Life & Wisdom Quote by Jonathan Kozol

Kozol’s line is built like a trap door: it starts with the soothing language of “benign” and “morally grounded,” then drops you into the hard mechanics of precedent. The intent is less to praise any particular private school than to expose how quickly “just this one good exception” becomes a pipeline. Once public money is framed as portable - not tied to a democratically governed public system but to parental choice and private operators - the state loses its ability to draw principled lines without admitting it’s making ideological judgments about which moralities count.

The subtext is a warning about the rhetorical Trojan horse of virtue. “Relatively benign” is doing the heavy lifting: it acknowledges that some private schools look harmless, even admirable, and that’s exactly why the argument is persuasive to moderates. Kozol is saying the politics of vouchers and subsidies don’t move on policy spreadsheets; they move on testimonial narratives about safe classrooms and caring teachers. But policy is what happens after the ad campaign. A funding regime that follows the child will inevitably be claimed by sectarian schools, exclusionary academies, and institutions that teach values the public may actively reject.

Context matters: Kozol’s career is a long indictment of inequality in American education - not just disparities, but the way inequality gets laundered through “choice.” This quote is a strategic pivot away from debating which private schools “deserve” support and toward the structural consequence: if the public bankrolls private education at all, it’s effectively outsourcing civic authority over schooling, one sympathetic case at a time.