Standing on the bricks of Harvard Square one day in 1964, Jonathan Kozol was just a few yards away from graduate school and a nice, safe career as a tenured professor of English. Kozol--who spoke last night to an audience of 250 in the Griffith Film Theater--already had the Harvard education, the Rhodes scholarship, the expatriate years in Paris; all that remained was the application form.
But other things were on his mind.
The Ku Klux Klan had just murdered three young civil rights activists in Philadelphia, Miss., two of them white Northerners, one a black Southerner. "Because it was both black and white, America paid attention," Kozol said. "They thought, it could have been me. It changed the lives of a generation."
Back in Cambridge, something snapped in Kozol, and before anyone could stop him, he flung himself down the subway stairs, caught the next train for Roxbury and confessed his guilt to a black church minister.
"I'm ashamed of what happened in the South," Kozol remembers saying--and with those few words, he launched himself into a career far from anything he had expected.
Kozol found out that the church was offering a "summer freedom school" and offered to help. "He asked, 'Can you teach reading?'" Kozol remembers. "And I said, 'No--I went to Harvard.' Because I knew the metaphysical poetry of John Donne but not how to teach kids how to read."
Wending his way through the years with a mixture of ire, humor and hope, the author of Savage Inequalities--required summer reading for the Class of 2007--kept the audience rapt for a solid hour as he discussed the disparities nationwide in standards of education and his work to reduce them.
He became a substitute teacher in a heavily segregated Boston public school, leading a 34-student kindergarten class that had already seen 12 substitutes come and go.
The next year, Kozol moved to fourth grade, and the year after that, to fifth. But when he introduced his class to a poem by Langston Hughes in 1967, the school fired him for "curriculum deviation."
"They said it was incendiary," Kozol said. "I had read Robert Frost with them, and they had said that was incendiary, too."
Kozol wound up in South Bronx, the poorest Congressional district in the nation, working with children and recording their stories.
"There is something deeply hypocritical about holding an 8-year-old girl accountable [for academic shortcomings] when we don't even hold the officials accountable who robbed her," Kozol said, a round of applause following his words.
Joyful anecdotes filled his speech, as Kozol recalled taking his students to see Mother Martha, an outspoken Episcopalian priest; talking with a girl who dreamed of having dinner with God and touring classrooms with the late children's television legend Fred Rogers.
But a vein of angry passion flared at times throughout the night.
"Often people will listen with compassion, and they'll say, 'Your last book made me cry,'" he said. "For a while I'm thinking that I've won an ally for the revolution. But sometimes after the evening, after the coffee and the creme brulee, something happens, and he asks, 'Yes, it's unfair, it's unjust, but tell me one thing: Can you really solve things by throwing money at them?'... And they'll be spending $40,000 a year for tuition at Andover. Sometimes it's late at night, and I'll have had a drink or two, and I'll say, 'I don't know--it seems to work for your kids.'"
Funding public schools with local property taxes has caused much of the inequity, Kozol said, and he hopes to eliminate the practice with a new Constitutional amendment guaranteeing education as a fundamental right of citizenship.
"It's a crackpot system," Kozol said. "Maybe it made sense in colonial days, when the kids usually grew up and lived in that town forever. But we all now compete in the same job market."
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