FAYETTEVILLE — University of Arkansas students had a lesson Tuesday in the history of civil rights from a nationally renowned author and child advocate.
Jonathan Kozol, Harvard University-educated and a former classroom teacher in Boston public schools, has devoted more than 40 years to the issues of education and social justice. He spent more than an hour discussing the combination of education and social justice to more than 300 students in a standing room audience at Giffels Auditorium.
Later Tuesday, he gave a public presentation at the Arkansas Union.
AT A GLANCE
Books by Jonathan Kozol
“Rachel and Her Children”
“Savage Inequalities”
“Amazing Grace”
“Ordinary Resurrections”
“The Shame of a Nation”
Source: Staff Report
He has spent years in the South Bronx of New York City studying the effects of poverty and culture on education, he said.
“Most of these people were normal people. One was a former teacher who had read some of my books,” he said. That former teacher provided him access into some of the most seamy areas of the South Bronx where he spent time in a homeless shelter for women and children.
It wasn’t the type of shelter one might see in Northwest Arkansas, he said.
The Bronx shelter was a former hotel, operated by New York City, where some 1,600 women and children lived in what he described as “a scene out of hell.”
Ironically, the shelter is in the poorest congressional district in the country while three minutes away by subway was one of the richest areas in the U.S., the posh Upper East Side, where people such as Donald Trump live.
He wrote a series of books on his experiences in the South Bronx, one of which was promoted by Oprah Winfrey, and one of which showed how some children were able to rise above the ashes.
He recounted his experiences with Pineapple, a young girl, wise beyond her years.
“By the time Pineapple was in the third grade, she had seven teachers in two years,” he said. “Imagine what that does to the morale of the class.”
Asked about the solution to such problems, such as in the South Bronx, Kozol said, “If a bull is in the middle of a china shop, you isolate the bull.”
He said the only solution is to get rid of segregation and inequality. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. gave his life over his dream of equality, not segregation, Kozol said.
“The way to deal with an evil is not to do circles around it, but cut it out like a cancer in our midst,” he said.
Yvette Murphy-Erby, an assistant professor in the university’s School of Social Work, said Kozol’s message stimulated mixed emotions for her. The issue of segregation goes beyond schools, she said.
“The issue is really so complex, it’s hard to capture in a sentence without a multisystemic perspective,” she said.