Instant Expert

At the bright young age of 31, Jonathan Kozol has become the nation's latest instant expert on the problems of urban schools. A frequent guest on television talk shows, he has more speaking dates than his calendar can handle, and last month he was invited to Washington to testify before a Senate subcommittee. What has made Kozol something of a celebrity is the success of his Death at an Early Age (Houghton Mifflin), a polemic against the treatment of Negro pupils in Boston's ghetto schools. Since publication last month, it has sold a thousand copies a day and, thanks to serialization in the Boston Globe, became an issue in the city's hot mayoralty campaign.

Death at an Early Age is based on Kozol's eight-month service as a $20-a-day substitute teacher at the Christopher Gibson School in the mostly Negro Roxbury neighborhood of Boston. A summa cum laude Harvard graduate and former Rhodes Scholar, Kozol was badly shaken by the experience--which ended abruptly when he was fired after reading to his class a poem by Negro Langston Hughes that was not on the teachers' approved reading list; it suggested that tenement tenants might justifiably put the slug on their landlords.

In the Zoo. Kozol's main charge is that a powerful anti-Negro prejudice permeates the entire Boston school system. When he first arrived in the system, Kozol contends, a fellow teacher pointed wearily at children in the playground and said: "Those are the animals, and this is the zoo."

Boston is one of the few cities in the U.S. that allows teachers to use corporal punishment. Kozol charges that teachers sometimes employ bamboo rattans to whip the hands of their Negro charges with sadistic delight: "There are moments when the visible glint of gratification becomes undeniable in the white teacher's eyes."

Kozol also contends that the students in these schools are often fed "a diet of banality and irrelevance which it is not worth the while of a child to learn or that of a teacher to teach." Of 32 different book series he had avail able in his classroom, the majority were more than ten years old. Creative children had to conform to the rigid thinking of teachers or face ridicule. He cites one gentle but emotionally disturbed boy who "drew lovely lyrical cows and pleasant horses lifting up their hooves to rub their noses" but only succeeded in throwing his art teacher into a tizzy. "Look at what he's done--he's mixed up the colors!" she cried. "I don't know why we waste good paper on this child."

Crumbling Dictatorship. The whole emphasis of the Boston schools, Kozol charges, is on conformity and respect for authority, which has created an "atmosphere of a crumbling dictatorship in time of martial law." It is a serious charge, which Kozol supports with more rhetoric than hard facts. His own prose style is larded with prejudice (School Committee Member Lee "looked out over his half-moon glasses almost like a childish madman"). Some of his statements are pure bathos; when a blackboard falls on a girl's desk, Kozol asks: "Was she saying with those eyes which looked down so steadily, as if with apology, that she really felt very sorry and did not mean to have gotten her small head in the way of the board?" Kozol's indignation is also a bit belated; he admits that he remained friendly with fellow teachers he knew to be bigots, followed their advice not to see his pupils after school hours. Even after being fired, he meekly heeded the principal's warning not to say goodbye to his class.

The deficiencies of the Boston schools have been recounted before--most notably in Peter Schrag's sober, well-researched Village School Downtown, which was published last April. Harvard Graduate School of Education Dean Theodore Sizer contends that Ko zol's recital of the ills of the Boston schools could be duplicated in many other big U.S. school systems. By overstating and underdocumenting his blustery crusade, Kozol is pushing Boston's regressive school officials into an even more defensive stance rather than inspiring them to correct much that is undeniably wrong. Indeed, School Superintendent William Ohrenberger dismisses the entire work as Kozol's "latest piece of fiction," refuses to take even the book's valid complaints seriously.

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