[Jonathan Kozol] has not grown more conservative with age. Indeed, he is today far more the enfant terrible than he was in 1967…. Since then, in fact, Kozol has continued to speak out often and forcefully on educational and social matters of immediate and widespread concern. However, though his points are often valid, sometimes shockingly so, he may be losing his ability to persuade people of their validity, because of an unfortunate change in his style and manner of presentation….

In quietly understated, profoundly moving prose, Kozol was able to show [in Death at an Early Age] how creativity, individuality, and ever dwindling self-esteem were squeezed out of the predominantly black children in the school where he taught…. He portrayed in powerful detail the extent to which an educational process estranged from reality attempted to impose through books and teachers unsympathetic to the students the standards and values of a culture which largely despised and feared most of them….

[At] least part of the significance of his first book lies in its value as a chronicle of how a characteristic product of the American educational system grew out of acceptance of this state of affairs and resignation to it, to a highly uncharacteristic resistance, which finally resulted in his dismissal from the school through proceedings which made a mockery of justice and which rightly exposed the Boston School Committee to ridicule and contempt. (p. 91)

Kozol, once a man considered radical (in large part because of the thoroughness and honesty with which he reported a scandalous situation and the compassion with which he approached it), is now a full-blown social and political revolutionary….

He has thus gone from making trenchant and necessary criticism of a school system whose deterioration has never ceased in recent years, and which is still in business to create "good citizens" by containing the youth in attendance until his ideological and ethical perception has been obliterated and he comes to exist in "tedium and torpor," to delivering himself of bombastic and dogmatic pronouncements not only on the schools but about the state of the nation at large.

Kozol began to move in this direction with his second book, Free Schools, published in 1972. Sandwiched in between some healthy and sane observations about how to organize an independent school (which he himself had come to do, how to raise money, and the need to teach reading and basic skills), he began to lash out vituperatively not only at grasping landlords and corrupt city officials who impeded the progress of his work but at fellow free-school theorists whose views did not agree with his own and at the ineffectual and fainéant liberals who so often manned the free schools.

Free Schools is thus a potpourri of idiosyncratic views, a book in which Kozol unburdened himself of much of the built-up tension and anxiety which had come as a result of the conflicting pressures involved in establishing his school. In its lack of organization and in many of the attacks he made, it is an undisciplined, self-indulgent book, in form and substance the product of his wearying work in Boston's Roxbury district. But he justified the book by writing, "Educational writing is, of course, to some degree, disguised confessional."

In The Night Is Dark and I Am Far from Home, Kozol carries this interesting observation even farther. Here is a book utterly without order, without shape, its purpose seemingly to provide Kozol with a forum for randomly denouncing, attacking, castigating, and abjuring not only the nation of which he disapproves but in the strongest terms his friends and ne'er-do-well associates who have now dropped out of the radical race.

Plagued and driven by guilt himself, he has written this book to induce guilt and shame in others, to make them uncomfortable, to provoke "pain and anguish" in "undefended readers" so as to make them rebel. (p. 92)

It is not merely unfortunate, however, that Kozol should have lashed out in this rash and childish fashion; it demonstrates how much he has lost over the years. At the beginning of his career, he was able to understand that good people are able to do bad things for a variety of often complicated reasons. Now it seems he has come to believe, as revolutionaries often do, that those who do not do "good" (as, of course, defined by Kozol) are "bad," tout court. There can be no other explanation for their conduct, and, in consequence, they must be done away with one way or another. Kozol has thus come to lose the empathy which was such a notable feature of his first book. The self-righteousness, the condescending moralism, the unshackled indignation which have come to replace it are not nearly so attractive—or so powerful.

Yet, though the tone of the book is appalling, its organization non-existent, its content occasionally taken verbatim from the two books which preceeded it, it is still not without substance. Far from it….

[He] is right to attack the lack of ethical standards in the schools, the pervasive absence of vision on the part of its graduates, and the myth of educational neutrality in a system which is meant to produce "reliable people, manageable people, unprovocative people" who are quite prepared to go through life without making connections between themselves and the rest of their society no matter where they are situated in it—indeed, are trained to be blind to the connections which do exist.

To change these circumstances, Kozol advocates "sophisticated and prepared rebellion."… So far he has given us no indication of what he means to do, although he promises another book shortly which will deal with the subject. Even then, however, he will not manage to create the largest following, because he has so needlessly and so cavalierly antagonized, through the use of strident, foolish, and denunciatory rhetoric and specious argument, a great number of those who believe in the need for reform as fully as he does himself. (p. 93)