The Playboy Interview: Jonathan Kozol Morgan Strong Playboy April, 1992

The Playboy Interview: Jonathan Kozol Morgan Strong Playboy April, 1992 Reproduced by special permission of Playboy magazine Copyright 1992 C by Playboy In 1896, the Supreme Court ruled in the reported on its inadequacies a quarter century case of "Plessy vs. Ferguson"that separate but ago in "Death at an Early Age," a controversial equal accommodations for blacks in railroad cars expose about poverty and racism in Boston's did notviolate the "equal protection" clause of public schools. With "Savage Inequalities," he the 14th Amendment and, therefore, were has sharpened his knife. Noting that many of the constitutionally valid. While the majority opinion country's schools have continued to deteriorate, was ponderously written and strained the bounds Kozol ridicules the ineffectual agendas of the of reason, the dissenting opinion, authored by past two Administrations' slickly packaged Kentucky-born Justice John Marshall Harlan, education policies. He relegates President was an exercise in simple eloquence: "In the George Bush to the role of, at best, disinterested eyes of the law, there is in this country no observer and, at worst sanctimonious fraud. superior, dominant, ruling class of citizens. There is no caste here. OurConstitution is While "Savage Inequalities" claimed a place color-blind, and neither knows nor tolerates on the best-seller lists almost immediately after classes amongcitizens . the humblest is the it arrived in bookstores, the critical response to peer of the most powerful. " it--and the national debate it stirred-has been even more passionate. Publishers Weekly, the In 1954, the Supreme Court ruled in authoritative voice of the book industry, was so "Brown vs. Board of Education of Topeka" that taken with "Savage Inequalities" that it placed on segregated schools were unconstitutional. The its cover-usually reserved for advertising-an case was the first challenge to the concept of open letter to the President, demanding that he separate but equal since "Plessy," and the High read the book. Kozol was then invited by a .Court ruled unanimously to reverse the historic Presidential aide to discuss his views with the 1896 decision. Administration. In a manner that betrays his appearance-his looks are bookish, his delivery Now, in 1992, nearly a century afterJustice is scholarly-Kozol continues to make his case in Harlan penned his prophetic dissent and 38 years any available forum. He is steadily in demand since those words were transformed into law, for morning talk shows and news programs; his segregation is still rampant in American memorable run-in with Patrick Buchanan on classrooms, according to Jonathan Kozol, 55, CNN's "Crossfire" offered one of the few times teacher, author and self-appointed watch-dog of that the pugnacious talk-show host and would-be the nation's education system. "What seems President had been stopped in mid-vitriol by unmistakable," writes Kozol in his latest boOk, anyone, let alone by a mild-mannered, liberal "Savage Inequalities: Children in America's intellectual like Kozol. Schools" - an indictment of disparities among our schools-"is that the nation, for all practice What Kozol has to say about America's and intent~ has turned its back upon the moral failure to educate its children goes beyond media implications, if not yet the legal ramifications, of hype or political opportunism. "Savage' the Brown decision. The dual society, at Inequalities"-a finalist for a National Book least in public education, seems in general to be Critics Circle award-is equal parts painful and unquestioned. " poignant, and Kozol has acknowledged that it was unsettling for him to write it. There were Sounding the alarm about education in times, he says, that "I just had to stop writing America is nothing new to Kozol. He first 105 and cry when I thought of all those children and state aid, but the difference between the two was their ruined lives. " staggering: from the school in East St. Louis that literally became a cesspool to the carpeted, Kozol, a Harvard graduate and Rhodes climate'-controlled institution in Great Neck, scholar, came to his current celebrity quite by New York. chance. Born in 1936 in the well-toodo Boston suburb of Newton, he grew up privileged, Kozol also discovered profound depression attending an elite prep school before moving on among many black and Hispanic students forced the Harvard and Oxford. After college, he began to endure prisonlike facilities in the nation's his career as a would-be novelist in Paris during poorer school districts. Because the parents of the days of the Beat Generation. Although he these students are badly educated and because found the expatriate life enlightening, Kpzol few vote, Kozol reasons, they cannot make realized that he had no grand adventures to write their political will known, thereby locking