Jonathan Kozol, a distinguished educator, scholar and activist, will speak at Hamilton College on Thursday, Sept. 16, at 7:30 p.m. in the college Chapel. Kozol will present a lecture titled "Savage Inequalities: Class, Race, and Social Justice in U.S. Public Schools." It is free and open to the public.
Jonathan Kozol's writings highlight the effects of inequality on the nation's poor youth and families. In the passions of the civil rights campaigns of 1964 and 1965, he moved from Harvard Square into a poor black neighborhood of Boston and became a fourth grade teacher in the Boston Public Schools. He has devoted the subsequent four decades to issues of education and social justice in America. His 1967 book, Death at an Early Age, describes that first year as a teacher. It received the 1968 National Book Award in Science, Philosophy, and Religion. Now regarded as a classic by educators, it has sold more than two million copies in the United States and Europe. Kozol is the author of nine more books, including Savage Inequalities: Children in America's Schools, Rachel and Her Children: Homeless Families in America, and Amazing Grace: Lives of Children and the Conscience of a Nation.
Kozol is still a fierce defender of public schools, an outspoken critic of the voucher movement, and a close friend and unswerving ally to schoolteachers. He continues to condemn the inequalities of education and speaks unrelentingly of the apparently perpetual apartheid of black and Hispanic children in the deeply segregated public schools of almost every major city of the nation.
Following the lecture, the Kirkland Project will host a reception and book signing with Kozol in the Bristol Campus Center Hub.
Kozol's visit is presented by The Kirkland Project for the Study of Gender, Society and Culture at Hamilton College, and co-sponsored by the VPAA/Dean of the Faculty and the Office of the President. For more information, please contact the Kirkland Project at 315-859-4288.
