Education Quote by Jonathan Kozol

Kozol’s line lands like a warning flare from someone who’s spent decades walking the hallways most Americans prefer to imagine rather than visit. The first move is strategic understatement: “I think a lot of people don’t have any idea” isn’t doubt so much as indictment. It frames segregation not as a disputed fact, but as a public blind spot - a failure of attention that polite civic mythology depends on.

“Have become all over again” is the knife twist. It refuses the comforting narrative that Brown v. Board settled the question and the rest is just uneven progress. Kozol implies recurrence, even regression: segregation returning through zoning, housing inequality, district lines, and the quiet logic of “choice.” The subtext is that modern segregation is harder to name precisely because it’s often bureaucratic rather than explicitly racist, which makes it easier to deny while its effects remain blunt.

Then he widens the charge from buildings to stories: “Most textbooks are not honest.” Not “incomplete,” not “imperfect” - dishonest. That’s an accusation about power, not pedagogy. If schools are re-segregating physically, curriculum is re-segregating morally, cordoning off discomforting truths about race, wealth, and policy behind sanitized timelines and heroic anecdotes. Kozol is pointing at an ecosystem: segregated schools produce segregated knowledge, and segregated knowledge makes segregated schools feel inevitable.

The context is Kozol’s lifelong project - from Savage Inequalities to The Shame of the Nation - documenting how inequality persists not by accident but by design. His intent isn’t merely to inform; it’s to strip away plausible deniability, forcing readers to see “separate” not as history but as infrastructure.