Who is Jonathan Kozol?
Jonathan Kozol is an American author and social justice advocate, born in Boston in 1936 to a neurologist and a social worker. Many activists concerned about equality issues in American society value Kozol’s writing, which provides a harsh look at basic ingrained inequality, especially in the American school system. Along with other sociologists who focus on equality, Kozol is a popular guest lecturer at universities all over the United States, and his books are required reading in many classes designed to get students thinking about American education. Kozol graduated from Harvard in 1958, and found himself traveling to England on a Rhodes Scholarship. He ended up moving to Paris, never completing his scholarship, although he got an education of a different sort. He lived in some of the poorest neighborhoods of Paris while he wrote his only novel, The Fume of Poppies. He traveled back to the United States, where he started out as a tutor and later took a teaching position in a primari
