Letters to a Young Teacher

“The best teachers are not merely the technicians of proficiency; they are also ministers of innocence, practitioners of tender expectations.”

For Kozol, teaching young children is multifaceted and difficult. Apart from the full-time work involved in lesson planning, leading a classroom, and dealing with parents and administrators, primary and middle school teachers have an obligation to nurture and protect the youthfulness of their students. Young people at these ages are still coming to learn about themselves and the world, and Kozol believes that teachers must carefully shepherd and in some ways parent young students through these exciting and emotionally delicate times.

“[M]ost of the children seemed to trust me, and one reason for this, I believe, is that they could see that I did not condemn them for the chaos and confusion they’d been through, because I told them flatly that they had been treated in a way that I thought unforgivable.”

Toward the end of his first teaching year in Boston Public Schools in Roxbury, Kozol made the decision to be honest with his class about the injustices they faced. After being subjected to a revolving door of stressed-out teachers in an underfunded public school, Kozol’s students were educationally stunted and impatient with the feckless adults in their lives. Kozol explained to them that it was not fair that they were being robbed of a proper education. This is an example of Kozol’s controversial opinion that teachers should be upfront and honest with students about sensitive subjects is part of a valid trust-building strategy.

“Establishing a chemistry of trust between the children and ourselves is a great deal more important than to charge into the next three chapters of the social studies text or packaged reading system we have been provided: the same one that was used without success by previous instructors and to which the children are anesthetized by now. Entrap them first in fascination. Entrap them in a sense of merriment and hopeful expectations.”

Here, Kozol offers practical advice to new teachers as well as a criticism of the education status quo. Teachers face the difficult but possibly thrilling and rewarding task of fascinating students with subject matter, before drilling them for tests on that same subject matter. Kozol’s view is that a child who becomes fascinated by something like Carl Sagan’s classic popular science television program Cosmos will be drawn to the study of science and be willing to do the difficult work of understanding the scientific method in a classroom. To present material dryly from an outdated textbook is a structural failing of schools unwilling to invest in better materials, and potentially a personal failing of a teacher who is unable or unwilling to charm students with the material before working within curricular course obligations.

“[I]f a teacher knows that he or she is likely to dissent from certain of the pedagogic practices established in a school, the best defense is to be very good at certain other practices that matter greatly to the school authorities. If a class that’s been unruly for a long, long time suddenly grows calm and well behaved and, superficially at least, obedient to rules that are important to the school, the teacher becomes valuable—and, after a run of teachers who have quit, almost indispensable —because the need to reestablish order in that classroom comes to be the highest possible priority.”

Teachers, in addition to keeping up with their regular work and finding ways to raise their students delicately, must also be mindful of the politics of their school. Kozol recommends finding out what the school administration is most fussy about (such as good behavior in the hallways) and making sure the class observes those rules to give teachers the freedom to get away with things like deviating from the standard curriculum. This sounds sneaky, but for Kozol it’s just a way for teachers to smartly maximize their potential and creativity in a constraining environment.

“Good principals are candid with the parents of their students; but there are others who put up a wall of distance and denial that creates an atmosphere of cynicism and distrust among the people in the neighborhood. So even while administrators may deplore that parents of the kids in greatest trouble never show up for school meetings, many of them manage to make sure that those who do show up learn virtually nothing that can help them to defend their children’s interests.”

Kozol often harshly criticizes bad public school principals. Some school administrators overseeing institutions that are understaffed and underfunded will resort to lying to parents and hiding the realities their children face rather than being honest with parents. These misguided administrators create an environment where parents feel unwelcome and disrespected by the school staff. A bad principal takes the resulting reticence on the part of the parents as evidence that they don’t care about their children’s educational success.

“Novice teachers often tell me they’ve been cautioned, in the same way I was, to be wary of the neighborhoods in which they teach. Physical dangers are evoked most often, but I suspect the physical risks of visiting our students’ homes or walking in the streets in which they play are less significant than something more akin to an emotional uneasiness about the act of crossing lines between two worlds of race and social standing. I also think that crossing lines like these as often and as comfortably as we can will teach us more than any of those classes offered frequently to education students about ‘multicultural relationships,’ useful as some of those classes are.”

