Herb Kohl and Inspiration
- Posted by admin in 20 |
- December 31st, 1969 |
- No Comments
I’m feeling inspired lately. This is partly due to the coming spring, with the growing warmth, the early flower shoots coming up, and the birds starting to migrate back north for the summer. (Birding is another big interest of mine. I’ll have to weave together birding and democratic education sometime - an interesting challenge!) So spring is always an exciting time of year for me.
Yesterday that inspiration grew after seeing educator and prolific education writer Herb Kohl speak at Bank Street College in Manhattan (not to be confused with the current Wisconsin Senator of the same name). I have several of Kohl’s books on my shelf, collected during my education book buying craze a bunch of years back when I began learning about non-conventional approaches to schooling and learning. Yet his books were some of those I only skimmed and had not sat down and read. Until now, that is.
Kohl gave a deeply personal and deeply moving talk, blending stories of his own schooling and teaching experiences with a powerful moral outrage at the current direction of educational practice and policy. I jotted down this line, which I found particularly stirring:
“NCLB is nothing more than the manifestation of a moral deficiency in our attitude towards children.”
But how can we talk to Obama and others about how misguided we might think their policies are, one audience member asked?
Kohl responded by saying first that we cannot avoid the word accountability, that in fact that word and concept are completely fine and positive. The question is not whether or not to hold schools and teachers and students accountable, but rather how and for what?
Kohl also emphasized that we have a moral imperative to expose those who are denying young people the opportunity to grow fully as a human being and supporting approaches that shrink children’s souls and minds. We have the moral responsibility, he said, to point this out to Obama and other policy-makers.
I greatly appreciated that moral perspective, which often gets lost in the nitty-gritty details of talk about testing, standards, curriculum, grades, merit-pay, and other education battle-grounds. Kohl’s point is that we ought not lose sight of the moral argument, that we are talking about “the lives of children” (the title of my favorite book about education, perhaps my favorite book of any type, by George Dennison), and that the educational approaches we practice will have a profound effect on the minds and emotions and spirits of young people.
Herb Kohl’s poetic stories, passion, and humility resonate with me, and give me great enthusiasm and inspiration to continue “to speak the truth to power with love,” as Cornell West has said and my friend and colleague Scott Nine has reminded me.
So while Herb Kohl’s books have been gathering dust on my shelf for several years, they are now down on my coffee table, their pages are open, and I am ready to sit down and get to know Mr. Kohl a bit better.