So long as these kinds of inequalities persist, all of us who are given expensive educations have to live with the knowledge that our victories are contaminated because the game has been rigged to our advantage.
Charity isn’t a good substitute for justice.
The primary victims of Katrina, those who were given the least help by the government, those rescued last or not at all, were overwhelmingly people of color largely hidden from the mainstream of society.
The first ten, twelve or fifteen years of life are excavated of inherent moral worth in order to accommodate a regimen of basic training for the adult years that many of the poorest children may not even live to know.
A culture in which guilt is automatically assumed to be neurotic and unhealthy has devised a remarkably clever way of protecting its self-interest.
I think a moment of critical energy has suddenly emerged. But moments like this come and go unless we seize them at their height.
Apartheid does not happen spontaneously, like bad weather conditions.
At that time, I had recently finished a book called Amazing Grace, which many people tell me is a very painful book to read. Well, if it was painful to read, it was also painful to write. I had pains in my chest for two years while I was writing that book.
You need massive recruitment to tell the poorest of the poor what is possible.
The answers I remember longest are the ones that answer questions that I didn’t think of asking.
Children are not simply commodities to be herded into line and trained for the jobs that white people who live in segregated neighborhoods have available.
Well, teachers have been profoundly demoralized in recent years and are often treated with contempt by politicians. There’s a great deal of reckless rhetoric in Washington about the mediocrity of the teaching profession – and I don’t find that to be true at all.
We know that segregation is evil. We know that the sickest children should not go to the worst hospitals.
But for the children of the poorest people we’re stripping the curriculum, removing the arts and music, and drilling the children into useful labor. We’re not valuing a child for the time in which she actually is a child.
People rarely speak of children; you hear of ‘cohort groups’ and ‘standard variations,’ but you don’t hear much of boys who miss their cats or 6-year-olds who have to struggle with potato balls.
An awful lot of people come to college with this strange idea that there’s no longer segregation in America’s schools, that our schools are basically equal; neither of these things is true.
If we allow public funds to be used to support our relatively benign, morally grounded schools, we will have to allow those public funds to be used for any type of private school.
I’d love to go back and teach primary school. I used to teach fourth grade and fifth grade. I’d love to spend several years teaching kindergarten or maybe third grade.
I wrote the first book, and I thought people would say: ‘Separate and unequal schools in the City of Boston? I didn’t know that. Let’s go out and fix it.’
I once made a check of all books in my fourth-grade classroom. Of the slightly more than six hundred books, almost one quarter had been published prior to the bombing of Hiroshima; 60 percent were either ten years old or older.