Politics & Power Quote by Jonathan Kozol

Kozol’s line is a controlled indictment of how a rich country manages to speak about children as if they were a line item. The punch is in the verb “measuring”: it evokes scales, accounting, and surveillance, a cold instrument applied to a human life that should resist quantification. He sets up a moral contrast - “blessings” versus “deficits or assets” - but the real target is the mindset that makes the second pair feel normal in policy talk.

The subtext is that our public language has been colonized by market logic. Children aren’t framed as citizens-in-the-making with intrinsic dignity; they’re framed as investments that must justify themselves by future productivity. “Competitive needs” is the clincher: Kozol hears in that phrase a national excuse for triage. If education is primarily an economic pipeline, then the kids who require the most support become suspect, and inequality can be rationalized as “efficiency.”

Context matters because Kozol built his career documenting how American schools mirror the country’s segregated housing and unequal tax bases. When he talks about “these children,” he’s gesturing toward the ones policy debates often treat as problems to manage: poor children, Black and Latino children, students with disabilities, kids in underfunded districts. The intent isn’t sentimental; it’s strategic. He’s exposing how technocratic pragmatism becomes a moral alibi, letting a nation congratulate itself for “preparing the workforce” while quietly accepting that some children will be written off as bad bets.