Although Stephen did poorly in his school work, there was one thing he could do well: he was a fine artist. He made delightful drawings. The thing about them that was good, however, was also the thing that got him into trouble. For they were not neat and orderly and organized but entirely random and casual, messy, somewhat unpredictable, seldom according to the instructions he had been given, and—in short—real drawings. For these drawings, Stephen received considerable embarrassment at the hands of the Art Teacher. This person was a lady no longer very young who had some rather fixed values and opinions about children and about teaching. Above all, her manner was marked by unusual confidence. She seldom would merely walk into our class but seemed always to sweep into it. Even for myself, her advent, at least in the beginning of the year, used to cause a wave of anxiety For she came into our class generally in a mood of self-assurance and of almost punitive restlessness which never made one confident but which generally made me wonder what I had done wrong. In dealing with Stephen, I thought she could be quite overwhelming.
The Art Teacher’s most common technique for art instruction was to pass out mimeographed designs and then to have the pupils fill them in according to a dictated or suggested color plan. An alternate approach was to stick up on the wall or on the blackboard some of the drawings on a particular subject that had been done in the previous years by predominantly white classes. These drawings, neat and ordered and very uniform, would be the models for our children. The art lesson, in effect, would be to copy what had been done before, and the neatest and most accurate reproductions of the original drawings would be the ones that would win the highest approval from the teacher. None of the new drawings, the Art Teacher would tell me frequently, was comparable to the work that had been done in former times, but at least the children in the class could try to copy good examples. The fact that they were being asked to copy something in which they could not believe because it was not of them and did not in any way correspond to their own interests did not occur to the Art Teacher, or if it did occur she did not say it. Like a number of other teachers at my school and in other schools of the same nature, she possessed a remarkable self-defense apparatus, and anything that seriously threatened to disturb her point of view could be effectively denied.
How did a pupil like Stephen react to a teacher of this sort? Alone almost out of the entire class, I think that he absolutely turned off his signals while she was speaking and withdrew to his own private spot. At his desk he would sit silently while the Art Teacher was talking and performing. With a pencil, frequently stubby and end-bitten, he would scribble and fiddle and cock his head and whisper to himself throughout the time that the Art Teacher was going on. At length, when the art lesson officially began, he would perhaps push aside his little drawing and try the paint and paper that he had been given, usually using the watercolors freely and the paintbrush sloppily and a little bit defiantly and he would come up with things that certainly were delightful and personal and private, and full of his own nature.
If Stephen began to fiddle around during a lesson, the Art Teacher generally would not notice him at first. When she did, both he and I and the children around him would prepare for trouble. For she would go at his desk with something truly like a vengeance and would shriek at him in a way that carried terror. “Give me that! Your paints are all muddy! You’ve made it a mess. Look at what he’s done! He’s mixed up the colors! I don’t know why we waste good paper on this child!” Then: “Garbage! Junk! He gives me garbage and junk and garbage is one thing I will not have.” Now I thought that that garbage and junk was very nearly the only real artwork in the class. I do not know very much about painting, but I know enough to know that the Art Teacher did not know much about it either and that, furthermore, she did not know or care anything at all about the way in which you can destroy a human being. Stephen, in many ways already dying, died a second and third and fourth and final death before her anger.
Sometimes when the Art Teacher was not present in our classroom, and when no other supervisory person happened to be there, Stephen would sneak up to me, maybe while I was sitting at my desk and going over records or totaling up the milk money or checking a paper, so that I would not see him until he was beside me. Then, hastily, secretly, with mystery, with fun, with something out of a spy movie, he would hand me one of his small drawings. The ones I liked the most, to be honest, were often not completely his own, but pictures which he had copied out of comic books and then elaborated, amended, fiddled with, and frequently added to by putting under them some kind of mock announcement (“I AM THE GREATEST AND THE STRONGEST”) which might have been something he had wished. I think he must have seen something special and valuable about comic books, because another thing that he sometimes did was just cut out part of a comic book story that he liked and bring it in to me as a present. When he did this, as with his paintings and drawings, he usually would belittle his gift by crumpling it up or folding it up very tiny before he handed it to me. It was a way, perhaps, of saying that he didn’t value it too much (although it was clear that he did value it a great deal) in case I didn’t like it.
If the Art Teacher came upon us while he was slipping me a picture he had drawn, both he and I were apt to get an effective lashing out. Although she could be as affectionate and benevolent as she liked with other children, with Stephen she was almost always scathing in her comments and made no attempt at seeming mild. “He wants to show you his little scribbles because he wants to use you and your affection for him and make you pity him but we don’t have time for that. Keep him away. If you don’t, I’ll do it. I don’t want him getting near you during class.”
For weeks after that outburst, when we had been caught in the act of friendship, he stopped coming near me. He stopped bringing me his drawings. He kept to his seat and giggled, mumbled, fiddled. Possibly he felt that he was doing this for my sake in order not to get me into further trouble. Then one day for a brief second he got up his nerve and darted forward. He crumpled up some paper in his fist and handed it to me quickly and got back into his chair. The crumpled paper turned out to be more funnies that he had painstakingly cut out. Another time he dropped a ball of crunched-up math paper on my desk. On the paper he had written out his age—eight years old— and his birthday—which I seem to remember came at Christmas. I also remember that once he either whispered to me or wrote to me on a note that he weighed sixty pounds. This information, I thought, came almost a little boastfully, even though it obviously isn’t a lot to weigh if you are almost nine, and I wondered about it for a time until it occurred to me that maybe it was just one of very few things that he knew about himself, one of the half dozen measurable facts that had anything to do with him in the world, and so—like all people, using as best they can whatever they’ve got—he had to make the most of it.
I think that much of his life, inwardly and outwardly, must have involved a steady and, as it turned out, inwardly at least, a losing battle to survive, he battled for his existence and, like many defenseless humans, he had to use whatever odd little weapons came to hand. Acting up at school was part of it. He was granted so little attention that he must have panicked repeatedly about the possibility that, with a few slight mistakes, he might simply stop existing or being seen at all. I imagine this is one reason why he seemed so often to invite or court a tongue-lashing or a whipping. Doing anything at all that would make a teacher mad at him, scream at him, strike at him, would also have been a kind of ratification, even if it was painful, that he actually was there. Other times, outside of school, he might do things like pulling a fire alarm lever and then having the satisfaction of hearing the sirens and seeing the fire engines and knowing that it was all of his own doing and to his own credit, so that at least he would have proof in that way that his hands and his arm muscles and his mischievous imagination actually did count for something measurable in the world. Maybe the only way in which he could ever impinge upon other people’s lives was by infuriating them, but that at least was something. It was better than not having any use at all.
I remember that the Art Teacher once caught him out in the back, in the hallway, in front of a big floor-length coat-closet mirror. She grabbed him by the arm and pulled him into the classroom and announced to me and to the children in the classroom that he was “just standing there and making faces at himself and staring.” While she talked, he looked away and examined the floor with his eyes, as he did so often, because he was embarrassed by being exposed like that. I thought it was needlessly cruel of her to have hauled him before the children in that manner, and surely a little hesitation on her part might have given her a moment to think why he might like to see himself in a mirror, even if it was only to see a scratched reflection. I didn’t think it was shameful for him to be doing that, even to be making funny faces. It seemed rather normal and explicable to me that he might want to check up on his existence. Possibly it was a desperate act, and certainly a curious one, but I do not think it was unnatural. What did seem to me to be unnatural was the unusual virulence of the Art Teacher’s reaction.
