I'm just returning from a fantastic speech by Jonathan Kozol, who is on tour talking about his new book, The Shame of the Nation: The Restoration of Apartheid Schooling in America.

Kozol does for education policy what Oliver Sachs does for medicine: he breathes life into statistics and jargon. Kozol shows what it means to be in a crowded classroom with no money, how the cafeteria smells, the dilemma of the principal who is trying to keep what little funding she has but hating putting teachers through the regulations No Child Left Behind demands.

I've read two of his previous books, Amazing Grace and Savage
Inequalities, and Kozol is satisfying to me not only because he's talking about the work that I do and the politics I loathe; what I especially love about him is that he uses moral language. In the eyes of God, he says, all children are equal, but in the eyes of America, some children are valuable, and some children are cheap.

Part of Kozol's charm is his affect -- he's 69, as white as they come, with a Boston Brahmin accent, and he keeps reminding us how he went to Harvard (he's also a Rhodes scholar) so he has a lot of rich friends, and for some reason they like him but he doesn't like them.

And he tells this story about being at a fancy dinner party in a swank Manhattan apartment, and just as the coffee and creme brulee are served,
someone asks him, "Jonathan, the stories you tell about these kids are so
sad [one of his key characters is a little girl called Pineapple], but
honestly, can you really buy an education?"

And Kozol looks at this person, who paid 22k a year for PRESCHOOL for both his children, then private elementary, and now a New England boarding school at 40 grand a year, and says -- if he's had a bit to drink --
"Well, I'm not sure. It sure did the trick for your kids, though."

One of my political friends says, "A budget is a moral document," and of
course how we, as a country, spend our money reveals everything about what and whom we really value.

Kozol also says he's forever being asked by senators (he often speaks at
House and Senate hearings, plus gives sermons at the National Cathedral in DC, which amuses him greatly, he says, as a Jew, to preach the words of Jesus to delinquent Christians), "Okay, so there's inequality in the
public schools: but can we really solve this problem by throwing money at
it?"

Kozol says, "The only time a politician uses the phrase 'throw money' is
when the problem has a human dimension. No one ever 'throws money' at the Pentagon. They allocate it.

"And yes. I can't think of a better way to fix a roof that is falling
down in a public, inner-school city than to 'throw money' at it."

I was quite stirred anyway -- this is the second time I've heard him
speak, and both times I was absolutely blown away; he is one of my real
role models, and a huge reason I got involved in education policy -- but I
was especially struck by how trends in education also reflect other trends
in American cultural and political life.

I don't know if you're up on the latest and greatest in US education
policy, but in the last few the Bush administration has made federal
funding to public schools contingent on how students fare on a battery of
standardized tests in math and reading.

There are a million, jillion things wrong with this scenario, but the key
issue at this moment for me is the increasing trend toward standardization
period. Forcing people and experiences into tiny boxes. It is, in
essence, an extension of corporate life, where everything has a cubby
hole, and policies prevail over circumstances.

In education, quite literally a teacher must show how every sentence she
utters correlates to a state standard -- no anecdotes to illustrate a
larger point, no poems that may be meaningful to the students but are
outside the curriculum, no in-class discussion without a didactic end.
Yet, the best moments in education almost always occur when a confluence of ideas adds up to more than the sum of its parts. This standards- and standardization-based curriculum manages to take what is a pretty meek sum anyway and dismantle it until it is even less than the original.

I fear the same is true as more and more parts of our lives are governed
by bureaucracies, corporate culture, chain stores: in reducing ourselves to
thousands of data points for the convenience of paperwork, business, and
marketing, the complexity of human experience is shrinking rather than
enlarging.

All this makes me not only indignant but afraid. I can easily extrapolate
an attack on other concepts I hold dear, such as narrative -- which is
necessarily specific and idiosyncratic -- self-expression, and
metaphysics. I also fear for anyone who seeks to live outside the
mainstream in any way. It used to be that one was only socially punished;
now it seems to me almost impossible. You cannot get educated, you cannot get health care, you cannot eat decent food or move to another location unless you are a consumer-producer of a certain echelon.

Kozol ended his speech on a note of urgency, exhorting everyone to go out there and make change, but I'm still sort of chilled, to tell you the
truth, like I've just read a science fiction novel and haven't quite
shaken it yet. Sadly, though, he writes non-fiction, and there are even
statistics in the endnotes.