Jonathan Kozol, the nation’s foremost authority on the state of public education in America, will present a talk on “The Hearts of Children and Obligations of our Nation’s Schools” for the Assembly Series at 11 a.m., Wednesday, February 22. The lecture, which is free and open to the public, will be held in Graham Chapel.
Over the past four decades, Kozol has sought to identify and correct social and educational inequality in America’s public schools. In his new book, The Shame of the Nation: The Restoration of Apartheid Schooling in America, he exposes the high incidence of public school resegregation in urban schools. Through exhaustive research in over 60 schools in 11 states, Kozol exposes the glaring inequities between schools catering to minorities in dense cities, and predominantly white schools in suburbia.
“[Public school resegregation] is a national horror hidden in plain view,” he writes in Shame of the Nation, and, according to his research, St. Louis has not been spared. “In his book, he takes special note of St. Louis area public schools as a place where inequality persists,” explained Garrett Duncan, Ph.D., associate professor of education and of African and African American studies in Arts & Sciences.
Kozol’s personal experiences illustrate the detrimental effects that these resegregation policies are having on Black and minority students. Urban schools, with 90% of their student body composed of minority students, are found to be lacking the fundamental basics, things such as good textbooks, clean classrooms, and extracurricular activities. Schools in these poor communities “must settle for a different set of academic and career goals,” he writes.
A former educator himself, Kozol witnessed social injustice firsthand in the mid-1960s when he began teaching at a Boston public school that catered to poor minority students. Soon, he was spearheading efforts to create “freedom schools” for Black students during the tumultuous civil rights movement. This was the first step in what became a lifelong commitment to fight for the right to adequate funding in education for the underprivileged. Since then, he has become a nationally recognized spokesperson for social reform.
In addition to Shame of the Nation, Kozol has authored numerous books that examine the interrelationships between race, poverty and education. These include: Death At An Early Age, recipient of the 1968 National Book Award in Science, Philosophy and Religion; Illiterate American; Rachel and Her Children: Homeless Families in America, recipient of the Robert F. Kennedy Book Award in 1989 and the Conscience in Media Award of the American Society of Journalists and Authors; Savage Inequalities: Children in America’s Schools, a finalist for the 1992 National Book Critics Circle Award; and Amazing Grace: the Lives of Children and the Conscience of a Nation.
Kozol has received numerous awards, including two Guggenheim Fellowships.
He received a degree in English literature from Harvard University, and a Rhodes Scholarship to study at Magdalen College in Oxford, England.
Graham Chapel is located north of Mallinckrodt Center on the Washington University Hilltop campus.
For more information, call (314) 935-4620 or visit the Assembly Series web page (http://assemblyseries.wustl.edu).