Kozol believes that it is no accident that schools in poorer neighborhoods often do not receive equitable funding.

He calls this not a "conspiracy of intent," but a "conspiracy of effect."

Kozol is not concerned that his ideas are not likely to garner across-the-board political support anytime in the near future.

"I never set out to say: here's a pragmatic battle plan for the next four years," Kozol says. "I see my role as an author to envision a just society."

The current system fosters inequality, says Kozol, because school funding relies heavily on local property taxes. So, wealthier neighborhoods gather a larger pool of tax money for their kids' education.

Critics argue that simply pumping more money into schools won't help educational quality. Though he stops short of saying that money would definitely make the difference, Kozol believes putting more money into poor schools would be a "noble social experiment."

Kozol is angered by what he perceives as a nationwide lack of attention to segregated schools.

"They'll (the Bush Administration) talk about everything except the central moral agony of our society-that we are still two nations," Kozol says.

Kozol's thoughts on desegregation are far outside the bounds of current political debate. "In the North, the only feasible system of desegregation would have to be between the cities and suburbs," he says.

But Kozol has no illusions about the political feasibility of such a system. "Virtually no white liberals are willing to discuss this," he says. Even during the Boston busing crisis, Kozol says, Boston suburban liberals "used their own racism to exonerate racists of South Boston."

Kozol, an English literature concentrator while at Harvard who graduated in '58, lived in Eliot House across the hall from his classmate Senator Jay Rockefeller.

"All the students and faculty at Eliot House pretended they were British," he recalls. "They had the 'Henry James disease.'''

Although his academics allowed him to go to Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar, Kozol says he "studied much too hard at Harvard."

After Oxford, Kozol spent a few years writing in Paris amid older writers like Allen Ginsberg, William Styron and Richard Wright.

In 1963, Kozol came back into the United States to "do something respectable" like "go to law school and then to the Senate."

But the civil rights movement inspired him to take the "longest trip I ever took," a 20-minute trip on the subway to Roxbury where Kozol volunteered as a schoolteacher. Eventually he was fired from the Boston schools for reading a Langston Hughes poem to his students.

Kozol believes he is one of the few true liberals who still fights the good fight. Even now, as a successful member of the political/literary establishment whose name is held up high by senators and journalists, Kozol feels betrayed by some of his old liberal friends, whom he calls "all these nice people in New York who get out Pete Seeger records and reminisce about their youthful ethics."

Kozol laments what he sees as a loss of idealism among these "decent-minded, progressive people. "While some of these people travelled to Mississippi to register blacks in the summer of 1964, Kozol says, "today it's their kids, and they don't want them going to school with anyone who might hold them back."