LECTURES

Lesley University will host Jonathan Kozol, one of the nation’s most acclaimed authors on education, for a lecture and book signing on his latest book, Fire in the Ashes: 25 Years Among the Poorest Children in America.
Lesley welcomes Kozol on Tuesday, October 30, 2012 at 6pm in Washburn Auditorium on Lesley’s Brattle Campus, 10 Phillips Place, Cambridge. His talk is free and open to the public, and he will be introduced by Lesley Professor Emerita Nancy Carlsson-Paige, an expert on early childhood development and passionate advocate for the equal right of every child to a high quality education.
Kozol, a National Book Award–winning author, will join the Lesley community to discuss his recently-released Fire in the Ashes, an engrossing narrative that follows the people he met decades ago in a squalid Manhattan welfare hotel and in the South Bronx’s Mott Haven ghetto.
Kozol graduated summa cum laude from Harvard in 1958, after which he was awarded a Rhodes scholarship to Oxford University. In the passion of the civil rights campaigns of 1964 and 1965, Kozol gave up the prospect of a promising and secure career within the academic world, moved from Harvard Square into a poor black neighborhood of Boston, and became a fourth grade teacher.
He has since devoted nearly his entire life to the challenge of providing equal opportunity within our public schools to every child, of whatever racial origin or economic level. Kozol speaks widely at universities and to future teachers, and has spent much of the last two years lobbying political leadership in Washington to radically revise No Child Left Behind.
His acclaimed books include: Death at an Early Age, a description of his first year as a teacher, which received the 1968 National Book Award in Science, Philosophy, and Religion; Rachel and Her Children, a study of homeless mothers and their children, which received the Robert F. Kennedy Book Award for 1989; and Savage Inequalities, which was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award in 1992.
For more information or to register for this event, click here.