Death at an Early Age: The Destruction of the Hearts and Minds of Negro Children in the Boston Public Schools (reissue ISBN 0-452-26292-5) is a book written by the American schoolteacher Jonathan Kozol and published in Boston by Houghton Mifflin in 1967. It won the U.S. National Book Award in category Science, Philosophy and Religion.
Death at an Early Age describes Kozol's first year of teaching, which took place in the Boston public school system. Kozol recounts the deeply entrenched policies of racial segregation and inequality on the part of Boston Public Schools, testifies to a crumbling infrastructure in his Roxbury Boston neighborhood, and documents the public outcry following his dismissal for the offense of teaching a Langston Hughes poem to his reading class.
Famous quotes containing the words death, early and/or age:
“There is no sorrow more grievous than the death of one’s spirit.”
—Chinese proverb.
Zhaungzi.
“It is easy to see that, even in the freedom of early youth, an American girl never quite loses control of herself; she enjoys all permitted pleasures without losing her head about any of them, and her reason never lets the reins go, though it may often seem to let them flap.”
—Alexis de Tocqueville (1805–1859)
“Old age is a tyrant that forbids us upon pain of death all the pleasures of youth.”
—François, Duc De La Rochefoucauld (1613–1680)