ORDINARY RESSURECTIONS

Jonathan Kozol's Ordinary Resurrections

Jonathan Kozol's Ordinary Resurrections

Introduction

Jonathan Kozol, recognized as one of America's most high-profile, and, influential advocates for public education. He is one of the primary educational thinkers who put the nation's public schools on the national public and policy agenda. Advocates of his ideas would describe him as someone who fights tirelessly for the rights and needs of children and especially for those who come from high-poverty environments. His books, read widely by both educators and non educators, set the agenda for social change in America's urban centers. His book Death at an Early Age, published, in 1967, has sold over 2 million copies. In this book, Kozol describes his first year of teaching in the Boston Public Schools and the unique way in which he began to understand the world of high-poverty students, also to think about new ways of teaching content to them, so that they could realize their empirical potential. In 1986, he published Illiterate America, and, made public debate about adult illiteracy, another issue of considerable importance to those who evidence strong social justice concerns (Zeichner, 1996).

In 1985, Kozol spent a year working in a homeless shelter, and his book, Rachel and Her Children, gave voice to the people living in extreme poverty and to the tragic death of an 8-month-old child. His more recent books have included Savage Inequalities, Amazing Grace, and most recently, Ordinary Resurrections. All of these books deal with children in high-poverty environments and the unique problems they face, as well as the way in which policies at the local, state, and federal level routinely mitigate the potential for those in urban environments to receive a quality education. Kozol questions why, in a nation of such fruitful abundance, so many children go without a decent education. What are the true costs of childhood poverty, and why does the American educational and political system seem incapable of addressing the problems of poverty? Kozol has spent his career fighting for the rights of young people who often cannot fight for themselves, or, who are without adult advocates, who can help them realize their full potential. Kozol is an accomplished writer and speaker. His public presentations are searing accounts of the tragedy of childhood poverty and substandard education. They also develop in audiences a deeper understanding of, and provide an arsenal of practical solutions for, the ways in which the educational establishment can more effectively address the rights and needs of children.

Background of Jonathan Kozol

Jonathan Kozol (born September 5, 1936, in Boston, Massachusetts) graduated from Noble and Greenough School in 1954, and Harvard University summa cum laude in 1958, with a degree in English Literature. He was awarded, a Rhodes scholarship to Magdalen College, Oxford. While in Europe, and during this time of actual searching, he befriended a number of exceptional individuals, including the writer William Styron. It was upon his return to the United States that Kozol began to tutor children in Roxbury, Massachusetts, and soon became a ...