark and I Am Far from Home—you speak of writing in a quieter and more tolerant voice than you did before...

...In fact, we played Pete Seeger's music all day long in the classroom...

...After two years I just felt, "This isn't my real place...

...It got to a point where every minor crisis or question that came up in the Boston public schools, I would get a call from a reporter wanting to know what I thought...

...Q: That raises another question about this book...

...And I also felt by that point that I was more concerned with America than with Boston...

...It shows the arrogance of youth that I thought it was important enough to tell anyone that...

...a threat to culture...

...The ultimate issue is the unresolved question of whether or not Americans really believe in equality...

...It was that they left their politics behind...

...I came back to Cambridge and was just about to re-enroll in graduate school...

...This led to a job as a "permanent substitute" teacher in the Roxbury schools—until he was fired for "curriculum deviation" because he read the poetry of Langston Hughes and Robert Frost to his students...

...Because it wasn't just a geographical movement—they left the city to live in the country—there's nothing wrong with that...

...The ultimate issue is a deep down ethical one—whether we really do believe in playing on an even field...

...Q: You've been quite critical of media handling of education and related issues...

...Surely we can send some books to the Bronx...

...Kozol: No...

...I don't think any reporter does this intentionally...

...For years now I have done what many other advocates have done in areas of housing, education, health care—essentially to say to business interests in America, "This issue is important because it's costing you money, and that's why you should deal with it...

...class in a lovely little school that welcomed innovation...

...This is a typical story: A dynamic, young teacher in the South Bronx has a revolutionary idea: instead of using textbooks, she uses books...

...That is superficially the "news peg," but on a deeper level I don't think the funding system is the ultimate issue...

...I still think the argument is a legitimate one, but there is something ethically embarrassing about resting a national agenda on the basis of sheer greed...

...They make a virtue of what they don't have...

...After that, I was hired to teach out in the suburbs in Newton, where I had grown up—ironically, at twice the salary I was getting in Boston...

...Now by telling the story in this way, the reporter leads the reader to think the following: That if we could just replicate what is going on in this one school...

...Further, she believes that children ought to learn to their potential...

...Kozol: For me, it is a quieter voice...

...I find over the years that no matter how I moderate my voice the major critics say, "He sounds too angry...

...I'd already talked to a lot of people about what was happening in New Jersey and Texas by the time the Kentucky story hit the newspapers...

...the waiter in Des Moines...

...I saw what happened when—instead of having a frightened, harassed, overburdened teacher—they had a relaxed, sophisticated, intellectually sensitive teacher...

...They are good people...

...But since you can't say that—since you can't say what's at the center—everything you write is out at the circumference...

...This is an amazing country...

...The year after I was fired, a church in Roxbury hired me to run a "freedom school"—that was a program funded by Lyndon Johnson's War on Poverty...

...Perhaps it was partly that I didn't feel / could absorb a story like that...

...Well, why can't we do it in Harlem...

...That's just the instrument...

...Kozol: They are rediscovering old banalities...

...I felt that I was becoming too facile...

...I think I'm a little more gentle now than I was in those days...

...It may be that through the political process they end up indirectly supporting causes that are evil, but they are not evil people...

...I kept thinking, "Good Lord, what we could have done with $50 billion in the New York City public schools," and wouldn't that really be more to our national self-interest...

...A lot of those kids have been successful...

...The superintendent of the school system—far from viewing me with uneasiness—used to come around and sit on the floor with my kids and spend the morning with us in the classroom...

...And so my voice—no matter how moderate it seems to me— seems much too shrill to them...

...It's quite a trick to write an education story for a big-city newspaper in America and say everything except that these kids are the victims of crushing racism and obliterating penury...

...Within a matter of three months we set up hospitals in the Persian Gulf that are better than anything you'll find in Harlem...

...Principals are rediscovering the concept of mini-schools—first discussed by Paul Goodman in 1968...

...And why should we have greater expectations now unless we frame the challenge differently...

...In America, as everywhere else, the wretched of the Earth are going to make their voices heard...

...Kozol: I still would...

...One of the problems was that in those days I didn't know a lot of the good things about America...

...And where—instead of using boring Scott-Foresman basal readers—we had individualized reading, and I could build the whole curriculum around a hundred paperback novels...

...The principal agrees...

...in the next couple of years...

...A few years later, Death at an Early Age, Kozol's powerful indictment of U.S...

...The last thing I want to see is a wave of violence in our big cities...

...This much anger cannot be contained forever...

...I called in my friends in Cambridge and told them I was giving up writing...

...Q: Upon graduating from Harvard in the late 1950s, you went to Oxford on a Rhodes Scholarship, then to Paris to become a writer...

...But I think of that as an unworthy argument which debases the one who makes it and the one who hears it because the reason we should deal with injustice is because it's not just, not because it's expensive...

...There was a certain point at which I just had to come home and take a walk with my dog and pick blackberries...

...We can send people to the moon...

...I haven't recanted on that...

...What I've learned is that there are an awful lot of damn good people in America...

...Another interesting thing I saw in Newton was the benefit of racial integration, because that year a small voluntary suburban busing program began where black kids from Boston—in limited numbers—rode the bus to a handful of the best suburban school districts...

...the fifth-grade teacher in Arizona...