The best way for teachers to understand their students’ perspective is to get to know them, their parents, and the neighborhoods in which they live. Kozol was bold enough to make house visits to the households of his students and would sometimes be invited in for dinner. This controversial behavior helped him enormously to see that the children and their parents were not the enemy, but instead welcoming and sweet people pushed away by teachers and administrators who had no interest in getting to know them. Kozol argues that becoming intimate with the families of students in this way was a useful act of crossing several divides: racial, emotional, social, and class.

“Most of the older teachers in the school were African-American. All of the young women who became your friends happened to be white. Without so intending, you’d been drawn into a situation that was bound to polarize the faculty between the young newcomers and the relatively ‘set’ and staid and perhaps not always terribly exciting veterans, whom some of your friends appeared to view as obstacles to ‘new ideas,’ much as bright teenagers often have an unkind tendency to dismiss or denigrate the values or opinions of their parents.”

New inner-city public school teachers tend to be young and white, while veteran teachers of the same institutions tend to be older and African American. When new teachers stick together, they create a divide among the teaching staff based on race, age, and even teaching strategies. Kozol is a champion of experience-based teaching and encourages new teachers to get to know and learn from the veteran teachers who have plenty of wisdom to share even if their strategies do not appear in the latest pedagogical textbooks.

“Some children who reveal their secrets in these hesitant and bashful ways seem to feel empowered later to reveal themselves in more outgoing ways as they begin to gain the literary skills to write in classroom journals or to make their first attempts at writing poetry.”

This passage highlights the importance of letting young students express themselves authentically without immediate and overbearing interventions to correct spelling and grammar mistakes. By giving children this space, teachers will build trust, which will enable them to teach children to write better as time goes on. This points to another subtle obligation of good teachers: protecting the fragility and innocence of children so they can blossom out of a foundation of trust and encouragement built by a thoughtful educator.

“None of us should make the error of assuming that a child who is hostile to us at the start, or who retreats into a sullenness and silence or sarcastic disregard for everything that’s going on around him in the room, does not have the will to learn, and plenty of interesting stuff to teach us too, if we are willing to invest the time and the inventiveness to penetrate his seemingly implacable belief that grown-ups do not mean him well and that, if he trusts us, we will probably betray or disappoint him.”

For Kozol, difficult students are usually susceptible to breakthroughs, but this requires careful attention on the part of their teacher. Small class sizes give teachers more time to give behaviorally difficult children the attention they need. Effectively teaching them also requires that teachers not be too quick to have them assessed for special education tracks. Sometimes children are just bored and need constructive outlets to let their creativity and enthusiasm shine. Many times, the hostility of children stems from the structural abuse of the school system and home and can be overcome with the directed compassion of a good educator.

“If I took a photo of the children that I meet in almost any of these schools, it would be indistinguishable from photos taken of the children in the all-black schools in Mississippi back in 1925 or 1930—precisely the same photos that are reproduced in textbooks now in order to convince our children of the moral progress that our nation has made since.”

Kozol stresses the continuity between prior and modern forms of racism and segregation in American schools. For him, it does not make a huge difference that early-to-mid 20th century school segregation was propped up by unjust Supreme Court legislation while modern segregation is underpinned by a broken public school system and inequality of conditions in American inner cities. For the students in these inner-city public schools, the experience of segregation is the same.

“But even while employing wise discretion and while making full allowance for the fragile sensibilities of children who are still in the first grade, I think you’re correct in saying that our teachers need to introduce a good big helping of political and intellectual irreverence into any lesson that might otherwise suggest to children in a classroom of contemporary racial isolation that they must discredit what they see before their eyes, with the result of teaching them to live with a peculiarly destructive lie.”

This passage takes Kozol’s belief that teachers should be open and honest with their young students to its ultimate conclusion: Teachers should discuss even the difficult topic of unjust racist conditions of their own school. Hard truths need to be dealt with carefully, but this does not excuse teachers from the obligation of tackling them, even despite the wishes of school administrations that would prefer not to engage with the topic of modern school segregation at all. Kozol provides only general advice about how to do this, since teachers should take into account their own contexts and use their own creativity and ingenuity to broach the topic with their students.

“The secret curriculum in almost any class, in my belief, is not the message that is written in a lesson plan or a specific book but the message of implicit skepticism or, conversely, of passivity or acquiescence that is written in the teacher’s eyes and in the multitude of other ways in which her critical intelligence, her reservations about given truths, or else the absence of these inclinations and these capabilities, are quietly revealed.”

