Riall Lecture Series: Jonathan Kozol

SALISBURY, MD--- Teacher and best-selling author Jonathan Kozol, who has been called today's most eloquent spokesman for America's disenfrachised, delivers this spring's Riall Lecture at Salisbury University.

Kozol's talk, titled "Hearts of Children and the Obligations of Our Nation's Schools," is sponsored by SU's Seidel School of Education and Professional Studies. Free and open to the public, the lecture in on Monday, March 18, at 7:30 p.m. in Holloway Hall Auditorium. A reception follows his presentation.

In the passion of the civil rights campaigns of 1964 and 1965, Kozol moved from Harvard Square into a poor black neighborhood of Boston and became a fourth grade teacher in the Boston public schools. He has devoted the subsequent three decades to issues of education and social justice in America.

Death at an Early Age, a description of his first year as a teacher, was published in 1967 and received the 1968 National Book Award in Science, Philosophy and Religion. Now regarded as a classic by educators, it has sold more than two million copies in the United States and Europe.

His 1995 book, Amazing Grace: The Lives of Children and the Conscience of a Nation, described his visits to the South Bronx of New York, the poorest congressional district of America. Praised by black and Hispanic leaders and children’s advocates and theologians all over the nation, Amazing Grace received the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award in 1996, an honor previously granted to the works of Langston Hughes and Dr. Martin Luther King. Despite the severe political conservatism of the 1990s, Amazing Grace became a national best seller. It joins Savage Inequalities as required reading for future teachers and religious leaders.

Now, in a remarkable departure from his past, Kozol has written the most energized and hopeful book of his career: a joyful answer to the bleakness that suffused so many Early works. Ordinary Resurrections is a book about the little miracles of stubbornly persistent innocence in children who are still unsoiled by the world and still can review their place within it without cynicism or despair.

Kozol is a close friend and unswerving ally to schoolteachers. He is a fierce defender of public schools, one who continues to condemn the vicious inequalities of education in our nation.

Begun in 1988, the E. Pauline Riall Lecture Series brings to the University and community outstanding national lecturers in the field of education. The series was established by the late Miss Riall, long-time principal and teacher of the former Salisbury State University's Campus School. A generous bequest was provided by Miss Riall's will to fund this special program.

For information visit the University’s Web site at www.sslisbury.edu, or call 410-543-6030.