Another time, seeing him all curled up in one of the corners, I went over to him and tried to get him to look up at me and smile and talk. He would not do that. He remained all shriveled up there and he would not cry and would not laugh. I said to him: “Stephen, if you curl up like that and will not even look up at me, it will just seem as if you wanted to make me think you were a little rat.” He looked down at himself hurriedly and then he looked up at me and he chuckled grotesquely and he said, with a pitiful little laugh: “I know I couldn’t be a rat, Mr. Kozol, because a rat has got to have a little tail!” I never forgot that and I told it later to a child psychiatrist, whose answer to me made it more explicit and more clear: “It is the absence of a tail which convinces him that he has not yet become a rat.” Perhaps that is overly absolute and smacks a bit of the psychiatric dogmatism that seems so difficult to accept because it leaves so little room for uncertainty or doubt; yet in this one instance I do not really think that it carries the point too far. For it is the Boston schoolteachers themselves who for years have been speaking of the Negro children in their charge as “animals” and the school building that houses them as “a zoo.” And it is well known by now how commonly the injustices and depredations of the Boston school system have compelled its Negro pupils to regard themselves with something less than the dignity and respect of human beings. The toll that this took was probably greater upon Stephen than it might have been upon some other children. But the price that it exacted was paid ultimately by every child, and in the long run I am convinced that the same price has been paid by every teacher too. (Jonathan Kozol “Death At An Early Age” 1967 p.1-7)
Many people in Boston are surprised, even to this day, to be told that children are beaten with thin bamboo whips within the cellars of our public schools and that they are whipped at times for no greater offense than for failing to show respect to the very same teachers who have been describing them as niggers. Some rules exist about these whippings and a number of public statements have been made by the school administration in their defense. Some of the rules and some of the public statements are in themselves revelatory of the attitudes which still prevail within the system. One of the present School Committee members, Mr. Thomas Eisenstadt, has made the following remarks in regard to the use of the rattan: “The conditions … under which it may be employed are very explicit; for example, a written report must be made and kept on file in the principal’s office stating the reason for using the rattan. Also a witness must be present when the rattan is administered, and the name of the said witness must be recorded in the principal’s report. Since I have been a member of the School Committee, and that has been over three and one-half years, not one instance of abuse of this prerogative by a teacher or by anyone else has been brought to my attention. The rattan is used conservatively and not indiscriminately.”
Another statement on the subject is that given to a Boston newspaper by Miss Marguerite Sullivan, until recently the Deputy Superintendent for elementary schools in Boston. “She noted the extent of the rattanning is usually limited to three blows on the hand: ‘And the child is never held by the teacher. If he won’t put out his hand, the matter is taken up with the parents.’”
The Boston Teachers’ Handbook also contains these rules: “Corporal punishment shall not be inflicted when it might aggravate an existing physical impairment or produce or threaten to produce permanent or lasting injury … Violent shaking or other gross indignities are expressly forbidden. Cases of corporal punishment shall be reported by each teacher on the dates of their occurrence in writing … These reports shall state the name of the pupil, the name of the witness, the amount of punishment, and the reason therefor …”
These stipulations are daydreams to anyone who know certain of the Boston schools. Whippings were frequently given at my school without a witness present. Cards were commonly not filed, if for no other reason than that this task alone would have taken some of the teachers several hours. Students were repeatedly grabbed, shaken and insulted. Parents were rarely notified. And at least one child in my school was whipped in such a way as to leave on his hand a physical impairment in the form of a large raised scar which may be with him all his life. I know this boy well, for he was a student in my room. His name was Frederick. When I first noticed the curious protrusion that rose up near the end of his finger, I asked him about it immediately and he explained it in these words:
“It happened in September before you were my teacher. I was talking and I was sent down to the cellar and when I got the stick I was scared and I must have pulled back my hand a little so I got it on the knuckle instead of on the finger part. I already had a bad infection. They said it was my fault for not keeping my hand still.”
It is never simple to accept the idea that these things happen. It came to me that the only conceivable way in which this sort of thing might go unnoticed in a civilized city in the middle of the 1960’s would be if the boy had been to terrified to report what had happened to any grown-up outside the school, or if that grown-up in turn were to scared to pass it on to anybody else. This was not the case. As Frederick reported it to me, he had indeed told someone. He told his mother. His mother, with whom I have confirmed the remaining details, did not do anything until evening but then became greatly alarmed when she saw the infected knuckle swelling up into the size of a small ball. She took her child to a doctor. Nothing has been exaggerated. The finger was in a highly inflamed state. The boy was not merely treated at the City Hospital but it was felt necessary by the doctor that he be put into the hospital for a period that lasted several days. Frederick’s medical records afford confirmation of this injury although of course the records do not make any mention of the whipping.
When I spoke to Frederick’s mother, I asked her whether she had gone up to school to demand an explanation. She told me that she had but she had not gotten further than the Art Teacher. Frederick had been in art class at the time the trouble started; she believed, therefore the Art Teacher would be the one to know about it. This turned out to be so. The Art Teacher did know about it. She knew what happened, and she knew the boy had been hurt badly and she even knew that he had been subsequently hospitalized, and she did not deny any of it. What she did do, however, was to tell the mother that there was no reason to be angry or to pursue the matter further, for she had, she said, already checked with the male teacher who had given the rattaning and had found out that he had “done the whipping right.” I wondered whether she felt this could in any way justify the injury or whether she believed that it could in any way provide exoneration either for herself, as the teacher in charge of the child, or for the man who did the whipping. Because it was done right, according to a rule, did that mean it was permissible? It reminded me of the way that many people in wartime Germany had exonerated themselves for their participation in the deaths of Jewish people on the grounds that what they had done had been done correctly. The truth, of course, in this instance, is that the whipping hadn’t been done correctly. The rules had not been followed, or else a child with an infected finger would not have been beaten. And possibly the Art Teacher knew this and may have had some doubts about it. For she followed through with an act which suggests that she may have had some later worries. The mother of the child has shown me a handsome card that her son received while he was recuperating from his whipping at the hospital. The card is a get-well card and it is signed with a flourishing hand: “To Frederick. Get well soon and come back to school again! With love, from your Art Teacher.” Underneath that, she has signed her name. The envelope bears the address of City Hospital.
It seems to me to simple to call the Art Teacher a blatant hypocrite for sending this message, although the thought occurred to me when I read it. I think that she was no more a hypocrite to send him that card than I was a hypocrite to chat with her in a friendly way day after day after I knew all of these things, or to go out and have a friendly beer and shake hands warmly with the pleasant casual man who did the whipping. All white people, I think, are implicated in these things so long as we participate in America in a normal way and attempt to go on leading normal lives while any one race is being cheated and tormented. But now I believe that we probably will go on leading our normal lives, and will go on participating in our nation in a normal way, unless there comes a time when Negroes can compel us by methods of extraordinary pressure to interrupt our pleasure.
To whip a normal child and scar his finger seemed bad enough but to whip an emotionally disturbed child and to devastate his heart and mind is to go a step further. This happened also in my school building. There were two children to whom it happened in my immediate knowledge. One was Stephen. I don’t know how many times he underwent these whippings and I am certain that what ever records exist at school would not be accurate. Unquestionably it happened for a while as often as once every month and probably more often, probably closer to once or twice a week. It happened, I noticed, very often when the class was having math instruction, and this, I came to believe, was closely connected to the nature of the feelings that the Math Teacher at our school tended to show toward kids like Stephen. I ought to explain briefly, although it will become more apparent in the sections that come later, that our school was loaded with a certain number of experts in different subject areas, for art, for math, for reading; and the reason for this was that we were participating in the Boston version of a compensatory education program for Negro children. The compensation involved was of a questionable nature, in fact, and when our city lost the prospect of obtaining two million dollars in federal aid for compensatory education, the reason given was that the federal government just did not consider Boston’s program to be providing any kind of legitimate compensation. But even if the program had itself been a wise and splendid one, the experts who arrived on the scene, or who were drafted to serve in it, would have compromised it anyway.
