44 pages • 1 hour read
Letters to a Young Teacher
A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Themes
The Difficulty of Being a (Good) Teacher
For Kozol, teaching is not just a job or a career: Teaching is a calling. Like many vocations, the work is difficult, and the rewards can be rare and subtle, but for the right person (like Kozol’s pen pal Francesca), teaching, even at its most challenging, is its own reward.
Kozol expects a lot from teachers. Unlike other jobs with obvious metrics of success, a teacher’s effectiveness reveals itself subtly through the long-term growth of her students. When Kozol writes that “the best teachers are not merely the technicians of proficiency; they are also ministers of innocence, practitioners of tender expectations” (4-5) and insists that teachers should see the best in even their most challenging pupils, he is speaking to a small segment of the population who are spiritually prepared to give their whole selves over to the grueling work of raising children. What does it mean to behave like a minister of innocence or a practitioner of tender expectations? Kozol would say that only experience—not expert advice or a curriculum—can reveal this.
Aside from the spiritual requirements, teachers also face the boots-on-the-ground daily grind and dealing with school politics. For progressive teachers with regressive, combative principals, each authentic word and movement in the classroom could result in disciplinary action. Kozol was fired from a teaching job for “curriculum deviation” (197)—reading an extracurricular Black poet’s work in class to reach his students with its powerful relatability. Because of these tensions between a teacher’s authenticity and the structural requirements of the administration, good teachers must find ways to strike a balance between letting their creative voices shine and satisfying the technical requirements of their role. Kozol is firmly on the side of teachers’ discretion, even suggesting they make deals with students to strictly behave in one area that the administration values highly (like good hallway etiquette) to get away with non-curricular classroom time. Knowing when to make these kinds of calls is another tricky situation teachers routinely face.
For their efforts, the rewards teachers reap are not financial: Modest teacher incomes are one of the challenges of the profession. Instead, good teachers are rewarded with small breakthroughs and tender moments with innocent children. For most people, this would likely not be enough compensation for the effort. Kozol argues that for good teachers, these small celebrations make everything else worth it.
The Continuity of Segregation in American Education
One of Kozol’s missions in this book is to demonstrate that school segregation is still alive and well decades after civil rights activists in the 1950s and 1960s managed to achieve legal desegregation through the courts.
Photographs of the student body in an inner-city public school, like P.S. 65 in South Bronx in which nearly the entire student body is of African American or Hispanic descent, are “indistinguishable from photos taken of the children in the all-black schools in Mississippi in 1925 or 1930—precisely the same photos that are reproduced in textbooks now in order to convince our children of the moral progress that our nation has made” (78). In a way, the situation is worse now because modern schools are unable even to live up to the infamous Plessy v. Ferguson Supreme Court decision that legalized racial segregation but at least demanded “separate but equal” facilities—a demand that modern schools do not even try to fulfill (and to be fair, a demand that was never properly fulfilled in the construction of segregated facilities after Plessy).
The segregation issue arises in part from the non-white demographics of the neighborhoods surrounding inner-city public schools. The population distributions of many cities in the United States are starkly divided by race; majority Black and Hispanic neighborhoods usually send their children to the local public school, which becomes a majority Black and Hispanic school.
These racially segregated inner-city public schools are chronically underfunded and dilapidated. Children do not receive the same level of education in these schools as children in better-resourced public schools and many private schools receive. Students at underfunded inner-city schools have a more difficult time achieving high levels of academic success, which translates into the possibility of even more budget cuts when these students underperform on mandatory tests. Many well-meaning teachers who begin their careers in these schools become overwhelmed and switch teaching posts or exit the field entirely, leaving many students with an impermanent, rotating cast of stressed-out instructors who are never able to build rapport with their classrooms. The practical result is that children of minority racial backgrounds are more frequently subject to chronically inferior education standards than their white counterparts.
The Importance of Keeping Education Public
Kozol is a progressive activist who regrets the trend toward privatization and the adoption of business-style practices in American education. Despite the problems of the public education system (many of which Kozol explores in this book), he believes that the greatest possible education system for the most people would be an improved public system with no private alternative.
Private schools increase inequality in society. Affluent parents often believe that the solution to failing public institutions is to enroll their children in elite private academies. Kozol laments this but understands it; the author himself was tempted early in his teaching career to abandon “the trenches of the public schools that [serve] the vast majority of children” (39) and move on to something less demanding in the private sector. This solution, which is unavailable to the majority of parents, helps to create a tiered society in which private school graduates form networks of elite contacts and receive the best career opportunities.
Voucher systems in which “public dollars would not go to schools themselves but would be assigned instead to individuals who would then be free to spend them either at a public school or at a private institution” (132) diminish the capabilities of public schools. Voucher advocates often mislead parents into thinking that their vouchers will put their kids in the same kind of elite institution that the children of the wealthy attend, but in reality, vouchers only cover tuition for private institutions that are largely no better than their public rivals. Further, voucher systems empower private schools to choose the kinds of children they want to recruit and remove power from parents, especially poor parents. Kozol foresees a nasty future in which racist or otherwise bigoted private academies become the norm. This future is not possible in a healthy public system.
The privatizing trend goes hand-in-hand with the encroachment of business practices into education. The author rejects the idea that young students are primarily future jobholders who have an obligation to be productive members of the capitalist economy. He also criticizes the business-style expectation that teachers constantly “need to be ‘on task’ […] and that the only task that matters is the one that’s stipulated by an ‘outcome’ or ‘objective’ that’s been posted on the wall” (49-50). This dangerous perspective robs teachers of the opportunity to bring their personalities and creativity into the classroom, transforming teaching into a job rather than a calling.
Unlock every key theme and why it matters
Get in-depth breakdowns of the book’s main ideas and how they connect and evolve.
- Explore how themes develop throughout the text
- Connect themes to characters, events, and symbols
- Support essays and discussions with thematic evidence