Students asked Jonathan Kozol to add MU to his book tour.
Forty years ago, Jonathan Kozol was fired from his first teaching job after reading a book by black poet Langston Hughes to his fourth-grade class.
Today, Kozol has made a career of exposing racial and class inequalities in America’s public schools, and he will bring his message to MU on Tuesday.
Kozol is scheduled to speak about his most recent book, “The Shame of the Nation: The Restoration of Apartheid Schooling in America,” which combines personal interviews and stories with statistical data to show continuing racial segregation and inequality in urban schools.
The lecture is sponsored by the Office of Service Learning and the College of Arts and Science, along with the Peace Studies Program, Special Degree Programs, the Sinclair School of Nursing and the Center for eResearch.
Although a stop in Columbia wasn’t on Kozol’s original book tour, he decided to work it in after speaking with MU students who attended his October lecture in St. Louis, said Anne-Marie Foley, director of MU’s Office of Service Learning. She said Kozol was impressed by the students’ enthusiasm and is speaking at MU without charging his normal lecture fee.
MU senior Liz Morningstar, who spoke with Kozol in St. Louis, said the writer wants to get students involved in working to improve public education. “I think he saw an opportunity, and he knew that he wanted to reach out to students in the area,” Morningstar said.
This will not be Kozol’s first time speaking at MU. In 2002 he held a lecture to promote his book “Ordinary Resurrections,” and the success of his visit also helped prompt his return, Foley said.
“He talks about education among the poor and the challenges among poor children in those areas,” she said. “He wrote some of the most important books on the subject.”
Kozol, who graduated from Harvard in 1958 with a degree in English literature, began his career as a teacher in an inner-city Boston school during the civil rights campaign of 1964, according to press releases.
In 1967, he published his first book, “Death at an Early Age,” which chronicles his first year as a teacher. He has since written 10 more books on issues of education and social injustice, including “Savage Inequalities” and “Amazing Grace.”
In researching “The Shame of the Nation,” published in September by Crown Publishing, Kozol spent five years visiting nearly 60 schools in 11 states, including schools in St. Louis and Kansas City.
Ted Tarkow, associate dean of the College of Arts and Science, said Kozol’s visit is relevant to the MU community in light of recent events. “He has written on so many issues in public education, on race, on class and on the divide in America,” Tarkow said. “In the wake of Katrina, and with a whole range of economic and political issues, Kozol is always a great person to have to speak to students and faculty.”