Among the various experts with whom I found that I must deal, and under whose general authority I worked, were such people as the Art and Math and the Reading Teachers. #Each of the latter two came into my classroom for a particular part of every morning, the Art Teacher twice weekly. During these periods I was either to observe or else to go out and do remedial work with other classes. In this way, it was imagined that a novice teacher would learn from the old-timers. In the case of the Mathematics Teacher, in the same way as with the Art Teacher – although it was somewhat different with the Reading Teacher – I cannot say I learned anything at all except how to suppress and pulverize any sparks of humanity or independence or originality in children. What I leaned from the specificity of the techniques of teaching I have had to do my best to unlearn since. The Math Teacher, like the Art Teacher, did not seem very fond of Stephen. She told me so freely on more than one occasion. Yet she was also very much aware of his mental instability and it was she, rather than I, who was first to come out in the open and speak of him as a child who was not well.
I remember the day that she told me this, snapping it out with sureness: “The child’s not in his right mind.” I asked her when she said this, if she had thought of helping him into any treatment. This was a mistake; however, for it developed that the Math Teacher was not at all keen about psychiatry. When I asked about treatment for Stephen, she answered only that she had not thought of it but that, now that I mentioned it, she was going to have to admit that she could not go along. When I asked her why, her answer to me was that “he would just lie and tell the psychiatrists that we weren’t kind to him. He’d tell them that we were all prejudiced up here.” Within days, Stephen was sent to the cellar for another rattaning and the comment of the Math Teacher, with no sense of incongruity or injustice, was again, that he was “not in his right mind.” Others in the school made similar statements about Stephen. The Assistant Principal, a man who was generally kind and – within the context of this school – relatively enlightened, told me almost exactly the same thing. The man was aware of the situation, as were many people. Nothing was done about it, however, and Stephen continued to get whippings. Nor did I do anything myself. I am afraid that many people may not wish to believe that these were real whippings, or that they honestly scared a child, or that they actually involved substantial pain. If this is the case, then I would like to describe what Stephen was like and how he seemed and behaved when he went downstairs to take his beating.
I have said how little he was. Sixty pounds isn’t very heavy. He was skinny, with tiny arms, and he couldn’t have been more than four feet tall. He had light-brown skin and a Red Sox baseball jersey. He had terrified tiny little hopeless eyes. He had on corduroy pants, which were baggy. He had on basketball sneakers which looked a few sizes too large. His hair had oil on it and had been shaved almost down to the scalp. He was standing near the men’s smoke-room. Up above were the pipes of the cellar ceiling. Nearby was the door to the basement boys’ toilet. Out of that doorway urine stank. He looked at the floor. He wouldn’t look up. He wouldn’t let his eyes depart from one chosen spot. His elbows froze at his sides. The teacher who administered the whipping gave the order to hold out his hands. He wouldn’t answer. He was the image of someone in torture. Again the teacher, standing above him, passed down the order. He wouldn’t do it. The teacher, now losing his patience, ordered it a third time. And still he wouldn’t answer or comply. A fourth time. Yet still this frozen terror. So the decision is made: He will get it twice as many times. The stink still from the toilet. Comment from a passing teacher: “the little bastards don’t mind acting up but when it’s time for them to take their punishment they suddenly lose all their nerve.” He can’t hold out forever. And finally he gives in. He breaks down and stops resisting. Hands out. He gets the beating.
The teacher who gives the beating may, in all other instances, seem a decent man. Moreover, even in giving this beating, he may do it absolutely as he is supposed to and in every little detail by the rules. Yet – well done or not, and what ever the man’s intent – the tears still come and the welts still are formed upon the light brown hand. The stick is flexible, light and quick and it must hurt badly or else those winces of screwed-up agony and those tears are an incredibly good act. As for the teacher, in most cases, he behaves with a sense of sobriety. Most teachers do not treat the matter lightly. On the other hand, there are always a couple of teachers (there were some in my school and there are many elsewhere) who will speak about the rattaning in a manner of cynicism and humor and open cruelty and who will not hesitate to intersperse their talk with some pretty straightforward remarks. There are also male teachers who, in the very act of giving a whipping, cannot prevent themselves from manifesting a really unmistakable kind of satisfaction. In my own school and elsewhere I have heard any number of proud and boastful statements about the kind of pain you can get across.
“When you do it, you want to snap it abruptly or else you are not going to get the kind of effect you want.”
“Leave it overnight in vinegar or water if you want it to really sting the hands.”
I asked, soon after I had started teaching and observing the acts of other teachers, whether it was within the rules to strike a child or whether it was against the law.
“Don’t worry about the law. You just make damn sure that no one’s watching.”
Other council: “Don’t let them get to close to you. No matter how you feel. The ones you help the most are the first ones who will axe you in the back.”
From a teacher at my school: “The ones I can’t stand are the goddamn little buggers. The First Graders. And the Second Graders. There’s nothing you can do to them – you can’t even lift up your goddamn hand.”
In a special regard to a child like Stephen, one question remains and still poses itself repeatedly: Why would any teacher, whatever his bent or inclination, just go ahead and whip a boy whom he knows it will not in any way help or correct for something which the teacher has already acknowledged, both to himself and to others, to be beyond the child’s ability to prevent? The beginning of one answer may be found in the fact that segregated schools seem often to require this kind of brutal discipline because of the uneasy feelings which are so often present. The children, enough of them anyway, are quietly smoldering with a generally unimagined awareness of their own degradation. The atmosphere that grows out of this may be one of real danger to the equanimity of a teacher or administrator. I am sure this is one reason at least why discipline comes so fast and so strong and, at times, so unjustly. Possibly, in the case of some of the best teachers, this was the entire story. Thinking of some of the other teachers, however, I am convinced that there was also at times something else happening and once you had seen it in action, and watched it, you would know exactly what it was and would never deny that it was there. You would have to have watched certain people doing it, and to have seen their eyes, to have seen any idea of what was going on.
“This hurts me,” says the old expression, “more than it hurts you.” Yet this is said easily and it is just not always so. Sadism has its signs and they are unmistakable. There are moments when the visible gratification becomes undeniable in the white teacher’s eyes. Would any teacher be able to say with absolute certainty that he has not sometimes taken pleasure in that slash of rattan and that he has not felt at times an almost masculine fortification out of the solemnity and quietude and even authoritative control and “decency” with which he struck the child? I have watched a teacher giving the ratten with a look on his face which was certainly the very opposite of abhorrence, and I have heard a teacher speak of it as if it were somehow a physical accomplishment or even some kind of military feat. I am sure that teachers as a class are no more sadistic than any other people, and possibly in this the teachers in Boston are no worse than the teachers anywhere else. But many human beings do take pleasure in inflicting pain on others, and those who have the least to be proud of or to be happy about are often the ones who take that pleasure the most.
Sometimes the argument is put forward by white Bostonians that corporal punishment did not begin with Negro children and that it is, in fact, a very old tradition within our public schools. I have never found this a convincing argument. The fact that a crime might have been committed with impunity in the past may make it seem more familiar and less gruesome to certain people but surely it does not give it any greater legality. And the fact that some boys may have been whipped unjustly fifty years ago does not make that injustice more palatable today. Whatever it was once, it just seems wrong in its present context. It does not matter whether it was done once by Yankees to Irish children. And it does not matter, either, if it was done once by Irish to Jews. What does matter is that corporal punishment today is being used by whites on Negroes, and being used in too many cases to act out, on a number of persuasive pretexts, a deeply seated racial hate. If you hear of just any tough teen-ager being beaten on the fingers by his teacher, one can assume that a school official someplace will be able to pass it off as discipline. But when you hear of a sixty-pound mentally ill fourth-grader being guarded by two men and whipped by a third for acts that are manifestly crazy, and when the teacher who prepares the punishment is not only gleaming with excitement but has, not ten days before, been speaking calmly of the niggers down South, or the little bastards causing trouble up there in Room Four, then it seems to me that anyone, including the administrator of such a system, is going to have to admit that something has gone wrong. A School Committee member, as I have shown, has put in the public record that he has never yet heard of a case of the abuse of corporal punishment in the Boston Public Schools. I think that he and all the others who share responsibility for these matters ought to recognize quite clearly that they are hearing of one now. (Jonathan Kozol “Death At An Early Age” 1967 p.9-18) portions cited at the Atlantic.
