(Following is an excerpt from onathan Kozol's controversial speech delivered last Sunday at the Ford Hall Forum. Kozol, a Harvard graduate currently teaching in Newton, was fired from the Boston School System in 1965 for reading a poem by Langston Hughes to his largely Negro class. His book, Death at an Early Age, was published recently.)

In my school I see pictures on the wall. I see pictures of Spain and a pictures of Portofino and a pictures of Chicago. I see arithmetic paper a spellings paper. I see a star chart. I see the flag of our America. The classroom is dirty... The auditorium is dirty the seats are dusty. The light the auditorium is brok. The curtains in the auditorium are ragged they took the curtains down because they was so ragged. The bathroom is dirty ... The cellar is dirty the hold school is dirty sometime ... The flowers are dry every thing in my school is so so dirty.

When the history of the United States in the twentieth century is written, the City of Boston is going to deserve an ugly chapter all its own--and the most painful paragraphs within that chapter will be those which describe the educational genocide being carried out to this day with the full knowledge of many people within the Boston Public Schools.

The subject of our discussion is the future of the public schools in Boston. We cannot talk about the possibilities of the future without first documenting both the agonies of the present and the disasters of the past. It is this, then, which I will take to be my responsibility this evening.

Two years ago, when I was fired from the Boston schools, I spoke of conditions that I found there in a tone of outraged innocence. Today I still have plenty of outrage, but I no longer am innocent. After two years of teaching the corruption, lies and overt racism of the people who dominate the Boston School Committee, and who hold supervisory positions within its administration, it is quite impossible to feel innocent or wide-eyed.

Here is a school system which takes young Negro kids at grade level and turns them out retarded.

A school system in which the children of ghetto classes are burdened year upon year with unbroken lines of substitute teachers--teachers unfit, unprepared, inexperienced, teachers who are not teachers, teachers who are fill-ins, who are temporary, who work at night or after school in other jobs, who do not know children, who do not know education, who are not concerned, who are not involved, who do not and cannot care about the lives expiring before them.

All systems use substitutes when regular teachers are unwell. But the ghetto schools of Boston bear the sinister distinction of having used substitutes in place of regular teachers in dozens of ghetto classrooms month after month, year after year. I have known children who have had as many as 25 substitute teachers in three months. I have known children who have not had one, single, serious, permanent, competent, fully trained teacher during the course of three full years.

Those children who do get permanent teachers--it might as well be said now--are at times scarcely more fortunate. It is close to heresy in Boston to speak badly of the teachers. The word is out that we are to call them dedicated. The message has been given even to our daily press that, whatever else is wrong, the regular teachers are good-hearted, serious, and capable.

I would like to be absolutely frank.

They are not all serious.

They are not all capable.

Many are anything but good-hearted.

There are always, of course, a certain number of good teachers.

There are far too many, however, who should never in their lives be allowed to go near children, and certainly not near children whose color they despise. How they get to them--how they have been slotted in these classrooms--by what process of political string-pulling they have ended up here, most of us will never know. But the fact remains--it is a bitter one indeed--that the Boston schools are riddled with mediocre, unwell, ignorant and brutal teachers. Alcoholism, creeping senility, mental instability in permanent faculty members are thoroughly documented, known well both to children and to school department officials, and continue uncorrected to the present time.