Death at an Early Age: The Destruction of the Hearts and Minds of Negro Children in the Boston Public Schools was published by Houghton Mifflin in 1967, winning the National Book Award. It established Kozol — a young Harvard graduate who had volunteered to teach in a segregated school — as the most uncompromising voice in American education writing.
Kozol taught fourth grade at a school in Roxbury, Boston’s Black neighborhood. What he witnessed was systematic: not the failure of individual teachers but the institutional murder of children’s potential. The school building was crumbling (no heat, broken windows, peeling lead paint). The textbooks were decades old and depicted only white people. The curriculum was designed for white suburban children. The teachers (mostly white) ranged from indifferent to actively cruel. And the children — intelligent, curious, alive — were being slowly destroyed by an institution that communicated daily its contempt for them.
The title is precise: what Kozol documented was not educational failure but educational murder — the death of hope, curiosity, and self-worth in children who entered school eager to learn and left (or were pushed out) convinced of their own worthlessness. The book’s power lies in its specificity: not abstractions about “systemic racism” but particular children in particular classrooms being failed by particular adults in particular ways.
Kozol was fired for teaching a Langston Hughes poem not on the approved curriculum. The firing became the book’s coda — and its proof that the system protects itself rather than its students.
Collecting Death at an Early Age
First edition (Houghton Mifflin, Boston, 1967): Cloth binding, dust jacket.
Market values:
- First edition in dust jacket: $40–$120
- Signed first edition: $80–$200
- Without jacket: $10–$20