I urge you to be teachers so that you can join with children as the co-collaborators in a plot to build a little place of ecstasy and poetry and gentle joy
The idea that private money can solve our problems is very dangerous. Ultimately that’s charity. Charity is a lovely thing. I’ll never turn it down. But charity is not a substitute for systematic justice and equality.
I feel, in the end, as if everything I’ve done has been a failure.
I beg people not to accept the seasonal ritual of well-timed charity on Christmas Eve. It’s blasphemy.
In schools with a history of chaos, the teacher who can keep the classroom calm becomes virtually indispensable.
‘Death at an Early Age’ was about racial segregation in Boston. ‘Illiterate America’ was about grownups who can’t read. ‘Rachel and Her Children’ was about people who were homeless in the middle of Manhattan.
So long as these kinds of inequalities persist, all of us who are given expensive educations have to live with the knowledge that our victories are contaminated because the game has been rigged to our advantage.
We know that segregation is evil. We know that the sickest children should not go to the worst hospitals. No, I refuse to pretend the problem is insufficient knowledge. We lack the theological will to do it.
Businessmen are not in business to lose customers, and schools do not exist to free their clients from the agencies of mass persuasion. School and media possess a productive monopoly upon the imagination of a child.
It’s sad that some people who have one exciting moment spend the rest of their lives rehashing it.
No matter what happens in a child’s home, no matter what other social and economic factors may impede a child, there’s no question in my mind that a first-rate school can transform almost everything.