Jonathan Kozol delivers Common Reading Lecture TONIGHT

“Joy and Justice: An Invitation to the Young to Serve the Children of the Poor”
Jonathan Kozol

DATE: September 23, 2008
TIME: 6:30 p.m.
LOCATION: Alumni Gym in the Koury Athletic Center
COST: $12 or free with Elon ID. Call (336) 278-5610 for tickets.

In 2005, Kozol authored the highly acclaimed Shame of the Nation: The Restoration of Apartheid Schooling in America, which describes wretched conditions in many inner city public schools and how many minority children remain as racially isolated today as they were five decades ago when the landmark Brown v. the Board of Education was handed down by the U.S. Supreme Court. Shame of the Nation is Elon University’s Common Reading for 2008-09.

Kozol has written additional books such as Death at an Early Age, Savage Inequalities, Amazing Grace: The Lives of Children and the Conscience of a Nation, and Letters to a Young Teacher, among other works.

After graduating summa cum laude with a degree in English from Harvard in 1958, Kozol accepted a Rhodes Scholarship to Oxford. He moved to Paris before completing his graduate studies, choosing instead to write a novel. He returned to the United States four years later and would soon teach in the Boston Public Schools.

Kozol was fired before long for reading a Langston Hughes poem to his fourth grade class, which led to Death at an Early Age that same year. It was in this book that he described his initial experience in the Boston schools.

In recent years, Kozol has lobbied leaders in Washington to repeal several aspects to the No Child Left Behind Act of 2001, which he harshly criticizes for how it punishes inner city school children and leads to a drop in the quality of classroom instruction.