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:
“As deaths have accumulated I have begun to think of life and death as a set of balance scales. When one is young, the scale is heavily tipped toward the living. With the first death, the first consciousness of death, the counter scale begins to fall. Death by death, the scales shift weight until what was unthinkable becomes merely a matter of gravity and the fall into death becomes an easy step.”
—Alison Hawthorne Deming (b. 1946)
“Progress would not have been the rarity it is if the early food had not been the late poison.”
—Walter Bagehot (1826–1877)
“My age is as a lusty winter,
Frosty but kindly.”
—William Shakespeare (1564–1616)