An awful lot of people come to college with this strange idea that there's no longer segregation in America's schools, that our schools are basically equal; neither of these things is true.

Racial segregation has come back to public education with a vengeance.

I once made a check of all books in my fourth-grade classroom. Of the slightly more than six hundred books, almost one quarter had been published prior to the bombing of Hiroshima; 60 percent were either ten years old or older.

False hope is worse than despair.

I encourage teachers to speak in their own voices. Don't use the gibberish of the standards writers.

Childhood is not merely basic training for utilitarian adulthood. It should have some claims upon our mercy, not for its future value to the economic interests of competitive societies but for its present value as a perishable piece of life itself.

Children are not simply commodities to be herded into line and trained for the jobs that white people who live in segregated neighborhoods have available.