Savage exaggerations.

Marcus Winters nicely nails the empirical and conceptual fallacies in Jonathan Kozol's tiresome jihads against the alleged institutional racism causing the unequal funding of schools ("Savage Exaggerations: Worshiping the Cosmology of Jonathan Kozol," check the facts, Spring 2006). Yet Kozol's most destructive legacy may turn out to be his attempts to convince classroom teachers that their proper role is to subvert mainstream American beliefs.

In his first book, Death at an Early Age, Kozol presented himself as a nonpolitical, idealistic young man shocked by a glaring injustice. But soon afterward he revealed himself as a hard-line leftist who argued that America's capitalist culture gave rise to its racist public schools. He hardened these views in (of all places) revolutionary Cuba, whose government invited him in the mid-seventies to study its education system. Kozol's account of his visit, Children of the Revolution, is a nauseating apologia for the Castro regime's indoctrination of children and adults. When Kozol asked Cuba's education minister why political propaganda filled Cuba's adult-literacy-course texts, he got the standard Marxist line: "All education has forever had a class bias. No society will foster schools that do not serve its ends." In his book, Kozol accepts this doubletalk as gospel and urges the reader to discard the naive view that education can be politically neutral.

Kozol's next book, On Being a Teacher, takes as its starting point the crude Marxist view that education in all societies is "a system of indoctrination." All the book's model lessons aim to teach little children to withstand America's state-sponsored brainwashing and to open them up to the self-evident truths of feminism, environmentalism, and the Left's account of history. Kozol also thoughtfully provides a long list of left-wing publications and organizations--including the information agencies of the Chinese and Cuban governments--where teachers can get worthwhile classroom materials.

On Being a Teacher is still widely read in ed schools and by activist teachers. To the degree that teachers take to heart Kozol's vision of the classroom as an arena for political indoctrination and the deconstruction of Western culture, they limit the life chances of inner-city children. Education theories and practices inspired by another failed Marxist utopia are the last thing those children need.

SOL STERN

Senior Fellow

Manhattan Institute