November 5, 1999
Contact: Janet Crow, Hall Center for the Humanities, (785) 864-7823.
LAWRENCE -- Jonathan Kozol, writer, social critic and educator, will speak at 8 p.m. Saturday, Nov. 13, at the Lied Center at the University of Kansas. Kozol's speech, "Love Against Fear: The Ethics and Compassion of Young Children Under Siege," is part of a series of free public events observing the millennium sponsored by the Hall Center for the Humanities at KU.
For more than 30 years Kozol has worked to lift children living in poverty into the mainstream of American life, said Roberta Johnson, Hall Center director. From his first book, "Death at an Early Age," which criticizes inner-city education, to his most recent, "Amazing Grace," Kozol has fought against hypocrisy and cynicism in what he has called, "... the agreeable illusion, that [we] need not feel complicity in these tragedies," Johnson said.
Fired in 1965 from a substitute teaching position with the Boston Public Schools for teaching Langston Hughes' poem "Ballad of the Landlord," Kozol began addressing the issues surrounding poverty and education, Johnson said.
In "Savage Inequalities" he writes that he "decided early on in [his] journey to listen very carefully to children, and to let their voices and their judgments and their longings find a place within the nation's dialogue about their destinies."
His many books include "The Night is Dark and I am Far from Home," "Free Schools," "Children of the Revolution," "On Being a Teacher," "Illiterate America," "Rachel and Her Children" and "Savage Inequalities."
Kozol's latest effort prompted Nobel Laureate Toni Morrison to say, "Amazing Grace is good in the old-fashioned sense: beautiful and morally worthy."
In line with this event, the KU Center for Community Outreach will be collecting canned food and nonperishables in the lobby of the Lied Center. For more information about the center's work please contact E.J. Reedy at (785) 864-4073.
Millennial observance events scheduled in 2000 by the Hall Center include a Feb. 10 lecture by Anna Deavere Smith, a performance artist; and an April 26 lecture by Jeane Kirkpatrick, former U.S. ambassador to the U.N.