Every year, near the beginning of the school year, I reread Jonathan Kozol’s Letters to a Young Teacher. I have been doing it long enough that the practice has become something like a ritual. The book appeared in 2007, the same year I began teaching, so it has accompanied nearly the whole of my professional life. I have changed considerably during those years. The words on the page have not. Yet somehow, each time I return to them, I find something I had not noticed before.
Perhaps that is what rereading does. We imagine that we are returning to the same book, but we never really are because we are no longer the same reader.
When I first encountered Letters to a Young Teacher, I was, quite literally, a young teacher. I had questions about classrooms, students, institutions, and the kind of educator I hoped to become. Nearly two decades later, I have accumulated considerably more experience, but I am not convinced that I have accumulated proportionately more answers. If anything, experience has made some questions more complicated.
That may be why I continue to need Kozol.
There is something important about the epistolary form of the book. Kozol is writing to a young teacher named Francesca, answering questions and responding to experiences that we encounter primarily through his side of the correspondence. We do not possess the conversation in equal measure. There is an absence on the other side of the page.
I have come to appreciate that absence.
It leaves a chair open.
Each year, I can sit down in it.
I can become the young teacher again and bring Kozol the questions I have accumulated since the last time I read him. The questions I brought in 2007 were those of someone beginning a profession. The questions I bring now belong to someone who has spent years inside it. They carry students I remember, students I worry about, mistakes I have made, successes I still do not completely understand, institutional frustrations, changing responsibilities, and the slow accumulation of experiences that we call expertise.
The danger of expertise, however, is certainty.
One of the passages I return to in Kozol concerns Paul Klee’s Bird Garden, painted in 1924. During Kozol’s early teaching in Boston, he displayed works of art for his students. He recalls being told that Klee was “too sophisticated for the children of this neighborhood.” He put Bird Garden up anyway.
The children loved it.
Kozol remembers the painting becoming an “instant favorite,” with students gathering around it when they passed. The adults had already decided something about the children. They knew the neighborhood. They knew their academic circumstances. They knew the difficulties surrounding their education. From that information, they believed they could predict the limits of what those children might understand.
Then the children stopped in front of Klee.
There is something profound in that small act.
They did not need to explain the Bauhaus. They did not need to know Klee’s place within European modernism or possess the vocabulary of abstraction. They did not have to write an analysis of the painting’s forms or explain the strange relationship between its birds, vegetation, symbols, and geometry.
They looked.
Something in the painting arrested their attention.
We sometimes make the mistake of thinking that because a child cannot articulate an experience in the language adults expect, the child has not had the experience. We confuse vocabulary with perception, academic fluency with intelligence, and explanation with understanding.
Art continually exposes the weakness of those assumptions.
Klee’s Bird Garden is particularly suited to the lesson. It is recognizably a garden, although no garden actually looks like this one. Birds inhabit an environment of branching forms, geometric structures, strange vegetation, and patches of color. Some birds announce themselves immediately. Others nearly disappear into the surrounding forms. The painting hovers somewhere between representation and symbol, as though Klee were less interested in showing us a garden than in showing us the idea of one.
A garden is nature, but it is cultivated nature. Someone prepares the soil, tends it, waters it, protects what is vulnerable, and creates conditions favorable to growth. But the gardener cannot command growth.
That distinction matters to me as a teacher.
Education is filled with attempts to predict human beings. We collect data. We identify patterns. We diagnose problems. We learn about trauma and poverty. We examine academic histories, disciplinary histories, disabilities, family circumstances, race, gender, language, and countless other dimensions of a student's experience. Much of this knowledge is necessary. Circumstances matter. They influence opportunity, behavior, belonging, and the ways institutions respond to children.
But circumstances are not destiny.
The great danger is that information intended to help us understand a student can become information we use to finish understanding them.
A child can become the trauma.
The poverty.
The reading level.
The referral.
The disability.
The reputation that arrived in the room before the student did.