Teachers convey the secret curriculum—information or points of view outside the standard curriculum and often opposed to it—to students in subtle ways. Kozol believes even young children are able to interpret subtle cues, facial expressions, and tones of voice to determine hidden messages from their teacher. He also assumes that teachers will be willing and able to provide students with extracurricular information using just their personality and creativity—a clearly optimistic assumption.

“Once these words and phrases are disseminated widely, they begin to be employed without much thought by school officials and political appointees who apparently believe the word or phrase itself will lend significance to unexamined utterance. Not ‘big words’ in themselves, but big words that say nothing more than little words could say, sometimes have the added benefit of making a circular statement sound like a real idea.”

Kozol is an enemy of the niche jargon employed by education experts and policymakers. This specialized language is confusing and hides meaning, rather than reveals anything interesting about education. Teachers and administrators are compelled to use jargon to feel professional and respected by experts. Kozol prefers straightforward, plain language in the classroom and in collegial conversations regarding best practices and recommendations. It is impossible to hide a lack of understanding when plain language is used, whereas a jargon-filled explanation can baffle an audience and prevent uncomfortable questions.

“When Mrs. Gamble trilled her voice and ran her fingers through the air, she didn’t simply play the flute. She also played the playfulness within herself and seemed to play the spirits of the children too. She later told me that one third of all the children in her class, and in the school, suffered from asthma, which was common in the South Bronx as a consequence of New York City’s policy of placing toxic installations like waste burners in the neighborhood. You wouldn’t have guessed it on that morning. For a minute there, we might have been a thousand miles from the city in a magic forest where the evening air smells fresh and green and not one of the spirits of the woods has any trouble breathing.”

Mrs. Gamble’s brilliant class exercise, in which she prompts the class to pretend to be the flute section of an orchestra to gather the students’ attention, is a perfect example of an experienced teacher coming up with an original, creative solution to the common classroom problem of distraction. Her solution is effective in reaching its goal and fun for the children to participate in. Mrs. Gamble is the kind of teacher who would be able to carry out any of Kozol’s recommendations regarding creativity and infusing personality into lessons, including conveying the secret curriculum to young students.

“Why on earth should kids in elementary school be asked to care about their future role within the global marketplace? Why should teachers foist this mercenary nonsense on them in the first place?”

This excerpt challenges the very purpose of primary and middle school education. Kozol believes that young students should be made to feel fascinated by the universe and to feel like their horizons are being expanded by their education. Learning specific facts and formulas comes secondary to the primary goal of showing children possibilities and coaching them to become their best selves. The trend toward tracking students based on early career interests and pigeon-holing them into specific courses based on how they might best fit into the American economy cheapens what education should be.

“[N]obody believed test-drilling was of educative worth. Its only function was to skew the scores, defend the school from state or federal punishments, and, as many of the teachers at the school believed, enhance the reputation of the principal.”

Test-drilling, or the practice of taking time away from regular class instruction to prepare children for mandatory high-stakes testing, is one of the terrible symptoms of inequality in public school funding. Schools that perform well on mandatory testing tend to receive better funding, while schools that perform poorly are threatened with losing resources. This pressure forces schools to spend an inordinate amount of time “teaching to the test” rather than providing an actual education to students. As Kozol points out, test-drilling is bad for students, who are bored or anxious about the drilling, and for teachers, who aren’t able to utilize their creativity during these drills.

“The children of the suburbs learn to think and to interrogate reality; the inner-city kids meanwhile are trained for nonreflective acquiescence. One race and social class is educated for the exploration of ideas and for political sagacity and future economic power; the other is prepared for intellectual subordination. The longer this goes on, Francesca, I’m afraid the vast divide that we already see within American society is going to grow wider.”

Structural inequalities within the public system and between public and private schools reflect and produce inequalities in the broader society. Inner-city public school children are drilled for mandatory testing to glorify principals’ reputations and to secure school funding, while students at wealthier public schools and affluent charter schools are free to follow enriching curricula that broaden student minds rather than stifle their creativity.

