Stupidity and Tears: Teaching and Learning in Troubled Times - Hardcover

Kohl, Herbert R.

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9781565848511: Stupidity and Tears: Teaching and Learning in Troubled Times

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1565848519 ISBN 13: 9781565848511

Publisher: The New Press, 2004

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In Stupidity and Tears, renowned educator and National Book Award winner Herbert Kohl offers us a thoughtful and ultimately optimistic meditation on the forces that conspire to keep teachers and students “stupid”—i.e., frustrated and unable to excel in an education system that is clearly failing them.

Among the topics explored by Kohl are the pressures of standards based assessments and harrowing sink-or-swim policies, the pain teachers feel when asked to teach against their pedagogical conscience, the development of a capacity to sense how students perceive the world, and the importance of hope and creativity in strengthening the social imagination of students and teachers.

A rousing call for common sense in the face of dwindling budgets, crippling state mandates, and injudicious politics, Stupidity and Tears is “vintage Kohl—incisive, funny, reflective, profound . . . a provocation to educators to better teach all our children” (Norman Fruchter, NYU Institute of Education and Social Policy).

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About the Author:

Herbert Kohl is a celebrated writer, teacher, and advocate. He is the author of more than forty books, including “I Won’t Learn from You”: And Other Thoughts on Creative Maladjustment, Should We Burn Babar?: Essays on Children’s Literature and the Power of Stories, The Discipline of Hope: Learning from a Lifetime of Teaching, Stupidity and Tears: Teaching and Learning in Troubled Times, She Would Not Be Moved: How We Tell the Story of Rosa Parks and the Montgomery Bus Boycott, and The Herb Kohl Reader: Awakening the Heart of Teaching (all published by The New Press), as well as the bestselling classic 36 Children. He is a co-author, with Judith Kohl, of The View from the Oak: The Private Worlds of Other Creatures and a co-editor, with Tom Oppenheim, of The Muses Go to School: Inspiring Stories About the Importance of Arts in Education, both published by The New Press. A recipient of a National Book Award and a Robert F. Kennedy Book Award, he was the founder and first director of the Teachers and Writers Collaborative in New York City, has served as a senior fellow at the Open Society Institute, and established the PEN West Center. In 2010, Kohl was named a Guggenheim Fellow in education. He lives in Point Arena, California.

From Publishers Weekly:

National Book Award-winning educator Kohl (36 Children and some 40 other books) offers six essays on "sustaining the joy of teaching while under pressure." How can teachers maintain integrity and creativity when school systems mandate uniform teaching protocols and test-oriented curricula? How do teachers guide the moral development of children after 9/11? How can teachers reconnect alienated students? With 40 years of experience working with the nation's "least-served children," Kohl isn't afraid to speak plainly about the "willful stupidity" of our education system and currently proposed reforms. He says mandating a uniform curriculum won't improve education, since "a terrible teacher will be terrible" with any curriculum and such micromanaging just pushes creative teachers into private schools. Literacy "will not come through testing and an obsession with standards, but through patient, intelligent, and sensitive speaking, reading, and listening." Thus teachers need to be aware of how they are being heard, in much the same way that politicians, lovers and actors are always monitoring how their message is being received. Instead of a simplistic, monocultural model of moral development, Kohl stresses the need to examine a wider range of transformational experiences (social violence, deprivation, altruism, etc.) to understand their impact on children of diverse backgrounds. Brief in words but long on courage, Kohl's latest will be required reading for progressive-minded teaching professionals and recommended to everyone else concerned about the hearts and minds of our next generation of citizens.
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