(Jonathan Kozol “Death At An Early Age” 1967 variations of excerpts written at the Atlantic
(Jonathan Kozol “Death At An Early Age” limited quotes mixed in with discussion at THE UNDERACHIEVING SCHOOL
(Jonathan Kozol “Death At An Early Age” arbitrary quotes at Daily Howler
(Jonathan Kozol “Death At An Early Age” Frozen In Time, Remembering The Students Who Changed A Teacher's Life
“I wouldn’t do anything for Angelina because I just don’t like her. But if you’re going to do anything, the Museum School’s plenty good enough for a child like her.”
… With Stephen, for example, there were only rare moments when she came face to face with his desperate position. Characteristic of her response to him was the attitude expressed that time when she pointed to the white boy in the seat in back of him and called him the most unhappy child in the class. I remember when I asked her, “What about Stephen? He doesn’t even have parents,” the Reading Teacher became instantly defensive and irritated with me and replied: “He has a mother. What are you talking about? He has a foster mother and she is paid by the State to look after his care.” But I said maybe it wasn’t like having a real mother. And also, I said the State didn’t seem to have time to notice that he was beaten up by his foster mother while being thoroughly pulverized and obliterated in one way or another almost every day at school. “He has plenty,” was her answer. “There are many children who are a great deal worse off. Plenty of white people have had a much harder time than that.” Harder than he had? How many? I didn’t believe it. … But the Reading Teacher became impatient …. “He’s getting a whole lot more than he deserves.” (Jonathan Kozol “Death At An Early Age” 1967 p.26-7)
After the window blew in on us, the janitor finally came up and hammered it shut with nail, so that it would not fall in again, but also so that it could not be opened. A month passed before anything was done about the missing glass. Children shivered a few feet away from it. The principal walked by frequently and saw us. So did various lady experts who traveled all week from room to room within our school. At last one day the janitor came up with a piece of cardboard and covered over about one quarter of that lower window so that no more wind could come in, but just that much less sunshine too. I remember wondering what a piece of glass cost in Boston, and thought of going out and buying some and trying to put it in myself. That rectangle of cardboard covered our nailed-shut window for half of the term, and it was finally removed only because a television station was going to visit in the building and the school department wanted to make the room look more attractive. But it was winter when the window broke, and the repairs did not take place until the middle of the spring.
In case a reader imagines that my school may have been unusual and that some of the schools in Roxbury must have been in better shape, I think it’s worthwhile to point out that the exact opposite seems to have been the case. The conditions in my school were said by many people to be considerably better than those in several of the other ghetto schools. One of the worst, according to those who made comparisons, was the Endicott, also situated in the Negro neighborhood and, like my own school, heavily imbalanced. At Endicott, I learned, it had become so overcrowded that in some classes the number of pupils exceeded the number of desks and the extra pupils had to sit in chairs behind the teacher. A child absent one day commonly came back the next and found someone else sitting his desk. These facts had been brought out in the newspaper, but nothing had been done. When the parents of the Endicott children pressed the school department to take action, a series of events transpired which told a large part of the story of segregation in a very few words.
The school department offered, in order to resolve the problem, to buy a deserted forty-year-old Hebrew school and allot about $7000 to furnish it with desks and chairs. Aside from the indignity of getting everybody else's castoffs (the Negroes already lived in former Jewish tenements and bought in formerly Jewish stores), to buy and staff this old Hebrew school with about a dozen teachers would cost quite a lot more than to send the children down the street a couple of miles to a white school which had space. The Hebrew school was going to cost over $180,000. To staff it and supply it with books and equipment would cost $100,000 more a year. To send the children into available seats in nearby white classrooms (no new teachers needed) would have cost $40,000 to $60,000 for the year. The school department was willing to spend as much as an extra $240,000 in order to put the Negro children into another segregated school. It was hard for me to believe, even after all I had seen and heard, that it could really be worth a quarter of a million dollars to anyone to keep the Negro children separate. As it happened, the school committee dragged its heels so long and debated the issue in so many directions that most of the school year passed before anything of a final nature was decided. Meanwhile, the children in the Endicott classrooms had lost another year from their lives. (Jonathan Kozol “Death At An Early Age” 1967 p.34-5) a variation cited in
(Jonathan Kozol “Death At An Early Age” a variation cited in Atlantic Ideas
The worst school of all schools in which I ever taught as a substitute teacher was not an ordinary school at all but a “discipline school.” I think this was the most depressing place for learning that I have seen anywhere. It was a place for difficult children, for kids who had been in trouble, for those who had fallen behind, kids who have been arrested, who were truant, who had bad problems, who were disturbed or despairing or unwell. To this school I was sent as a new substitute teacher not only absolutely unprepared but also wholly untrained and unwarned. The most curious thing about it is that the School Department, in asking me to go there, did not even tell me that it was a discipline school but specifically misinformed me when I asked and told me that it was a regular junior high. It was not until I got there that I found out what it was. What it was, was not a school but a dumping ground. It was a dumping ground, I felt, both for undistinguished teachers and for students who had not been manageable or who had not been considered salvageable at more ordinary schools. At this place education seemed to me to have been forgotten, and the Twentieth Century itself seems to have been forgotten or never seriously encountered. I met a number of the teachers during the time I was working there, and I remember at least a couple of them clearly.
One was a good natured and affable person with nothing in particular right or wrong about him except that he seemed to dislike education and had no interest that I could see in kids. He assured me on one of my first days that all revolutions have been begun by intellectuals. …
… He told me that if I was interested in teaching, then I had better get out. “This place isn’t a school. It’s a zoo. And those are the animals.”
When he said it was a zoo, he gestured out to the children in the schoolyard, and the sweep of his hand was terrifying because it seemed to shut out forever all chance of amelioration or education or treatment or any kind of hope. Yet he did not hesitate to talk to me in this way and he seemed assured, for a reason that I did not give to him, that his expressions of contempt for the children would somehow find a willing listener. The same thing has happened in a more dramatic and more damaging way with one of the other teachers at that place.
This man, unlike the first one, was not easygoing and affable at all, although he shared with the first an apparent distaste both for the children and, I This man, unlike the first one, was not easygoing and affable at all, although he shared with the first an apparent distaste both for the children and, I thought, for the school. The man was a professional “tough guy” and he had been a marine sergeant before taking the courses and getting the credits to become a teacher. He styled himself very much as a tough guy and seemed to like this designation and the boys accepted it. He told me several tales of his toughness and showed off that toughness out in the schoolyard by throwing a bullet football pass. (I remember he took a certain amount of relish by trying to “nail” me with a hard one and that I earned the only grains of respect from him I ever had by catching it.) Again he confused me by seeming to like me for a while and he made me feel tied down by his tendency to report to me things that I did not want to hear but which he seemed to feel sure I would enjoy of profit from. It was he, for example, who ahd given me the advice, that I referred to earlier, of being careful I wasn’t observed if I should want to strike a child. He illustrated this warning be relating to me the story of a good friend of his, a teacher in another school, who had struck a boy so hard that the welt marks remained on the child’s face for a week and the parents threatened to take the teacher into court. The teacher got out of it, he told me, by using some kind of political connection or some sort affiliation with the judge. He also managed to get the parents off his abck by threatening them with some kind of sordid revelation about the son which he said would have gotten the pupil sent away. So the parents dropped the charge. The point of the lesson, however, was that a teacher could not be too careful. Whack a kid, if you had to, when nobody was looking, but make sure you didn’t leave any bruise marks on him. And then just deny it coldly if it ever came to court. When I thought of it later, I was surprised that he had told it to me – because it seemed so damning both to his friends and, in a sense, to him by seeming to sanction it. Yet it also was a narration which, in a small way, indicated that he knew some people who knew other people who had some connections in the world so it was a story of which, even in a small way, he could feel proud.