the about and eventually returned home to Boston, children into a desperate state that will only get intending to study law. One day, he spotted a worse. sign in Harvard Square asking for volunteers to teach in "freedom schools, " the spare Kozol is unrelenting in his denunciation of educational facilities that sprouted up during the the Reagan-Bush years. He says that the civil rights movement of the early Sixties, and promises of a better education system made by soon Kozol was teaching impoverished and both Presidents were exaggerated and empty. illiterate black children in crammed classrooms Their Administrations' policies,. he charges, have in Roxbury, one of the poorest sections of only widened the gap between classes in this Boston. country, exacerbating a trend in which the rich get everything and the poor and middle class get This firsthand teaching experience led Kozol what the rich think they deserve-or are willing to write "Death at an Early Age," his scathing to allow. Kozol is trying to provide relief to the assessment of Boston's public schools. Although victims of this condition. He has used proceeds the book was criticized by experts-specifically from his books to 'establish the Education Action for its charges of racism against the white Fund, a nonprofit organization that offers establishment-it went on to win a 1968 National emergency assistance to inner-city children and Book Award and, for its author, a place in the their families. media spotlight. Several more recent books include "Illiterate America" (1986), in which To find out more about Kozol and what Kozol explored how the nation's poor "navigate has gone wrong with our public schools, society" as adults, and "Rachel and Her Playboy sent Contributing Editor Morgan Children" (1988), a compilation of interviews Strong to Kozol's home in Massachusetts. Here Kozol conducted with New York's homeless. is Strong's report: While writing "Rachel, " Kozol kept "Jonathan Kozol lives not far from the site hearing horror stories about New York public of this country's second Revolutionary War schools from the children he interviewed. engagement--Concord, Massachusetts-a setting Prompted by these reports, he decided to that, in his case, is appropriate: Kozol is reexamine the nation's schools; his objective was fighting for what he believes to be the salvation to compare the diverse education programs and of a nation founded on the fundamental facilities throughout the United States and then principles of fairness, justice, equality and a write a sequel to "Death at an Early Age." duty to do what is right for all its citizens. He is Traveling throughout the nation, Kozol visited unmarried and has no children. He lives alone, both devastated inner-city schools and those in off the main highway, in a Revolutionary-era the more affluent suburbs. He discovered two house. It's a writer's house, cluttered with separate education systems-distinctly similar, books, newspapers, magazines, reference yet completely unequal. Both were funded by manuals--all in a calculated disorder with which local community revenues and some federal and Kozol is obviously comfortable. 106 "Kozol is not insistent that a listener adopt have written a novel about a creative-writing his viewpoint; neither is he apologetic about his class. own. His arguments are often subdued and thoughtful, but fueled by the battle he has waged PLAYBOY: Did your return to Boston for the better part of his life. Despite the grim stimulate your interest in education? evidence in his writing, he is, nevertheless, optimistic. Little can shake his confidence that KOZOL: No. I was ready to go into a all will be put right in our public schools-and in conventional career. My father was quite the country, for that matter-as long as we concerned about me; he expected a Rhodes appeal to the basic decency of Americans." scholar to do very respectable things. I was twenty-six by then and he thought I should be at PLAYBOY: Didn't your career as a least the junior Senator from Massachusetts. teacher begin almost by chance? Instead, I was a struggling writer living in Harvard Square. KOZOL: I never intended to become a teacher. I had a privileged upbringing. My PLAYBOY: Just drifting? father is a neuropsychiatrist, my mother a social worker. I lived in an affluent suburb of KOZOL: I had intended to go back to Boston-Newton, Massachusetts-and went to an Harvard Law, get on track and become a elite prep school. Then I went to Harvard and, member of Congress, go into banking, become after that, to Oxford as a Rhodes scholar. a college president-whatever it is that Rhodes scholars do. PLAYBOY: Not the typical path for someone who'd wind up as an elementary PLAYBOY: But instead? schoolteacher in the ghetto. KOZOL: Instead, some important things KOZOL: No. I really wanted to be a happened in the spring of 1964.

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