Kohl and Holt
18/06/07 16:01
I have been reading Herbert Kohl in between Ursula le Guin and have been struck by a contrast
between him and Holt. Kohl, like John Holt, was a teacher
who started to look more critically at the system he worked within.
Although he recognises, like Holt, that teaching and the school
system in general can potentially do more harm than good to
children, he does not reject the system out of hand, preferring to
think that having an impact at a personal, individual level is
still a positive thing. The collection of essays I am reading is
more about telling stories of individuals and how they have reacted
to learning and the things they have done to retain their
intellectual integrity in the face of a bad system. His, I think,
first book, '36 children' is similar in some ways to Holt's 'How
children fail', in that it is a record of his time with a
particular class and the children's learning and how he worked to
make the curriculum more relevant to their lives. In much of his
writing he makes quite fundamental criticisms of schools, but he
never quite takes the jump into saying that we should reject them
altogether. Holt takes what he observed in his own classroom, that
no matter what he did he was damaging his pupils' ability to learn,
and concludes that it cannot be the only way to educate, and goes
in search of alternatives. Kohl does not. He focusses instead on
the ways to work within the system and work the system to the
advantage of his pupils. I can sympathise with his conclusions in
many ways, what is important to him is helping the individuals he
comes into contact with rather than trying to tackle the whole
system. Anyway, when I have finished the book I'll write something
longer, I love especially his concept of 'not-learning', the active
and positive process of refusing to learn something that someone
tries to teach you.