Letters to a Young Teacher

Kozol praises Francesca for honestly discussing the inadequate, boring way that teachers typically address diversity with young students. The “ugly little secret” is that there’s virtually zero diversity in schools “in which diversity curricula are generally used” (73); the language of diversity covers up the racial segregation that is actually taking place.

Students are often taught from lesson plans that praise the struggles for civil rights of the 1950s and 1960s “while steering clear of any reference to the struggles of a comparable order that remain before their generation now” (75). This provides a confusing picture of reality for students, suggesting that segregation and racial divisions have been solved. Kozol and Francesca agree that teachers should “speak openly about the schools that they attend and neighborhoods in which they live right now” (77). For example, Kozol cites a school in which no white children were enrolled for 18 years straight.

Kozol acknowledges that it is difficult to speak to children about these issues but argues that speaking honestly about racial segregation is better than leading young children to “discredit what they see before their eyes” (79). This denial leads to situations like that of students at a high school named for Martin Luther King Jr. who had only a surface understanding of MLK and were not encouraged by the school to engage with the core of his sometimes difficult and controversial message.

The author concludes the letter by discussing the importance of the “secret curriculum,” in which a teacher’s true opinions about the material she is forced to teach come out in subtle but clear ways—where “the message of implicit skepticism or, conversely, of passivity or acquiescence […] is written in the teacher’s eyes” (86).