“But, as you and I know very well, even in the public system as it stands and even in schools in which there is no clear-cut selectivity, self-selectivity manages to do the job of guaranteeing that the children of the more effective parents are more likely to get into better schools than other children living in their neighborhood. In almost every case in which there is a limited number of high-rated public schools, it is the more aggressive and more knowledgeable parents who learn first about these schools and navigate the application process most successfully.”

For Kozol, the point of an effective public school system is for all children from all walks of life to have equal access to excellent education opportunities no matter which school they attend. Practically speaking, however, more engaged or affluent parents are more likely to use research or connections to shoulder their children’s way into the best institutions, while parents who simply trust the system might end up enrolling their children in notoriously bad schools. Kozol argues that this is not a judgment against those parents; in a good public school system, a parent could trust that any school would be as good as any other and be correct.

“In paying taxes for the sustenance of public schools, we’re not just buying something for ourselves. We’re buying something for the benefit of the community in which we live, and for the state and, ultimately, for the nation.”

The author argues that paying taxes to keep public schools running is a good investment for everybody, even for parents who enroll their children in private school and technically don’t use the service themselves. Funding a good free public education system accessible to everybody is in the best interest of the community at every level because it guarantees that our fellow citizens are able to participate in the joys and obligations of life, leisure, and career with a baseline of preparedness and with some sense of how the world works.

“I think we have an obligation to empower those we teach to understand that this democracy is very much a work in progress and that if they can’t achieve the skills to take an active role as citizens in struggles to bring progress in their grown-up years, the injustices they suffer now will never change.”

Ultimately, the purpose behind Kozol’s insistence that teachers be honest with children about the inequalities they face is to keep students from falling into despair and uselessness regarding their unjust circumstances. Instilling in students the idea that their democracy is not perfect, but can change with wisdom and effort, encourages students to imagine a different future and ways to go about crafting it. It is crucial that honesty about unjust circumstances is paired with a discussion of the possibilities for change and a better future—otherwise, the problem of despair will remain.

“So long as myths and misconceptions about equal education remain unexamined in the schools that serve the poor, these kids are left to wrestle with the crippling belief that their repeated failings in comparison with affluent white children are entirely the result of an inherent defect in their character or cultural inheritance, a lack of will, a lack of basic drive and normal aspiration, or, as many have no choice but to believe, a deficit in their intelligence.”

One consequence of refusing to discuss the inequalities students face with the students themselves is that they fall victim to what Kozol calls the hortatory lie, the message that a student’s success or failure is entirely a result of their own efforts and has nothing to do with outside forces. An underperforming student who comes to believe this lie is more likely to give up entirely and to believe that they are incurably stupid. This is why Kozol advises teachers to pair honesty about injustice with a discussion about how the world can change and how students can be agents of change, especially when they grow up.

“I believe aesthetics count a great deal in the education of our children. Beautiful surroundings refine the souls of children. Ugly surroundings coarsen their mentalities. It’s one of the most decisive ways by which we draw the line of caste and class between two very different sectors of our student populations.”

Aesthetics is an easily overlooked aspect of student success, but anecdotally almost everybody will understand what Kozol is talking about. The average worker is more likely to become depressed and bored in a dingy workplace with oppressive fluorescent lighting than in a beautiful physical space. Children also know the difference between an oppressive environment and a nurturing environment. Kozol points out that aesthetic differences in schools follow class divisions, with children of affluent parents attending beautiful institutions and children in underfunded public schools left to make the best of crumbling facilities.

“[A]lmost every public voice we’ve heard for more than 20 years has counseled us to shut the mountain out of view and to direct our eyes instead to the less problematic flatlands where careers are made and resumes are typed and individual security may be protected and advanced. That may be one reason why it’s so much harder now for youthful teachers to invite the risks that people of their age were willing to incur when cries of ‘Freedom Now’ were in the air and ethically transcendent leaders like John Lewis and Bob Moses, not to speak of Dr. King himself, inspired them to place their bodies on the line to act on their beliefs.”

Kozol worries that modern life limits one’s horizons when it comes to activism. Rather than working toward a vastly improved future, progressives are more likely to put out small fires in their immediate vicinity. Kozol wants to remind us that band-aid solutions to structural problems are temporary and will never result in long-term successes. He exhorts teachers and other people with progressive values to aim high and be willing to ask for the extreme structural changes they most desire, despite the possible disappointment of failure.