Kozol’s book addresses the innocence of young students, their loss of innocence as they age past middle school, and the role of teachers in fostering childhood innocence. Good teachers are “ministers of innocence, practitioners of tender expectations” (4-5), meaning that a good teacher should work with children and instruct them as if they actually are children and not cogs in an education machine or just future jobholders. Additionally, Kozol’s correspondence with Francesca explores a new teacher’s loss of innocence (or naivety) as she begins a job in an underfunded inner-city public school.

The attitudes and priorities of school principals and the administrations behind them dramatically affect the working lives of teachers in both Kozol’s and Francesca’s experiences. A good principal like Francesca’s has similar beliefs regarding pedagogy and encourages a teacher’s efforts to connect with the classroom, while bad principals like Kozol’s Roxbury public school principal downplay shortcomings, lie to parents, and discourage teachers from bringing their creativity and personalities into the classroom. The administrator who chastised Kozol for reading the poetry of a Black American writer to his class by criticizing “literature written in native dialects” (198) is an example of a bad administrator who has no business working in the education field.