My first two or three days in the discipline school were anything but disciplined or orderly. Few students heard or obeyed me. They wandered in and out of the class rooms pretty much at will. (For a time, I did not know how many were my students.) Some of the boys were hostile when I arrived there, and hostile when I left, and never softened or melted for one minute in between. Nonetheless, I did get to be close to several of the boys, and like many of them, and one day I found myself driving a group home. I did not know at the time but that would be against the rules of the school. One boy, I remember asked me to leave him at the end of his street. His friend said: “That’s because he’s embarrassed. He doesn’t want you to see what an awful place he lives.” Things in the classroom calmed down somewhat after a few days, but the set-up of the place remained miserable for teaching. Two or three of the boys were virtually adult. Others seemed much younger and were reading at the level of the First or Second Grade. I could find no easy books or basic primers in the room. If there were any, no one bothered to tell me where they were or which ones I should be using. Math, I was told, hadn’t been taught for a long while and I could believe that when I tried some easy subtraction and division. Few could do either. Some of these boys were of Ninth or Tenth Grade age. With hardly an exception, they seemed disturbed. A large number were Negro. I couldn’t single out one who would not, if he weren’t poor or weren’t colored, have been given some kind of intensive psychiatric aid. As it was, so far as I could find out, they got nothing.
Sometimes a child in a situation like this will recognize, even if it is only distantly, the grotesque nature of the trap that is around him and he will even come out and ask you, pretty straightforwardly, if you would help him find a way to escape it. I remember a boy like this at that school who asked me privately, and with much embarrassment, if I would get him a First Grade book at a library or bookstore since he couldn’t find such a book at school and was embarrassed at his age to walk into a public place and ask for one. He wanted desperately to read. (Jonathan Kozol “Death At An Early Age” 1967 p.42-5)
The Reading Teacher had gotten wind that the book was in the building and she came into my room and put her foot down. Her excuse, I remember, was, first, that it would be an excellent book for enrichment for “the very brightest children” – a very few – but that it was infinitely too difficult, too advanced and too sophisticated for use as a regular book. Now it happened to be a fact that one of the slowest readers in the class not only asked me to sell her one of my copies but then took it home and read it every night in bed before going to sleep for an entire week until she was finished. She said, when I asked her, that it was the first book she had ever owned in her life. (Jonathan Kozol “Death At An Early Age” 1967 p.82-3)
Other changes came into our school during that period some of them due to the arrival of a new Negro teacher. There already were a small number of Negro teachers in the school, but in this case there was a great difference because the new teacher was from a different background and had a different kind of education than any of the others. ….
The man to whom he was assigned was not well qualified. He was, I thought, one of the least competent teachers in the school. His attitude toward the children varied between dislike and apathy with apathy, of a sleepy, sluggish, heavy-footed nature, being the overriding feeling. ....
I went to his house one Saturday and met his wife and daughter and talked with him about what was happening in the school and the neighborhood and we developed the idea of joining a meeting with local parents and offering them some information about what was going on. Although I felt a knot of instantaneous fear in my stomach at the thought of what I was doing, I knew I couldn’t back out and I knew while we were talking that I was going to be obliged to do it. The other teacher, whom, I will call Carl, contacted some of the parents and the result of his telephoning, which followed a few days later, was perhaps one of the first real parents’ and teachers’ meetings ever held in a Negro neighborhood of Boston because it was not under the supervision of the school administration and it was therefore honest and untrammeled by any false supplications to the power of the school. The meeting was held at a church near the school building. It was not large but it brought about half a dozen teachers from various Boston schools and about fifteen or twenty parents from our school. The new teacher spoke first and then I did and we answered questions and we told the parents, in answer to their inquiries, about the classes in the cellar, those in the auditorium, and the outdated curriculum, the dilapidated materials and outdated textbooks and overall worthlessness of the compensatory program as a viable means of making up for the deficiencies of a segregated school. A mother of Fifth Grade children was surprised to be told of a practice by which an entire class would be rattanned for the misbehavior of one pupil. A Fourth Grade mother was embittered to learn for the first time that one of the Fourth Grades had been stuck all year with a teacher who could not control children and who had already had similar difficulties within another school. Other parents had not been advised by the Principal that reading levels were far behind the national average at our school and that reading levels seemed to be growing worse with every year the children spent in school.
The outcome of this meeting was a decision on the part of the parents to make a complaint to the school in the form of stated demands and also to join a picket at School Committee Headquarters which had been begun by a Boston minister and then had been joined and supported by various parent organizations. As soon as possible after that meeting, both Carl and I went and told the Principal about it. We did not want to leave the chance that she might view it as something secret or something of which we were ashamed. It is true that, when I went in to talk to her, my hands were shaking and my voice was trembling badly. At a distance now from the school I had joined in protests without reluctance but here it seemed different and it created a great deal of anxiety in me when the confrontation of opposites came so close. I did not tell her about our meeting truculently, but quietly. I said it was something I believed in and that nothing said at the meeting would have been news to her, but I added that I knew very well it was still the kind of meeting of which she would have to strongly disapprove.
And that was so. She said it had been a mistake. She told me also that she did not know if a person accepting the pay of the Boston School Committee had the right to join in a picket against his own employer, adding that she felt it was an improper way to do things and that in time many problems with which she and I were both concerned would undoubtedly begin to be corrected, although not due to pressure from people who were misinformed. I just said quietly that I felt she was wrong, that I was not misinformed, nor were the parents any longer. So I went out of her office feeling more free and more at peace with myself than I had felt the whole year long, and thought, I imagine, more effectively for it too, although the Reading Teacher told me later that, since I had gone to talk to her, the Principal had been in a very unpleasant state of mind.
Carl, as it happened, left our school almost as suddenly as he had come. …. (Jonathan Kozol “Death At An Early Age” 1967 p.127-31)
About a month later, Gilbert Caldwell, a minister and one of the most respected leaders of the 65,000 Negro people of Boston, went out to the neighborhood of Hyde Park to attend a meeting on fair housing. At the time he was there he got up bravely and spoke out after several individuals who were members of the audience began asking questions and making statements that ahd an apparent anti-Negro edge. The Boston Globe of April 19 reported this: “Mr. Caldwell commented that he detected the same hatred in the speakers which would get him clubbed down in Selma … After his statement one of these racists rose and shouted that he would never club down a Negro in Boston – he would spit on him.”
It was during the same period of racial unrest and surfacing bigotry that we had a memorable teachers’ meeting at my school. At the meeting the Principal recounted to us the statistical facts about unplaced special students in our classes. She said that she was afraid that she was going to be able to find space in special class for, at best, only eight out of forty-two during the academic year ahead. For the rest she ahd to admit that she could promise nothing. ….
... What uses the School Committee did have for that money became clarified in a series of items that appeared in the press at around the same time.
