When I had the chance to cover a speaking event by nationally-renowned educational activist Jonathan Kozol I was excited but not ecstatic. I was familiar with his name and work but had never read any of his books on educational inequality in America.
I arrived at the event about 20 minutes before it began in the Performing Arts Center, ate some pastries and poured myself a cup of coffee from the complimentary breakfast bar. As I made small talk with another student, the room slowly filled up. By the time Kozol took the stage I estimated there were about 150 people there and only a handful of open seats.
Many talks I’ve attended on campus aren’t well attended and I wasn’t sure why this was the opposite; I soon had my answer.
Kozol was a flat-out fantastic speaker. He had obviously spent a lot of time in front of groups of people speaking on controversial subjects. He immediately put the audience at ease with a biography, personal anecdotes and jokes.
Kozol’s points were made very clear by a style that was essayistic in form, but not obviously so. He would make a broad comment and then move to an example which at first would seem unrelated. One example is a student he followed through her school career. Her nickname was Pineapple. She came from the poorest section of the Bronx and put an immediate spell on Kozol with her bossy charm and sassy demeanor. Kozol mentored her through school and was there to hand her her high school diploma. She is now in college. But the story had a message.
“When I tell Pineapple’s story, I feel the obligation to remind you of the tens of thousands of her peers who have never had her opportunity,” Kozol said. “Whose intellects could not prevail after the virtual decapitation of potential that they underwent in their early years.”
Kozol repeated this technique throughout the talk, going from a point to examples that seemed random to a strong talking point that he had obviously rehearsed and/or made earlier. One rehearsed part stuck out to me as very effective. It was a play on Dr. Martin Luther King’s words.
“Dr. King did not say that I have a dream that some day in the cities of the east or west or south or north, we will have test-driven, anxiety ridden separate but equal schools with self help chant, bombastic rhetoric and auto-hypnotic incantations all day long,” Kozol said.
“Dr. King’s words were clean and pure, ‘I have a dream that someday little black children (and if it were today, little brown children, Kozol added) and little white children will sit together at the table of brotherhood.’ It almost never happens anymore,” Kozol said in a sad, quiet tone.
His stories were so fitting and so powerful, he moved the audience with him. There where sighs, laughs and sniffles.
All his effort was to highlight the disparity between middle- and upper-class education and minority education. His last example, that almost any child that grew up with PBS could identify with, was a trip that Kozol took with his good friend, Mr. Fred Rogers, to an inner city school.
When Mr. Rogers entered a classroom a pudgy seven-year-old named Mario made a beeline towards him, Kozol said. Mario hugged Mr. Rogers and kissed him on the forehead.
“Welcome to my neighborhood Mr. Rogers,” Mario said.
Kozol left the podium to a standing ovation.