Acclaimed nonfiction author and teacher Jonathan Kozol spoke Monday on the Tempe campus about the problems and inequalities facing minority students in America’s school systems.

In an event put on by the Canon Leadership Program, hundreds of students, staff and community members attended the lecture at the Memorial Union to hear Kozol’s theories on why many minority students have problems in the education systems and why schools that focus heavily on testing aren’t preparing students enough.

Kozol explored the various issues he has seen through his teaching career in several award-winning books.

“Black and Hispanic children at this moment are more isolated intellectually and segregated physically than they have been since 1968, when Dr. King was taken from us,” he said.

After hearing Martin Luther King Jr.’s voice for the first time, Kozol traveled to the other side of Boston, his hometown, and asked how he could help. A priest told him to become a teacher.

He said he remembered hearing King’s dream that someday black and white children will sit together at the table of brotherhood.

“This almost never happens anymore,” Kozol said.

In going to what he called the “black side” of Boston, he was greeted by overcrowded classrooms of children who rarely had a teacher stay with them for a full school year.

It was up to him to figure out how to gain the trust of these students who were rarely given a personalized education because the curriculum was too heavily focused on improving standardized test scores, he said.

Kozol said he was fired from his first teaching job for bringing in a Langston Hughes book of poetry in an attempt to reach out to his African-American students. The school’s reasoning was that the book was part of the eighth grade curriculum instead of fourth, which he was teaching.

Now, Kozol said, he’s speaking out.

“I’m 73 years old, and I’m too old to bite my tongue,” he said. In today’s schools, he still sees the heavy focus on testing as a problem.

“The child is the product of the school,” Kozol said, when students should be viewed as individuals.

When the students are pumped full of standardized tests, they become value-added products, he said.

“If you ever talked about the kids in Beverly Hills as products, the parents would have the principal fired,” Kozol said.

Teachers in these test scores-obsessed schools are so afraid of running out of time to teach the curriculum that they are hesitant to let children interrupt to ask questions, he said.

“[Kids] love to interrupt and ask spontaneous questions,” Kozol said.

By stifling these questions, teachers will never know what lies within that child’s heart, he said.

Kozol said teachers are his heroes, especially those who work with little children.

“They do the best thing people can do, which is to bring joy, beauty, mystery and mischief to the hearts of little pint-sized people,” he said.

This idea inspired Sherry Padlan, a secondary education freshman, who changed her major to education last week.

After hearing him speak, she said she knew the choice she had been unsure of was the right decision.

“I am doing this for a good purpose, and I want to thank him for that,” she said.

Elementary education senior Sierra Sommars said she was inspired after reading one of Kozol’s books in a class.

“It makes you really understand what you want to fight for as a future teacher,” she said.

Reach the reporter at vajones2@asu.edu.