Kozol Blames Faculty Dreariness For Mediocrity in Boston Schools

"The schools in Boston are failing so totally to educate kids that any program is worth trying," Jonathan Kozol '58 told an overflow audience in Quincy House last night.

Kozol spoke of the crisis in Boston ghetto education in the third of a series of lectures co-sponsored by the Episcopal Champlaincy and Quincy House.

"We talk about the 'culturally deprived,'" he said, "and then we send these kids the rejects of society to teach them."

Kozol blamed the "mediocrity" of the Boston schools on "principals who are afraid of the parents in their communities."

"What is taught is like the weakest stew that has had all the meat taken out and only has a few lumpy potatoes."

He said that teachers and principals believe that "professionalism means distance" from their students. "The real education in Roxbury has been going on after school for the last decade," he said.

Kozol and a group of Roxbury parents founded an integrated private school for 70 students in 1966. "The New School represents the very best of what is called 'Black Power,'" he said, citing community involvement in the project.

Joyce Johnson, one of the parents who helped establish the school, said that a parents' group is now training teachers for a program that will transfer 1200 students from the Boston public schools by 1969.

Kozol is the author of Death at an Early Age, which he calls "a hot and angry" appraisal of the Boston public school system.