WHO IS JONATHAN KOZOL THE “GURU” IN UNIVERSITY EDUCATION DEPARTMENTS?
https://www.frontpagemag.com/a-student-writes-a-good-paper/
THIS IS AN EXCERPT FROM:A Student Writes a Good Paper Fearing the consequences, she hides. by
Professor Josephine K knew what she was hired to teach. She was hired to teach Jonathan Kozol. Kozol is a recipient of a Rhodes Scholarship, and multiple fellowships from the Guggenheim, Rockefeller, Field, and Ford Foundations. Kozol’s website identifies him as “one of the nation’s most eloquent and outspoken advocates for equality and racial justice in our nation’s schools.” According to Manhattan Institute fellow Abigail Thernstrom, Kozol is a “guru” in university education departments. A survey of departmental reading lists shows Kozol’s name on every one. Chances are that anyone studying to be a teacher in the United States will be required to read Kozol. Indeed, Amazon reviewers of Kozol’s books sometimes mention that his books were required reading for a university class.
Education students reading Kozol’s works learn that America is an “apartheid” country. They learn that “there are expensive children and there are cheap children.” They learn that children are cheap because of “governmentally administered diminishment in the value of children.” Poor children are “locked out of opportunity … for no reason but … the budgetary choices of the government.” Kozol’s readers learn that there are two flavors of human in the US: rich, greedy, racist white victimizers, and poor, disenfranchised, powerless black victims. Rich whites send their kids to early education programs beginning at age two or three. “Low income children” “are denied opportunities” and thus “come into their kindergarten year without the minimal social skills that children need in order to participate in class activities.” Poor children “spend years at home in front of a TV” or in “a slum apartment gazing down into the street.” These deprived childhoods are caused by “high officials of our government” who “rob” black children “of what they gave their own kids.”
Black students, on average consistently perform less well than whites, East-Asian Americans, and Hispanics, on average. Teachers, administrators, and politicians want to solve this achievement gap. A new proposed solution appeared: performance-based learning. Performance-based learning is defined as “emphasizing students being able to do, or perform, specific skills as a result of instruction.” That is, students learn something, and then demonstrate their mastery through action. Kozol describes this method as having been devised by racist whites to “humiliate” black children who cannot possibly learn anything in America’s schools as they are currently constituted. “There is no misery index for the children of apartheid education.”
Prof. Josephine K’s students learned from Kozol’s National-Book-Award-winning publications that the achievement gap between blacks and other ethnic groups exists because of malicious whites working to hurt blacks.
Kozol offers readers a solution to the crisis he describes. Americans must “storm their state legislatures, then do it to Congress, and absolutely demand in passionate, angry language the end of the present system of school finance in this nation.” American citizens should exercise “direct civil disobedience” and stop “unspeakably selfish racial steering.”
Americans must use their taxpayer dollars to “create a utopian children’s village in every inner-city neighborhood.” These villages would follow Montessori and Eriksonian educational guidelines. Americans must defeat “the right-wing voucher movement” advanced by “insidiously clever propaganda.” America must be like “more enlightened nations such as France.” There should be no more than sixteen students per class. Taxpayers should fund “three years of full-day preschool.” Taxpayers should also fund psychiatrists, ophthalmologists, lawyers, and HVAC consultants for every child. The HVAC consultants will ensure that every child’s home is kept at a comfortable temperature. Parents of school children should be guaranteed never to be evicted from their apartments.
Prof. K’s students accepted Kozol’s pronouncements passively. They understood their job as memorization of what Kozol said, not disagreeing with or interrogating Kozol’s assumed-to-be holy writ. Many of Prof. K’s students would go on to become teachers themselves. They might someday pass on unquestioning acceptance. America is racist. Blacks are doomed. Massive taxpayer spending on social engineering is the only solution. Resistance to such spending is evil. Forever and ever amen.
Comments are closed.