As I read it in the Globe, the School Committee voted, first, to add a total of six new high-paying positions to the top of an already top-heavy school system administration in the form of six new “district superintendents” at salaries of $17,000 per year. In a year and a season in which desks could not be found for students to work at in view of their teachers and in which money could not be found to paint walls, put lights in basements, or replace cardboard windows with glass panes, it seemed the height of political effrontery to create six new posts costing $102,000 a year for people who would not even be in the school but who would be sitting in office chairs up some place at the top. What about twelve new genuinely qualified teachers to begin to educate Edward and the hundreds of other unplaced special students in the city? What about one hundred thousand dollars’ worth of integrated readers, of modern histories and geography texts, of tape recorders, record players, poetry recordings, movies, slides and prints? Why six new officials with six new fat and heavy salaries? Were they needed? Or was the need a dire one? Would lives have been lost without them? What about hiring ten good teachers, a qualified counselor and a full time psychiatrist for the discipline school at which I had worked? What about the boys there? What about the children with twenty-five substitute teachers at the William Lloyd Garrison? What about some school libraries? What about some bright cans of pink, green, blue, and light yellow paint to cheer up our gloomy walls?
If this one act was not enough, the School Committee also voted at this time to give a salary increment to some of the old administrators who were already at the top. These latter boosts included a jump of Mr. Ohrenberger’s salary from an already high $26,000 to $30,000, a jump of Miss Sullivan’s salary from $19,000 to $23,000, and similar jumps in pay for several other people. Reaction to this pay-boost was considerable and even the Mayor of Boston had something angry to say. The Globe reported his comments in a story that appeared on its front page:
Mayor Collins today angrily accused the Boston School Committee of being “extraordinarily open-handed with tax-payers’ money.” Commenting on $4,000 pay hikes granted last week to top echelon school administrators, Collins fumed: “I am appalled by what I see here. It is difficult to see how any member of the School Committee can be so lavish with public funds. I always thought,” continued the mayor, “that elected representatives were responsible to all citizens of Boston, all taxpayers and also to those with children who go to our schools.” These salary increases for the top executives came as a surprise to city officials because salaries of the top school officials had been raised $1,000 less than two years ago.
A few days later, the Globe also reported this:
The $4,000 hike was the straw that broke the camel’s back as far as the mayor was concerned. It would mean that … Ohrenberger would go … to $30,000; business manager Leo J. Burke and the six assistant superintendents who recommended the raises … to $21,000. All would earn more than the mayor under these schedules. Mrs. Louise Day Hicks, School Committee chairman … said she thought the school budget had been properly balanced before being sent back to the mayor. Asked what she meant by “balanced,” Mrs. Hick said that the money was taken out of other accounts to take care of the raises. She pointed out that $1 million was taken from the alterations and repairs account. She said further that the committee deducted from “our budget certain items for educational expansion programs in order to give the raises.”
The connection could not have been made more clear: four thousand more for Mr. Ohrenberger. Four thousand more for Miss Sullivan. Thirty thousand more in all for these already well-paid administrators, and just that much less for alterations and repair and educational improvement. I thought that this was a remarkable self-indictment on the part of those who ran the schools. The result of all this in practical terms, as it filtered down through talk and gossip within the school itself, was that most expansion projects which had been planned for the compensatory program would now have to be curtailed, that repairs to buildings would stay at a minimum, and that very little would be done during the immediate year to improve the quality of the textbooks in our school. All of this was directly connected to the fact that Superintendent Ohrenberger, along with the rest of his top staff, had agreed to be rewarded with a substantial and unneeded boost in pay from a salary which was already a great deal higher that he could have earned in almost any other sort of educational employment with the kind of qualifications that he had.
The animosity in the Negro community against the School Committee chairman, as a consequence of this action and others, became very great. It did not surprise me to find the following item on the front page of the Globe about eight weeks later:
Mrs. Hicks gets Gun Permit For Protection
Boston School Committee Chairman Mrs. Louise Day Hicks has obtained a permit to carry a gun to protect “her life and property.” The authorization was granted to Mrs. Hicks May 20 at Boston Police Headquarters … According to police records, the School Committee chairman gave no instances why she felt compelled to take out the permit other than the “protection of life and property.” With this permit, Mrs. Hicks can purchase a weapon and carry it anywhere inside the Bay State. As a result of her stand on the question of alleged de facto segregation in Boston, Mrs. Hicks has been constantly harassed by telephone calls and visits to her home … More recently Boston police have been forced to clear a path through Civil Rights pickets for Mrs. Hicks following meetings at the Boston School Committee … Mrs. Hicks has praised the police for their efforts on her behalf.
Boston School Committee Chairman Mrs. Louise Day Hicks has obtained a permit to carry a gun to protect “her life and property.” The authorization was granted to Mrs. Hicks May 20 at Boston Police Headquarters … According to police records, the School Committee chairman gave no instances why she felt compelled to take out the permit other than the “protection of life and property.” With this permit, Mrs. Hicks can purchase a weapon and carry it anywhere inside the Bay State. As a result of her stand on the question of alleged de facto segregation in Boston, Mrs. Hicks has been constantly harassed by telephone calls and visits to her home … More recently Boston police have been forced to clear a path through Civil Rights pickets for Mrs. Hicks following meetings at the Boston School Committee … Mrs. Hicks has praised the police for their efforts on her behalf.
I thought it was unfortunate if people had threatened Mrs. Hicks, but it could not be news to anyone that she had made herself the object of a great deal of hate. The sense of outrage felt about the salary hikes, about her stand on segregation, about her unwillingness even to talk seriously about the State Board’s scrupulous report, created a groundswell of seething discontent that could be felt in every Negro neighborhood of town. …. (Jonathan Kozol “Death At An Early Age” 1967 p.140-4)
The section on obedience characteristics begins with the following verse: “We must do the thing we must Before the thing we may; We are unfit for any trust Till we can and do obey.” It goes on to list the forms that obedience can take and it recommends a list of “selected memory gems” having to do with compliance to authority. Some of them are good and some are by famous people, but all of them, coming at you this way, out of context, have a killing, dull effect. They come one after another, some good, some dumb, and leave you feeling very obedient:
Honor they father and thy mother [is the first one]. He who knows how to obey will know how to command … obedience to God is the best evidence of sincere love for Him … True obedience is true liberty … The good American obeys the laws … Help me to be faithful to my country, careful for its good, valiant for its defense, and obedient to its laws … He who would command others must first learn to obey … the first law that ever God gave to man was a law of obedience … My son Hannibal will be a great general, because of all my soldiershe best knows how to obey … Obedience sums our entire duty … the first great law is to obey … Children, obey your parents in all things; for this is well pleasing to the Lord … Wicked men obey from fear; good men from love … We are born subjects and to obey God is perfect liberty. He that does this shall be free, safe, and happy … Obedience is not truly performed by the body if the heart is dissatisfied … Every day, in every way it is our duty to obey. “Every way” means prompt and willing, Cheerfully, each task fulfilling. It means, too, best work achieving Habits of obedience, weaving. To form a cable firm and strong With links unbreakable and long: To do a thing, at once, when told A blessing, doth the act enfold. Obedience, first to God, we owe; It should in all our actions show … If your told to do a thing, And mean to do it really, Never let it be halves, do it fully, freely! Do not make a poor excuse Waiting, weak, unsteady; All obedience worth the name must be prompt and ready.
