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:
“When death has you by the throat, you don’t mince words.”
—Friedrich Dürrenmatt (1921–1990)
“Quintilian [educational writer in Rome around A.D. 100] thought that the earliest years of the child’s life were crucial. Education should start earlier than age seven, within the family. It should not be so hard as to give the child an aversion to learning. Rather, these early lessons would take the form of play—that embryonic notion of kindergarten.”
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“Do not go gentle into that good night,
Old age should burn and rave at close of day;
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.”
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