Public Schools: How to Get Through

It was a shock to see 36 black faces before me. It is one thing to be liberal and talk, another to face something and learn that you're afraid.

Despite an education at Harvard, Oxford and Columbia Teachers College, Bronx-born Herbert Kohl was clearly not ready for his first day in an East Harlem sixth grade. One minute he found his 36 Negro children sullen, silent, indifferent. The next they were boisterous, rowdy and defiant. "A child would tell me to get my nigger hands off him, and I couldn't see the pathos and self-mockery of the statement."

Unlike many another...

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