Social activist, author, and educator
Jonathan Kozol will be the opening speaker of CLPIA's series focusing
on choices and challenges for public education.
A keynote address by social activist and educator Jonathan Kozol, author of seven award-winning books on the plight of disadvantaged children in America, will kick off "Choices and Challenges for Public Education: An Agenda for the Twenty-First Century," the Center for Leadership and Public Interest Advocacy's (CLPIA) semester-long series of events focusing on public education. Each semester, CLPIA concentrates on a different topic of public concern, chosen from proposals solicited from the MHC community. Kozol will speak on "Teachers and Children in the Urban Schools" February 10 at 7:30 pm in Chapin Auditorium.
Jonathan Kozol graduated from Harvard University summa cum laude in 1958 and was a Rhodes Scholar at Magdalen College, Oxford. An active participant in civil rights campaigns during the 1960s, he moved to a poor, black Boston neighborhood in 1964. Kozol became a fourth-grade teacher in the Boston public schools that year; ever since, he has been drawing attention to issues surrounding education and social justice in America. His first book, Death at an Early Age, a description of his first year as a teacher, was published in 1967 and received the National Book Award in Science, Philosophy, and Religion. It was followed by Illiterate America, which helped generate a national campaign to combat adult illiteracy. Another work written in 1991, Savage Inequalities: Children in America's Schools, provides a comprehensive look at disparities within America's public school system.
Kozol combines teaching with activism. He taught at South Boston High School during the city's desegregation crisis, helped establish a storefront learning center that became a model for many others, and described his experience during these years in three books. Kozol's most recent work, Amazing Grace: The Lives of Children and the Conscience of a Nation, details two years of conversations with members of an impoverished New York City neighborhood.
Four events will delve further into the challenges confronting public education. On February 25, the symposium "The Power of Language: Is Bilingual Education Expanding Opportunity or Limiting Assimilation?" will be held. School choice will be addressed March 25 in the symposium "The Economics of School Choice: Who Wins? Who Loses?" On April 6, there will be a screening of Fear and Learning at Hoover Elementary, a documentary on Los Angeles's inner-city schools. A discussion with Herbert Kohl, senior fellow at the Open Society Institute and author of 36 Children and The Discipline of Hope, will follow the screening. On April 7 at the Odyssey Bookshop, Kohl will read from his latest work, The Discipline of Hope: Continuity, Crisis, and the Future of Our Schools. A special community-based learning course, taught by professors Patricia Ramsey and Anita Page, is being offered in association with this series.
"The series on public education will provide an important opportunity for educators, policy-makers, and others interested in the future of our schools to grapple with one of the most pressing issues of our day," said CLPIA Director Eva Paus. "The Center believes that active engagement with national and international challenges is not only a cornerstone to the education we provide MHC students, but also an opportunity to bring new ideas and insights to the public arena."
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