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Jonathan Kozol, Death at an Early Age Renowned educator and author Kozol began his career as a substitute teacher in Boston in 1964. He was given a year-long post at one of the most dilapidated inner-city schools in the Roxbury neighborhood. His haunting story of the reality lurking behind the Brown v. Board of Education decision became his first book. Kozol taught in a classroom carved out of a corner of an auditorium already occupied by several other classes. Most of the time, his students couldn't hear him speak. Kozol's tenure came to an end when he bought his class books of Langston Hughes' poetry. Though the poems were the first works to stimulate his students' interest all year, Kozol was fired for straying from the prescribed curriculum – a curriculum, he said, that made no effort to reach the psyche of the urban minority child. Kozol writes scornfully of the Boston school system, accusing it of "spiritual and psychological murder." His eloquent language and obvious love for his students and his career make Death at an Early Age a powerful and enduring work. |
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