Jonathan Kozol, with suit and sneakers, fidgeted in a chair on the stage of the Davis Concert Hall on Friday as School of Education Dean Eric Madsen introduced him.

"You're in for a thought provoking evening, but not an easy one," Madsen said.

Kozol, an education advocate and author of "Shame of the Nation: The Restoration of Apartheid Schooling in America," repeatedly leaned back and forth and shaded his eyes against the stage lights.

"I was fussing because the lights were too bright and I like to see you and that beautiful idealism in your eyes," he said smiling as he stepped up to the podium.

Kozol arrived in Fairbanks on Friday after delivering a lecture in Anchorage the previous night. After speaking to the crowd, he would fly to Minneapolis that same night for another engagement.

A busy man, Kozol travels around the nation visiting public schools, delivering lectures, and preaching to politicians. Coming to Alaska, though, was a first.

"This is the longest plane ride I've ever taken in the United States," he said when speaking about the ride he took all the way from his home in New York.

Admitting that most of his experience has been with Latino and black minorities, Kozol said his visits with Native Alaskans helped him understand how deeply Westernization affected the Native Alaska culture.

"I've learned a lot since coming to Alaska," he said.

Listening to children was a recurring theme throughout Kozol's lecture. He reiterated the point that listening to children shouldn't be considered a simple act of kindness.

"Leave time for children to speak their own words, and view it as a favor to yourself," he said.

Politically motivated, Kozol believes that teachers aren't political enough, and a lot of politicians just don't have a clue.

"I get so tired of going to Washington and hearing politicians talk about how teachers are the frontline of the nation," he said. "They need to teach a class to see what it's really like."

On the topic of education equality, Kozol discussed President Bush's No Child Left Behind policy.

"I wish we had happier people running things," he said.

Kozol said it was ridiculous to hold seven-year-olds accountable for a standardized test but not hold a president or Congressman accountable for keeping their own children out of the public school system.

Kozol said that the NCLB had no mention of the words love, joy, compassion, and kindness. Instead, it has words of judgment and measurement.

The "Success For All" textbooks, he claimed, were written like scripts. Laughing, he said they were suited for the Hitler Youth.

"Seriously, the books say that if you want kids to be silent, you do this," he said raising his hand in a "Heil Hitler" gesture.

Not a huge fan of numbers, because "that's just boring," as he said, Kozol made few references to statistics.

Kozol told stories to humanize the issue of inequality in the school system. He talked one young, black girl named Pineapple, whom he described as "a little version of Oprah Winfrey." Pineapple, Kozol said, received about $11,000 a year on her education in the school she was now attending, compared to the elegant suburbs just a few miles away where she'd get $22,000.

"These kids come into school with a price tag on their heads," said Kozol raising his voice. "They are K-Mart babies; you want to see Nordstrom Babies, go to a lawyer's neighborhood."

Kozol went on to describe the condition of the schools he visited.

Kozol said that Pineapple had described her cafeterias as "the lunch room from hell." And it really was, according to Kozol. There were 3,400 kids in a building that could legally hold only 1,800.

He told a story of a white student he saw in a school in the Bronx. The teacher, who had worked in that school for fifteen years, claimed he was the first white child she'd ever had in a class.

"Turns out he was a German immigrant who'd gotten on the wrong bus," Kozol said.

"Have you noticed that there are no more black boards in the schools," he said. "They're all white boards now, with dry-erase markers."