Of all the quotations included in the list, I think there are only two which are deeply relevant to the case at hand: “Wicked men obey from fear; good men from love” – this comes from Aristotle. And: “Obedience is not truly perfumed by the body if the heart is dissatisfied,” which comes from the Talmudic scholar Saadia. Both of these quotation are directly applicable to the exact problem exemplified by the kind of school system in which such a list could be seriously employed. If it is true as Aristotle wrote, that wicked men obey from fear and good men from love, then where else is this more likely to become manifest than within these kinds of penitential schools? One thinks of the pathos of anxiety with which teachers and principals go about their duties, seldom out of respect for their superiors, which in so many cases is impossible, but out of an abject fear of being condemned or being kicked out. I think of the Art Teacher confiding to me in an excited whisper: “Can you imagine that this principal honestly and truly can stand there and call herself an educator? It’s the biggest laugh of the school year.” The Reading Teacher, with equal vehemence. Talking about my supervisor: “That man doesn’t know as much about elementary education as the first-year substitutes do. You’ll have to agree to whatever he says and then ignore it when he’s gone.” To these people, whom they held in deeply justified contempt, both women paid ample lip-service. …
…. Only the authority of visible character demands respect. No other kind deserves it. No child in his heart, unless drugged by passivity, will pay obeisance to authority unless authority has earned it, and authority based on political maneuvering and upon the ingestion and assimilation of platitudes is an authority which no person, white or Negro, adult or child, should respect. There is too much respect for authority in the Boston schools, and too little respect for the truth. …. (Jonathan Kozol “Death At An Early Age” 1967 p.176-7)
One man at my school, the redneck teacher I have quoted often, once said to me in his usual frankness that he had been beaten all around and treated rough and whipped and so on by his parents or teachers or both when he had been a child. To him, this seemed to clear the field for beating others around today. The attitude of many older people in our school system has been consistent with this view: “We had a hard time of it, so why shouldn’t they?” This less than gentle attitude seems characteristic of a less than gentle society, in which the prevailing viewpoint of those who are moderately successful is too likely to be that they have got theirs, and the others can damn well wait a while before they get the same.
.... That same blunt redneck teacher at my school who spoke with so much honesty on most topics once made this remark to me while we were chatting:
"They talk about the Negroes being culturally deprived I'm the one who's been goddamn culturally deprived, and I don't need anyone to tell me. I haven't learned a thing, read a thing that I wished I'd read or learned since the day I entered high school, and I've known it for years, and I tried to hide it from myself, and now I wish I could do something about it, but I'm afraid it's just too late."
Few people in Boston have the openness to talk that way. ....
One day, during the first weeks of May of 1965, I received at last a visit in my classroom from the lady who has had so large a role in defining the applications and limitations of the word “culture” within the Boston schools. It was about a week after I had started work with my new students. I looked up from my desk, or whatever I had been doing, and I realized that the personage known as Marguerite Sullivan was standing at the door. The children stared at her, as I did also – a bit awed by her appearance.
The lady we saw before us was an unusually tall woman with an authoritative and rather pleasant face. She came into the classroom, smiled very broadly at the children and waited for them to scramble out of their seats and say “Good morning” to her. She told them that she did not think they said it with very much energy and so she asked them to say it once more. That time, she beamed at them very warmly and said in a hopeful and cheery old-fashioned voice: “Oh! What cultured children!” after which the children could sit down. Miss Sullivan’s next act was to turn to me and praise me flamboyantly, for what I did not know since she had not seen me for thirty seconds, and the principal next spoke to Miss Sullivan, in my hearing, as to the possibility of my being in the school again the following year despite my lack of educational courses. Miss Sullivan said surely there must be some way to use me, and by all of this I was more than a bit perplexed because, as I have said, I had scarcely been observed by the Deputy Superintendent but already I was being treated in a very flattering warm style. When a compliment like that is based on a total lack of information it seems like kind of a mockery. We all know, children too, when we are being complimented falsely, as by a mechanism of bureaucratic ingratiation. In such a case honest insult, based upon fact, would make us feel more comfortable.
A few minutes later, in a classroom across the hall from mine, a teacher whose class was a little unruly was addressed by Miss Sullivan in a very different style: “Not very good discipline, girlie!” Miss Sullivan said it to her right in front of the whole class. (Jonathan Kozol “Death At An Early Age” 1967 p.182-3) cited in the Atlantic
One day a week later, shortly before lunchtime, I was standing in front of my class playing a record of French children's songs I had brought in. A message-signal on the wall began to buzz. .... I left the room and hurried to the principal's office. A white man whom I had never seen before was sitting at the Principal’s desk. This man, bristling and clearly hostile to me, as was the Principal, instantly attacked me for having read to my class and distributed at their wish the poem I have talked about that was entitled “Ballad of the Landlord.” It turned out that he was the father of one of the few white boys in the class. He was also a police officer. The mimeograph of the poem, in my handwriting, was waved before my eyes. The principal demanded to know what right I had to allow such a poem--not in the official course of study--to be read and memorized by children. I said I had not asked anyone to memorize it, but that I would defend the poem and its use on the basis that it was a good poem. The principal became incensed with my answer and blurted out that she did not consider it a work of art. I remember that I knew right away that I was not going to give in to her. I replied, in my own anger, that I had spent a good many years studying poetry and that I was not going to accept her judgement about a poem that meant that much to me and to my pupils. Although I did not say it in these words, it was really a way of telling her that I thought myself a better judge of poetry than she. I hope that I am.
The parent attacked me, as well, for having forced his son to read a book about the United Nations. I had brought a book to class, one of sixty or more volumes, that told about the UN and its Human Rights Commission. The man, I believe, had mistaken "human rights" for "civil rights" and was consequently in a patriotic rage. The principal, in fairness, made the point that she did not think there was anything wrong with the United Nations, although in the report later filed on the matter, she denied this for some reason and said, instead, "I then spoke and said that I felt there was no need for this material in the classroom." The principal's report went on to say that she assured the parent, after I had left the room, that "there was not another teacher in the district who would have used this poem or any material like it. I assured him that his children would be very safe from such incidents."
As the Principal had instructed, I returned to my class, where the children had remained quit and not even opened up their lunch because I had not told them to and they were patient, waiting for me to come back. We had out lunch ……. and a little before two o'clock the principal called me back again. She told me I was fired. This was about eight days before the end of school. I asked whether this was due to the talk we had earlier but she said it was not. I asked her if it was due to an evaluation, a written report, which I had sent in on the compensatory program about a week before. This was a report I had written, and all teachers had, in answer to a request from the School Department and which I had said that the program seemed to be very poor. I was told, at the time that I passed it in, that the Principal had been quite angry. But again she said it was not that. I asked her finally if my dismissal was at her request and she said, No, it came from higher up and she didn’t know anything about it except that I should close up my records, leave the school, and not come back. She said that I should not say good-bye to the children in my class. I asked her if she really meant this and she repeated it as an order.
I returned to my class, taught for ten more minutes, then gave assignments for the following morning as if I would be there and saw the children file off. After all but one was gone, that one, a little girl, helped me to pile up the books and posters and pictures … to my car …. Outside my car, on the sidewalk, I said good-bye to this one child and told her that I would not be back again. I told her I had a disagreement with the Principal and I asked her to say good-bye to the other children. I regretted very much now that I had not disobeyed the Principal’s last order and I wished that I could have had one final chance to speak with all my pupils. The little girl, in any case, took what I said with great solemnity and promised that she would relay my message to the other children. Then I left the school.
The next morning, an official who had charge of my case at the School Department contradicted the Principal by telling me that I was being fired at her wish. The woman to whom I spoke said the reason was the use of the poem by Langston Hughes, which was punishable because it wass not in the Course of Study. She also said something to me at that time that had never been said to me before, and something that represented a much harder line on curriculum innovation than I had ever seen in print. No literature, she said, which is not in the course of study could ever be read by a Boston teacher without permission of someone higher up. When I asked her about this in more detail, she said further that no poem by any Negro author could be considered permissible if it involved suffering. I thought this a very strong statement and I asked her several times again if that was really what she meant. She insisted it was.
