Jonathan Kozol has spent his lifetime working with children and has made it his business to chronicle the inequities of the American educational system. Kozol began his career as an educator teaching fourth grade in 1964 in a poor, segregated school in Boston. He joined his class as their 13th substitute teacher for the year just before Christmas. The classrooms were overcrowded and the situation dire - it was no wonder then that the children he found there could read at only a second grade level and do math at the first grade level.

In an effort to encourage the students in any way he could he began to read them the kinds of poetry he liked - Robert Frost and Langston Hughes. When he read the lines I read to you, a little girl began to cry:

What happens to a dream deferred? Does it dry up like a raisin in the sun?

(Savage Inequalities, p.1-2)

Kozol and other teachers like him have been decrying the lost dreams of children for generation upon generation, but increasingly it seems as though we are not listening. I hate to be one of those people who has some nostalgic thought about days gone by, and then gripes about the ills of today's society - but I wonder where the educational philanthropists are today. Where are the proponents of educational opportunity, not just for the already wealthy but also for those who find themselves isolated in rural America, or stymied by the pressures of inner city life? It's not unusual for a community like Oak Ridge to place a high value on education then see it through by guaranteeing livable salaries for its teachers and allocating resources for its classrooms - but who's going to carry the ball for education in Wartburg or for the poor in Knoxville's inner city? Who will get to know the children that are on the forgotten edges? Who will not only teach them that one and one is two and how to tie their shoes, but also teach them the skills and the values that will carry them into life well-prepared for both its excitement and its disappointments?

The only feasible response to those questions is if we choose to take the responsibility upon ourselves; it looks like no one else is planning to jump up and do it for us. Remember that before Princeton and Harvard and Yale were Ivy League schools, they were merely dreams of education happening in the rough and tumble world of the early United States. I can only imagine that the education snobs back then would have sent their progeny back to the old reliable institutions of Oxford or Cambridge for a quality education. If Princeton were still called the "College of New Jersey" like it was in 1776, and certainly if it hadn't received consistent funding that it has over the years - it may not be the institutional giant that it is today. Our own Presbyterian Church as well has a long history of supporting educational endeavors - Princeton itself being one of the biggies. And yet, our church was not only instrumental in creating schools of higher learning, strong leaders in the church were also on the forefront of the development of a publicly accessible education for all children as a right guaranteed by a free and democratic society such as our own.

Our principles have been high and they have been biblically sound. Teaching is mentioned several times as a "gift of the Spirit" in the New Testament, and the Old Testament is full of examples of children learning from parents, and from the elders in the congregation, and from the wisdom passed down from generation to generation. The ability to help someone else want to learn - whether that learning is about physics, or about poetry, or about God's love for all of humanity - is a phenomenal gift of God's grace.

But the problem is that we get lazy, and we leave the teaching to the teachers. Like ministry, perhaps teaching should have never become a profession. When a degree is conferred for something that all of us need to be doing, the responsibilities that we share get muddied. All of us have gifts that allow us to teach and to minister in the name of God's grace. I may not know the intricacies of the universe so that I could teach Cade Physics or Chemistry to his greatest desire - but I do know that I can jump start his educational interests right now by letting him know how special he is and by helping him to understand the faith that I know to be helpful in navigating the world today. That faith is built upon what I consider to be the cherished structures of ancient truth, and yet, if it isn't taught, it won't be learned. The Hebrews were right, you have to take that knowledge that you have that God loves us and we should love God and each other, and then you have to write it, inscribe it, in an undeletable file on your heart. It has to be the mantra of your children. You have to talk about it at home and on vacation. It has to be the words on your lips when you go to bed, and the first thought you have in the morning even before coffee. If that doesn't work, they should be written like crib notes on your hand, hung up on the refrigerator, and taped to the front door so you don't come inside without seeing them. They knew simply by experience that if you don't have a dance instructor, you will never get to be Fred Astaire. The faith that we have is not learned from a book - no matter how many bumper stickers tell you that it is. The faith we have is learned from generation to generation, passed on from person to person, and from one story of God's incredible grace to another.

One of the things that sticks out like a sore thumb in Kozol's research is that he believes wholeheartedly that every child is special and every child deserves the opportunity to get to know that fact. However, it's one of those situations where some people are more equal than others. We live in a situation where money still speaks the loudest, and it will take many people finding many ways of speaking up for the situations that seem hopeless for hope to be able to endure. The titles of his books are telling to me that in spite of the "Savage Inequalities" he notices in his early writings so much so that it becomes the title of his first book, he is witness to both "Amazing Grace" and "Ordinary Resurrections" as he gets to know the persistence of children's goodness.

In the communities that Kozol observes, words like AIDS, incarceration, needle drugs, and deficient school performance hover over the community as if to topple any one person who thinks they might have a chance to escape it. And sure enough, bad things do happen in these places where many of us would be afraid to wander at night. But Kozol personally put himself in the middle of this situation to try to know these kids, and as he did, they befriended him, and really talked to him about the things that were important in their lives. At one point when researching an elementary school in the South Bronx, he says of the children, "Now and then, at times of sadness in the neighborhood - the death of someone who had been important to the children, or when someone's mother had been very ill, or when a child's pet was lost, or had been injured, or had died - a child would look up and ask me, simply, 'Can we pray?' I would say yes, but I felt strange about this at the start, because I'm not a Christian and I've never been especially religious, not in formal ways at least. So I'd be hesitant at first, but I'd agree; and so I've ended up saying a lot of prayers without the certainty that I had any right to do this." (Ordinary Resurrections, p.7)

Perhaps we all should pray more often and with less certainty that we have any special gifts to offer. Perhaps we could all benefit from more crib notes posted around our homes to remind us that God loves us, and because God loves us, we can love each other. Perhaps the Popsicle stick art and colored in bulletins that children bring home from church are some of our greatest treasures. Some shall be teachers - THANK GOD FOR THAT. Thank God for that. Amen.