Education Quote by Jonathan Kozol

Kozol doesn’t flatter the educated; he indicts them. The line turns what usually passes for an uplifting meritocracy narrative into something closer to a confession: success, under current conditions, isn’t merely unevenly distributed, it’s morally compromised. “Expensive educations” is doing blunt work here. He’s not talking about intelligence or effort; he’s naming a purchased head start, an institutional pipeline that converts money into credentials and then into authority. The phrase “have to live with the knowledge” is a pressure point: he’s less interested in policy abstraction than in the quiet psychological bargain that lets winners sleep at night.

The subtext is strategic. Kozol isn’t arguing that individual achievement is fake; he’s arguing that it’s inseparable from structural advantage. “Victories are contaminated” lands because it borrows the language of pollution and taint, suggesting something you can’t rinse off with philanthropy or good intentions. You can’t neutralize the rigging by being “nice” about it. That’s the discomfort he wants to produce: a moral debt that can’t be paid with gratitude alone.

Context matters: Kozol’s career is rooted in documenting the brutal disparities of American schooling, especially along lines of race and class. This sentence is aimed at the people most likely to treat inequality as unfortunate background noise while cashing its dividends. By framing privilege as a rigged “game,” he also challenges the culture of competitive self-mythmaking: if the rules were tilted, winning isn’t proof of virtue. It’s evidence of a system that needs to be un-tilted, not merely admired for producing “talent.”