1936-
Teacher and Education Critic

"Unbounded and Compensatory Rage."

Jonathan Kozol, the son of a physician in the Boston suburbs, grew up in a "privileged and insulated" world. He came into contact with the less fortunate only on trips to drive his live-in maid home to Roxbury, the black section of Boston, on her day off. Years later he realized "with a wave of shame and fear" that the maid's children, brought up by their grandmother, "had been denied the childhood and happiness and care" that had been given to him by their mother. He began teaching at an elementary school in the Roxbury area in 1964, fresh from studying at Harvard and Oxford and living in Paris. In teaching fourth grade he found "a world of suffering, of hopelessness and fear." His shame turned into, as he puts it, "unbounded and compensatory rage," which propelled Kozol...