BOOK Open Classroom by Herbert R. Kohl ebay price shop free find
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Book description
the open classroom: a PRACTICAL guide to a NEW WAY of teachingI saw this on the bargain shelf while checking out at an anarchist bookstore in Philadelphia, The Wooden Shoe, and thought Id pick it up. (By the way, if you are ever in the area check out The Wooden Shoe. Its on South Street and is an excellent selection of radical political theory - especially some of the newer literature.) It was $2. One of the my best buys ever. The Open Classroom shares with The Pedagogy of the Oppressed the sense that traditional, Anglo-style education is essentially authoritarian. I have not yet finished the latter book; it did not speak to me as The Open Classroom did, though now I think I will begin to read it again. A comparison between the books by Kohl and Friere would be an interesting project. Both are strongly informed by philosophy - very explicitly in The Pedagogy of the Oppressed, which makes mention every other page or so of Hegel, Marx, Sartre, Merleau-Ponty, etc. On the other hand, The Open Classroom consists solely of Kohls words. He is a simple writer, and I was able to finish this book in probably less than two hours. But he is incredibly thoughtful. Kohl could have taught Foucault about the structures of power in education, and his knowledge comes from experience.I capitalized above the words practical and new way. That is because Kohl is practical, and honest: the system does not like open classrooms and the teachers and students who desire them. Rather than pretending that one could escape from this reality into an ideal teaching setting, he shows how it is possible to work within even the harshest conditions - if, that is, one is capable of doing so. And that is another point: he does not expect of teachers invincibility; for the notion that the teacher should keep his emotions and troubles away from his work is itself authoritarian. Dealing with state mandated tests can even be a learning experience. Can we parody it? he asks. Can we treat it as a cultural document? Hope and despair are dialectically related. Kohl gives into the latter and finds the former.Kohls philosophy is in the background, unlike Frieres. But it seems to me that Kohls work has a certain Foucauldian flavoring to it. Kohl thinks about the space of the classroom, how its elements can be rearranged to make open spaces and how they are arranged to make authoritarian spaces; he recognizes that disciplinary and scholastic records have normalizing effects. I included him in my Foucault section because his analysis of how time is allocated in schools, essentially treated like space, and his writing (already mentioned) on the use and creation of space in the classroom could certainly be looked at as an application of some of the ideas Foucualt espouses in Discipline and Punish. Kohl saw Power/Knowledge at work before the term become one of Foucaults trademark ideas: he wrote The Open Classroom six years before Foucault even published Discipline and Punish.If I have done this book an injustice with my review, if I have simply rambled, circled around it, I apologize. Books like this are difficult to write about, in part because they are so brilliant, in part because they inspire a certain paralyzing enthusiasm in certain readers, of which I am evidently one. I will end with a quote from the book - its last paragraph. This is quite unlike the rest of the book - more prophetic, more political, more grandiose. The rest of the book is more subtle, more humble, more practical. But this quote functions well out of context, and Kohl earns the right to proclaim it:Our schools are crazy. They do not serve the interests of adults, and they do not serve the interests of young people. They teach objective knowledge and its corollary, obedience to authority. They teach avoidance of conflict and obeisance to tradition in the guise of history. They teach equality and democracy while while castrating students and controlling teachers. Most of all they teach people to be silent about what they think and feel, and worst of all, they teach people to pretend that they are saying what they think and fell. To try to break away from stupid schooling is no easy matter for teacher or student. It is a lonely and long fight to escape from believing that one needs to do what people say one should do and that one ought to be the person one is expected to be. Yet to make such an escape is a step toward beginning again and becoming the teachers we never knew we could be.
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