Connections

In the excerpt from his latest book, beginning on page 28, Jonathan Kozol again holds a mirror up to the dark recesses of the nation's soul. For a year, beginning in 1993, Kozol made regular visits to a destitute neighborhood in the South Bronx where children live daily with fear, crime, pain, and death. Although abandoned by society and deprived of any reason to hope, many of the children he came to know miraculously cling to their innocence and somehow wrest tiny tendrils of joy from the bleakness around them. They also hold fast to their belief in God, and, though condemned to a hell of suffering, they speak often of heaven, which they envision as a place in the sky entered through an archway of gold where smiles, not money, are the legal tender.

A heaven these South Bronx children could never enter (or even imagine) lies a few hundred miles to the north in Wilton, N.H. (See page 22.) The private Pine Hill Waldorf School celebrates children, cherishes them, protects them. Based on the turn-of-the-century theories of Austrian visionary Rudolf Steiner, Waldorf schools view their mission not so much as adding something to children but as reclaiming what is already there--the innate ability to paint, for example, or write poetry or do math. A teacher and a group of students stay together through the first eight grades. Those years are viewed as a journey, which the teacher, as guide, mentor, and "loving authority,'' takes with the students. Along the way, the teacher must change and...