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Few have inspired as many educators as Herb Kohl. Over the past four decades, Kohl has been a teacher, principal, university teacher educator, social activist and author of more than forty books. His writing emerges from his direct experience in classrooms and challenges us to think about our own practice. He does not shy away from controversy, but appeals to our basic sense of right and wrong.
DA Senior Editor Gary Stager recently had the privilege of sitting down with Herb Kohl to discuss his career and a life well lived. His most recent professional experience was as resident scholar and director of the University of San Francisco's Institute for Teaching Excellence and Social Justice. After two years of exhilarating work, the current political climate and a lack of institutional support ended Kohl's program.
Kohl grew up in the Bronx in the 1940s and '50s. He attended neighborhood public schools and the renowned Bronx High School of Science. Bronx Science was special because of "great teachers," says Kohl. "They were marvelous."
Kohl played a lot of basketball and enjoyed his share of mischief before attending Harvard as an undergraduate and going on to distinguished fellowships at Oxford and Columbia. He remembers always wanting to be a teacher and a writer. He imagined writing "novels and plays and great world-shaking books on philosophy." Despite writing only one early book about philosophy, The Age of Complexity, Kohl says, "Almost all my published work is about education, social change, social justice, things like that." Kohl's second book, Teaching the Unteachable, was published by the New York Review of Books.
Kohl first became a schoolteacher in 1961 at a school for autistic children in New York City but only lasted six months, "because I wasn't any good at it." He then attended Columbia University Teachers College and earned a teaching credential. Kohl remembers, "My first public school job was at P.S. 145 on 106th Street and Amsterdam Avenue, and most of my students were Puerto Rican. There were also some Haitian kids and a couple of Irish kids, who were the wildest ones in the class. This was a very homogeneously grouped school and I was the new teacher on the block, so they gave me all the kids nobody else wanted.
"I cut my teeth on that for one semester. I started in January 1961, and the classroom had been stripped bare by the other teachers, so I had to buy everything-you know, from pencils to chalk to everything in order to teach.
"I started out as a very up-in-front-of-the-classroom, full-frontal, authoritarian teacher with the kids. They were throwing stuff around the room, they were dropping off their chairs, banging on their desks, opening the window and threatening to jump out. They had already gone through fourteen subs before I came in January.
"But I wasn't going to be beaten by them," says Kohl, and he developed a strategy for making the learning environment more productive.
"I had finally won the morning, so the kids would stay calm and try to read, and I could teach them a little bit about skills that they had never acquired or had totally lost in the course of bad schooling. But the afternoon I gave up on-completely gave up on it. So I brought in a record player and paints and pastels and chess and checkers and everything I could think of, and shut the door, put a piece of black paper over the glass, and said to the kids, 'The afternoon is yours as long as you clean up afterwards,' and they learned to respect me."
'The afternoon is yours as long as you clean up
afterward,' and they learned to respect me.
In 1967, Kohl's landmark book, 36 Children, chronicling his first year as an urban educator, was published. The book has been a staple of teacher education courses ever since.
Kohl continued teaching at a couple more New York City schools and then ran a storefront school in Harlem and a high school in Berkeley, California, from 1968 to 1971.
"We had a place called 'Other Ways,' a really interesting, very experimental, very radical high school at a very radical time in not only our society but in that particular city at that particular historical conjuncture. ... We were really pioneering a lot of cross-cultural, multiracial learning; we were pioneering a lot of feminist stuff . It was all beginning to perk up then, and it was pretty wild-a lot of energy and a wonderful staff ." These experiences in creativity, freedom, collaborative teaching, learner-centeredness and respect for individuals inspired a generation of educators who read his book The Open Classroom: A Practical Guide to a New Way of Teaching.
