Thinking back to his undergraduate years, Jonathan Kozol ’58 said he could not remember a single Harvard senior who planned to teach in the public schools.

“Teaching was not regarded as a sufficiently dignified profession for a Harvard graduate,” said Kozol, who attended the exclusive Noble and Greenough School in Dedham, Mass. While some classmates would teach at schools like his, “by and large teaching was unthinkable.”

Fifty years later, with an enormous debt to the education activist, scores of Harvard graduates-to-be compete to teach in the poorest schools in America. For the past 40 years, the movement to redress inequalities in education has been Kozol’s movement, and the urgency felt by aspiring public school teachers largely originates in his compassionate indignation.

In books and public lectures, Kozol—the former Eliot House resident—assails government and society for perpetuating cycles of poverty and lackluster education.

At the same time, he celebrates the teachers who foster a love of learning in underprivileged students in spite of dilapidated buildings, crowded classrooms, and tattered books that hinder learning. Kozol’s dedication, born in the civil rights era, still resonates with students.

BECOMING RADICAL

As an undergraduate, Kozol said he was not directly involved in education advocacy.

“I was consumed with a passionate addiction to literature,” he said.

Under the tutelage of professors Archibald MacLeish, a Pulitzer Prize-winning poet, and Harry T. Levin ’33, a literary critic, Kozol planned a life in creative writing.

After graduating summa cum laude from Harvard, Kozol attended Magdalen College at Oxford, but left early for Paris. There, MacLeish introduced the young writer to the more seasoned expatriates Richard Wright and William Styron, among others.

From MacLeish, Levin, and the Paris group, Kozol said he developed an “admiration for people who were not only good at what they did, but also good at conveying it to younger people.” They “predisposed” Kozol to teaching, “but the specific event that precipitated my decision to teach” was the June 1964 murder of three civil rights activists in Mississippi.

When he heard the news, Kozol was back in Cambridge, where he planned to enroll in graduate school at Harvard to study Elizabethan literature.

Disturbed by the events, he approached the pastor of a black church in Roxbury to ask how he could help. The pastor, said Kozol, told him what his community most needed was dedicated teachers.

“Within a month, I was teaching fourth grade in Roxbury,” he said.

Before the end of the school year, Kozol was fired for teaching the poetry of Langston Hughes.

“They were determined to suppress any semblance of civil rights activities in the Boston schools—they were eager to get rid of me,” he said. “But like most Harvard graduates, I didn’t suffer long.”

Kozol landed a job teaching in Newton, a wealthier school district but one that also implemented a successful integrative busing program.

“That experience radicalized me,” he said. “I didn’t become an activist as a result of reading the right books. I just thought, ‘My god, both these cities are in the same country, but in one school system [in Roxbury], the children are shortchanged in every possible way you can imagine.’”

Kozol translated his early teaching experiences into “Death at an Early Age: The Destruction of the Hearts and Minds of Negro Children in the Boston Public Schools,” his first book of non-fiction. Its selection for the National Book Award in 1968 “unfortunately propelled me into a public role, which I had never wanted,” he said.

“It was virtually impossible to maintain the relative private experience of a teacher,” he said.

A dozen books and two Guggenheim fellowships later, Kozol continues his advocacy for better public school systems and funding. A vocal critic of the No Child Left Behind Act, Kozol said he has spent recent months working with the staff of Senator Barack Obama on policy briefs. And last year, Kozol founded the Cambridge Institute for Public Education to prevent the drain of qualified teachers from public schools.

TEACHING, DIGNIFIED

As a freshman, Elizabeth G. Hornig ’08 read Kozol’s 1991 book “Savage Inequalities: Children in America’s Schools” in a single day.

“It has in some ways haunted me ever since,” said Hornig, who grew up outside Kansas City. “It awakened me to a set of issues that, coming from my privileged suburban background, I didn’t even realize, since they are invisible issues. It was a very painful revelation.”

When Kozol read from his newest book, “Letters to a Young Teacher,” to a packed Memorial Church in September, Hornig was in the crowd. After the talk, she said, she finally overcame her hesitations about teaching and applied to Teach For America (TFA), which places college graduates in two-year teaching positions in high-need school districts. (She will be teaching high school French in the Mississippi Delta region next year.)

Kozol’s books “can’t help but make you outraged,” Hornig said.

“It’s a great thing to finally be able to act on all that feeling.”

Although Kozol argues that TFA’s two-year placement perpetuates the already-high turnover at public schools, he also praises the program for recruiting new teachers to low-income districts.

“I simply hope that [they] will not see it as two years of service to provide them with idealistic cocktail conversation 20 years later when they are corporate lawyers, but will see it as the first step in their life’s career,” said Kozol, who also said that he has personally recruited hundreds of teachers to the program.

Christopher H. Green ’08—who said that Kozol has had an influence on him—said he has had trouble finding a teaching job after being turned down by TFA. Public schools otherwise require teachers to be state-certified, and jobs at charter schools, many of which do not require certification, are quite competitive.

Green partially attributed his interest in education to Kozol’s work, which he called “eye-opening” to the inequities in school funding, but said he may end up teaching in a private school instead, before going to graduate school in education.

Over 100 of Hornig and Green’s classmates will likely join them in the field of education this year, according to The Crimson’s most recent senior survey.

In the survey, more than 10 percent of respondents who plan to work next year said they will do so in education. Forty-one seniors have joined TFA this year, almost twice the 24 that joined last year.

Kozol lived in Roxbury for 20 years, but now resides in Byfield, Mass., where he finds the “isolation” necessary to write.

Sociology professor Mary C. Brinton includes Kozol’s 2005 “The Shame of the Nation: The Restoration of Apartheid Schooling in America” on her “Education and Society” syllabus.

“There is a power to his writing that is much harder to find in traditional social science treatments of these subjects,” Brinton said.

—Staff writer Jeremy S. Singer-Vine can be reached at jsvine@fas.harvard.edu.