...instead of teaching the whole class, she teaches each child individually...

...I'm always amused now when I hear conservatives say, "We threw all that money at the poor, and it didn't do any good...

...When this book comes out, I'm sure the news angle is going to be something of this sort: "This is a timely book because we've just had three important cases in the U.S.—Kentucky, New Jersey, and Texas— in which the school systems have just been overturned in the courts, and there are some twenty more similar cases that are now pending...

...Q: At one time, when you spoke about illiteracy, when asked to discuss the consequences of not addressing the problem, you suggested four outcomes: A passing on of the problem from generation to generation...

...Put it this way: It certainly can't be good for American competitiveness to have millions of people who are at very marginal or low literacy levels, because there aren't many jobs left that require no literacy...

...A couple of times when you've spoken about education reporting, for example, you've pointed out that trends that are cheered today—like mini-schools—are trends that were cheered twenty-five years ago...

...What they call self-discipline is really inadequacy...

...He teaches at George Brown College in Toronto...

...My own belief is that it is utterly irresponsible for journalists to tell people that something new is happening if, in fact, we are in the presence of an old idea repackaged in new wrappings...

...The courts are likely to overthrow school funding systems throughout the U.S...

...I always feel that they're giving themselves credit for more passion than they have...

...It's never been replicated before beyond a handful of model schools and it won't be again, unless there's a political demand for certain widespread changes which are going to cost society a lot of money...

...I'd been there for eighteen years...

...The Gulf war showed that this country is technologically prepared to do anything...

...public education, became the 1968 National Book Award winner...

...I saw what happened when they went from a class of thirty-four to a class of eighteen or nineteen children...

...That's why I spent a little time [in Savage Inequalities] explaining the court cases...

...And I also saw the black kids—the ones who were bused out from Roxbury—thrive in that program...

...and, finally, an undermining of our competitiveness with other countries like Japan...

...I still think in the long run that's true...

...People just get tired of hearing that "we're turning things around with school-based management and mentors...

...Looking back, and looking at the way you live [in rural Massachusetts], would you still say the same things...

...Jonathan Kozol: When I returned to the United States, it was with a sense of disappointment that I hadn't been able to write anything that was worth publishing...

...Nore is a free-lance writer...

...Q: In Free Schools you were quite critical of the back-to-the-land movement of the 1960s and 1970s, and of those lucky enough to pull up stakes and leave the problems of city living behind them...

...I left Boston because I needed to leave that city...

...So this book comes out at an ideal moment, as this issue is attracting national attention...

...Is this true...

...I sometimes say to them, "If you don't like the way my voice sounds, just wait till a thousand poor kids burst into your city room and stand around your desk, you won't like their voice any more than mine...

...Q: What did you think about the Persian Gulf war...

...NORE Had fate taken a different twist, Jonathan Kozol might have been a novelist, or an English professor, or a lawyer...

...Is there any significance to your selection...

...Since then I've spent a lot of time with ordinary middle-class Americans all across this country—the lawyer in a Midwest town who picks me up at the airport...

...Why can't he contain his passion like we do...

...I had almost half as many children in my Gordon W.E...

...I felt that I said everything I knew so many times, I didn't want to keep repeating myself...

...Q: In your new book, Savage Inequalities, you examine the schools of New Jersey and Texas, whose education systems have been successfully challenged in the courts, but not Kentucky, whose system was ruled unconstitutional in early 1990...

...It is absolutely essential for the press to tell the public that this is something that was tried before...

...On the last point you seem to have recanted somewhat...

...They weren't worried about Langston Hughes or Robert Frost...

...Kozol's newest book, Savage Inequalities: Children in America's Schools, has created a flurry of excitement in the media...

...funds...

...Newspaper editors would never allow their sports writers to turn out the kind of boring stuff that education writers turn out...

...Most people, I suspect, want their children to have a better-than-equal chance—a better-than-equal chance of being born alive, of having good medical care, of preschool opportunities, and a better-than-equal education...

...I was exhausted...

...We ran that program on $3,000 a year—that was my salary, the salary of a local mother who became my co-director, and we bought all the books we needed, and we served almost 500 children...

...I still think it's probably true...

...The principal has decided to break the school up into mini-schools...

...It's more important in the long run, more true to the American character at its best, to lodge the argument in terms of simple justice: It ain't fair the way it is now...

...Why can't he be controlled like us...

...I didn't spend a lot of time on them because I felt what was going on in the courts was less important than what was going on in the hearts of those children, and on the streets, and in the schools in which they are entrapped...

...That's why it is gratuitous injustice that we let these kids rot away their childhood in East St...

...The irony is that the year I gave up writing was the year I finally found something worth writing about...

...It will still be too loud a voice for many of our literary critics in the United States, I'm sure...

...My dissent was not against America, my dissent was as an American...

...I saw some of the kids from Roxbury go from the Boston schools to the Newton schools...

...By then I was about twenty-five or twenty-six...

...Instead, in 1964, he answered a call for volunteers to teach in a summer tutoring program for low-income children in the Boston ghetto of Roxbury...

...Is this book an expression of that voice...

...I solemnly announced to professors that I was giving up literature and going to become a teacher...

...Nor, however, do I see much likelihood of a mass protest in the near future, because the spirits of poor people are so broken right now...