Jonathan Kozol, Fire In The Ashes, 2012.
Even though I do not have a career in the manner I expected to possess, struggle and develop one, there are great benefits to my lunatic lifestyle. One is getting to spend a lot of library time and being able to read without much purpose. For if I was on a clock, I wouldn't have ever picked up any of Jonathon Kozol's books. That would have been sad. For my teachers and advisors at State should have pointed him out. Kozol is a great voice and a strong part of our 200 year public education experiment. As it was I was directed from KPFK, which HAD been an alert from my crying preacher professor, Dan, so in the end, the school did win.
"Savage Inequalities" is Kozol's magnum opus, as many of you may know, and "Fire In The Ashes," is his latest. Kozol has made a fifty year career out of documenting some of the students in East Coast Schools. That by itself could be why he was a little remote, but the read is well worth the work and there is not that much different between any of our poor schools.
From the jacket: [Kozol writes of] the urgent issues tha confront our urban schools--a devastating race gap and a pathological regime of obsessive testing and drilling students for exams instead of giving them the rich curriculum that excites a love of learning--are intrwoven through these stories. Why certain children rise above it all, graduate from high school, and do well in college, while others are defeated by the time they enter adolescence, lies at the essence of his work."
Jonathan Kozol, Fire In The Ashes, 2012.
Douglas Whiting, 2013
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