Parenting & Family Quote by Jonathan Kozol

Kozol writes like someone banging on the locked door of a public school and refusing to stop. The line opens with a blunt dividing marker: "But". Whatever hopeful rhetoric exists about education, he implies, collapses when it reaches "the children of the poorest people". That phrasing matters. He doesn't say "under-resourced schools" or "at-risk youth". He names class plainly, then describes policy as an act of taking: "stripping", "removing", "drilling". The verbs are tactile and punitive, suggesting not reform but extraction.

The intent is to expose a moral bait-and-switch in American schooling: enrichment for the affluent, utilitarian training for everyone else. Arts and music aren't presented as decorative add-ons; they're evidence of whether we believe poor children deserve imagination, leisure, and interior life. When he says "useful labor", the subtext is historical and ugly: education as a sorting machine that laundered inequality into "workforce readiness". "Useful" becomes a euphemism for obedient, trackable, employable - and therefore expendable.

His final sentence is the quiet knife. "Valuing a child for the time in which she actually is a child" rejects the dominant economic framing where kids are only future workers. It's an argument about childhood as a present-tense right, not a waiting room. The pronoun "she" adds specificity and tenderness, pushing against the depersonalized language of standards and metrics. Kozol's context - decades documenting segregated, underfunded urban schools under test-driven regimes - hangs behind every word: this isn't metaphor. It's a diagnosis of a system that treats poverty as destiny and calls it pragmatism.