Race and gender can become categories through which adults presume to know a young person rather than dimensions of an identity infinitely more complex than any institutional description can contain.
There is an ethical difference between recognizing the conditions shaping a person's life and believing those conditions tell us the limits of that person.
That is what I hear now in Kozol’s story about Klee.
Someone looked at the children and saw the neighborhood.
Kozol put the painting on the wall.
The children looked at the painting.
The latter act required trust.
It required Kozol to concede that he did not know beforehand what would happen between those children and that image. He could provide the encounter, but he could not control its outcome. In another passage, Kozol describes teaching as an opportunity to “bring joy and beauty, mystery and mischievous delight” into children’s lives. I increasingly think those things matter precisely because they cannot always be reduced to measurable outcomes.
Beauty does not need to justify itself with a learning objective before a child deserves access to it.
Mystery does not need to be differentiated according to reading level.
Wonder does not belong only to children whose circumstances adults have judged conducive to wonder.
Perhaps this is where Kozol’s title matters so much to me. Letters to a Young Teacher unmistakably echoes another book I return to repeatedly, Rainer Maria Rilke’s Letters to a Young Poet. Rilke also writes across an asymmetrical correspondence, answering a young man who has approached him with questions about art, vocation, uncertainty, and life.
His most enduring counsel is also among the simplest:
“Live the questions now.”
I have loved that sentence for years, but I hear it differently when I place Rilke beside Kozol.
When I began teaching, I thought experience would answer my questions. In some ways, it has. I know infinitely more about teaching than I did in 2007. I understand institutions more clearly. I recognize patterns I could not have recognized then. I possess techniques, language, and judgment that only experience can produce.
But perhaps maturity in teaching is not finally measured by how many questions disappear.
Perhaps it is measured by which questions we refuse to stop asking.
Do I still believe that students can surprise me?
Do I still distinguish between understanding a student's circumstances and predicting a student's possibilities?
Can I recognize trauma without seeing only trauma?
Can I acknowledge economic disadvantage without assuming a poverty of imagination?
Can I recognize the significance of race, gender, disability, and identity without imagining that any category exhausts the person standing in front of me?
Can I encounter a student with a long disciplinary history without assuming I already know how the next chapter ends?
Do I still believe that young people deserve encounters with beauty, difficulty, mystery, and wonder?
After all these years, am I still willing to put Bird Garden on the wall?
That question has become the heart of Kozol’s story for me.
Putting the painting on the wall means accepting the limits of my own knowledge. It means admitting that there are dimensions of every student I will never see unless I create room for them to appear. It means resisting the professional temptation to transform patterns into prophecies.
It means trusting.
There is a particular humility required in that kind of trust because the teacher may never witness its consequences. A student may stop before the painting and say nothing. Something may happen internally that never becomes visible to me. A book, an image, a conversation, or a gesture may become important years later, long after the student has left my classroom.
Education contains enormous amounts of invisible work.
Perhaps that is another reason Bird Garden stays with me. Klee’s garden is crowded with life, but not all of that life announces itself equally. Some forms blaze against the background. Others require attention before they emerge. The fact that something is difficult to see does not mean it is absent.
The same is true of children.
And perhaps the same is true of teachers.
Every year, I return to Letters to a Young Teacher carrying another year of experience. I am no longer the teacher who first opened the book in 2007. I would not want to be. Experience ought to change us.
But I do not want experience to close me.
I want there always to remain something of the young teacher—the one who still has questions, who is still capable of being surprised, who has not become so fluent in the language of schools that he mistakes description for destiny.
Rilke tells me to live the questions.
Kozol reminds me whom those questions are for.
Klee gives me the image.
And so, at the beginning of another school year, I return to the book and take my place once more in the empty chair on the other side of Kozol’s correspondence. I bring different questions than I brought in 2007. Next year, I expect they will be different again.
But I hope one of them never changes.
Am I still willing to put Bird Garden on the wall?
I hope the answer is always found in the act of putting it there.
