Herbert Kohl
"I Won't Learn from You" and Other Thoughts on Creative Maladjustment.
(Kohl 2005)
A book of essays
Notes from my Learning Journal on:
"I will not learn from you"
This book makes some very powerful statements about people's refusal to learn and the techniques they employ in order to actively avoid learning.
This first essay focusses on this - the writer uses his own refusal to learn Yiddish as a child as an example of dysfunctional choices later regretted.
He looks at the use of 'not-learning' as a positive as well as a negative. Ideas of racism and sexism are examined in this light. The cultural imperialism of the academic environment.
Self esteem is examined - people's self esteem may in in fact be raised by making the choice to 'not-learn' from a society that they feel alienated from. Issues about children who actively hide their abilities in school are raised.
I think there is an element of this in the actions of some children in the school. It rings true that people will find ways to take power in situations where they feel powerless.
The Tattooed Man
An essay that looks at the power of literature to open doors to unimagined worlds of experience and at teaching as a romantic pursuit. This is the heady stuff from 36 Children that fired my desire to teach in the first place.
Great quote:
I know that I could not have invented Mozart myself, and contrary to some educators who would have us believe that children create their own worlds, I know that the worlds created by individuals are tiny and that children need to connect with culture and history as much as they need to be free to contribute to them. Fear of multiculturalism, of learning things that force you to change the way you view the world, is akin to putting down my encounter of Mozart as a betrayal of the Bronx.
(my emphasis)
There seems to be a belief, especially in primary literacy that children need to only be exposed texts which relate to their own experience. I wrote about this in a conversation in First Class recently.
Kohl introduces the idea of 'hope-mongering'. This is about the unlearning of stupidity, the almost religious belief that all children have untapped capabilities if only we can find a way to reach them. That all children need to hear us say "You are smart. You can do this."
He sees learning as being situated in the time and the political situation in which it finds itself. Needs change and now the need is for hope to counter the ground down hopelessness that children are surrounded by.
Passionately sharing our enthusiasm for learning with children is not to be denigrated. The skill of the good teacher can be life-enhancing and should not be written off. Opening doors for children that let them see a world beyond the one they inhabit is seen as almost a sacred trust.
However I have never known a child, no matter how superficially unmotivated she or he might seem, whose indifference, hopelessness or rage did not mask a lively imagination and dreams of challenging work, lasting love and a fullness of being.
This feels like such a contrast from the view of the child put forward in Rogers work. I think in some sense they are both saying the same thing but there's a difference in emphasis on who must make the changes. In Roger's work the child's behaviour is seen as the problem and change whilst being influenced by the teacher must come from the child. It is the child who must change to fit the needs of the school.
In the Howarth book it is the teacher and the school who must change their behaviour and this in turn will modify the response of the child.
Here the teacher is taken further into the world of the child and encourage to see why 'negative' choices are being made. There is a respect for those choices which is absent in the other books. Here the child is seen as reachable, teachable, if only the key can be found. The behaviours will fade away if the child is engaged. I like this book! It chimes so well with my experience. Yet it asks so much of teachers and schools. So little progress towards the kind of changes he envisions has been made in the last 25 years.
I wrote about something like in this blog entry recently.
Creative Maladjustment
This essay provides a guide to how to survive in the public schools system in the states whilst still challenging all the iniquities it involves. These are the sort of adjustments I might have been well advised to make in my previous encounters with the education system.
Overall these essays have a firm emphasis on the role of the teacher and the need to show the child the richness and variety the world has to offer without in anyway encouraging them to reject their own culture. They seem to be about openness and a heady, romantic view of education in its widest sense. Kolb's writing still chimes for me, as it did in the past. It seems so far from the agenda of behaviour modification and cognitive behavioural therapy. I know from my own experience working with groups that exciting and interesting subject matter approached with enthusiasm can make many behavioural problems disappear. I also know that sometimes this is simply not enough. Sometimes, for some children, behaviour patterns are triggered that are hard for them to break. Indeed the trigger can sometimes be the production of a 'good' piece of work or praise which triggers an uncomfortable emotion.
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