I asked her whether there would be many good poems left to read by such a standard. Wouldn't it rule out almost all great Negro literature? Her answer evaded the issue. No poetry that described suffering was felt to be suitable. The only Negro poetry that could be read in the Boston schools, she indicated, must fit a certain kind of standard or canon. The kind of poem she meant, she said by way of example might be a poem that accentuates the positive or "describes nature" or "tells of something hopeful." Nothing was wanted of suffering, nothing that could be painful, nothing that might involve its reader in a moment of self-questioning or worry. If this is an extremely conservative or eccentric viewpoint, I think it is nonetheless something which has to be taken seriously. For an opinion put forward in the privacy of her office by a School Department official who has the kind of authority that this woman had must be taken to represent a certain segment of educational opinion within the Boston school system and in some ways it seems more representative even that the carefully written and carefully prepared essays of such a lady as the Deputy Superintendent. For in those various writings Miss Sullivan unquestionably has had one ear tuned to the way they were going to come across in print and sound in public whereas, in the office of a central bureaucratic person such as the lady with whom I no was talking, you receive an absolutely innocent and unedited experience in what a school system really feels and believes.
The same official went on a few minutes later to tell me that, in addition to having made the mistake of reading the wrong poem, I had also made an error by bringing in books to school from the Cambridge Public Library. When I told her that there were no books for reading in our classroom, except for the sets of antiquated readers, and the need of the children was for individual reading which they would be able to begin without delay, she told me that this was all very well but still this was the Boston school system and that meant that you must not use a book that the Cambridge Library supplied. She also advised me, in answer to my question, that any complaint from a parent meant automatic dismissal of a teacher anyway and that this, in itself, was therefore sufficient grounds for my release. When I repeated this later to some Negro parents they were embittered and startled. For they told me of many instances in which they had complained that a teacher whipped their child black and blue or called him a nigger openly and yet the teacher had not been released. It seemed obvious to them, as it seems obvious to me, and would to anyone, that a complaint from a white police officer carries more weight in the Boston school system than the complaint of the mother of a Negro child.
I asked this official finally whether I had been considered a good teacher and what rating I had been given. She answered that she was not allowed to tell me. An instant later, whimsically reversing herself, she opened her files and told me that my rating was good. The last thing she said was that deviation from a prescribed curriculum was a serious offense and that I would never be permitted to teach in Boston again. The words she used were these: "You're out. You cannot teach in the Boston schools again. If you want to teach, why don't you try a private school someday?" I left her office, but before I left the building, I stopped at a table and I took out a pad of paper and wrote down what she had said.
The firing of a “provisional teacher” from a large public school system is not generally much of an event. As Mr. Ohrenberger was to say later, it happened commonly. When the firing is attributed to something as socially relevant and dramatically specific as a single poem by a well known Negro pot, However, it is not apt to go unnoticed; and, in this case, I was not ready to let it go unnoticed. I telephoned one of the civil rights leaders of Roxbury and told him what had happened. He urged me to call Phyllis Ryan, press spokesman for the Boston chapter of CORE. Mrs. Ryan decided to set up a press conference for the same day. That afternoon, sitting at the side of the Negro minister who had begun and carried on a lonely vigil for so many days outside the Boston School Committee, I described what had just happened.
The reaction of the reporters seemed, for the most part, as astonished as my own, and the direct consequence of this was that Miss Sullivan and Mr. Ohrenberger were obliged in a hurry, and without checking carefully, to back up the assertions of their own subordinates. The consequence of this, in turn, was that both of them allowed themselves to repeat and to magnify misstatements. Mr. Ohrenberger came out with a statement that I had been “repeatedly warned” about deviation from the Course of Study. Miss Sullivan’s statement on my dismissal was much the same as Mr. Ohrenberger’s, adding, however, a general admonition about the dangers of reading to Negro children poems written in bad grammar. Although Langston Hughes "has written much beautiful poetry,” she said “we cannot give directives to the teacher to use literature written in native dialects." It was also at this time that she also made the statement to which I have alluded earlier: "We are trying to break the speech patterns of these children, trying to get them to speak properly. This poem does not present correct grammatical expression and would just entrench the speech patterns we want to break." I felt it was a grim statement.
The reactions of a large number of private individuals were recounted in the press during the following weeks, and some of them gave me a better feeling about the city in which I grew up than I had ever had before. One school employee who asked, for his safety to remain anonymous, gave a statement to the press in which he reported that the atmosphere at school on the civil rights subject was like the atmosphere of a Gestapo. I believe that the person in question was a teacher at my school, but the fact that he had felt it necessary to keep his name anonymous, and his position unspecified, made his statement even more revelatory than if his name and position had appeared.
Another thing that reassured me was the reaction of the parents of the children in my class and in the school. I did not have any means of contacting them directly, but dozens of CORE members went out into the neighborhood, knocked at doors, and told parents very simply that a teacher had been fired for reading their children a good poem written by a Negro. A meeting was called by the chairman of the parent group, a woman of great poise and courage, and the parents asked me if I would come to that meeting and describe for them what had gone on. I arrived at it late and I was reluctant to go inside but, when I did go in, I found one of the most impressive parent groups that I had ever seen gathered in one hall. Instead of ten, .. or even thirty, which was the number of parents that can usually be rallied for a meeting on any ordinary occasion during the year, there were in the church building close to two hundred people and I discovered that several of my students were in the audience as well as over half the parents of the children in my class. (Jonathan Kozol “Death At An Early Age” 1967 p.194-201)
(Jonathan Kozol “Death At An Early Age” 1967 variation published at Atlantic on line Where Ghetto Schools Fail
A careful investigation of the facts pertaining to the discharge of Mr. Jonathan Kozol reveal that the administration of the Boston Public Schools were fully justified in terminating his service.
…..
In conclusion I must add that Mr. Kozol did bring to his pupils an enthusiastic spirit, a high degree of initiative, and other fine qualities found in the best teachers. It is my hope that Mr. Kozol will develop his latent talents and concomitantly develop and understanding and respect for the value of working within the acceptable codes of behavior. (Jonathan Kozol “Death At An Early Age” 1967 p.225-6 cited in The Teacher in American Society: A Critical Anthology edited by Eugene F. Provenzo
To the Editor – For someone new to the Boston public school system, Jonathan Kozol showed remarkable brilliance and insight, for he quickly found the fourth grade course of study grossly inadequate. After all, it was only the product of the Boston teachers themselves. It likely didn't take too long to patch the thing together, although the dull, incompetent workers who labored on it had to pool centuries of collective teaching experience and innumerable hours of unpaid, unpublicized work to get the job finally done. (Jonathan Kozol “Death At An Early Age” 1967 p.228-30 [PDF]DOCUMENTS NOTES RACIAL RATIOS
The balkanization of consciousness described by C.P. Snow in The Two Cultures now takes on a new dimension which he could have not likely foreseen. Scientists and humanists, as he observed, can hardly speak to one another in a language that they both can understand. But the silent culture of a third of our society is divorced from the discussion altogether. They cannot read the blue-ribbon reports that document their plight. They cannot read the letters sent home with their children from the public schools to which they are entrusted – and which threaten to turn out another and much larger generation of illiterate adults within the decade now ahead. They cannot read instructions on a bottle of medication for their children. They cannot cast a vote based on informed and sensitive retrieval of the print-recorded past.
The dollar cost to our society is high. But there is another loss that is not reflected in the GNP. It is the insult to democracy, the compromise of all that is suggested by our shistful reference to a “Jefferson ideal” that rests upon the full participation of a people. Whether a nation, so divided, can persist for long in the betrayal of its democratic dreams becomes a question with disturbing implications. (Jonathan Kozol “Death At An Early Age” 1967 p.235-7)
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