Stupidity and Tears

From the National Book Award-winning author and educator, a book about teaching well in troubled times. A remarkable teacher who discovered in his first teaching assignment that in education he could keep playing with toys, didn't have to stop learning and could use what he knew in the service of others.Lisa Delpit on Herbert Kohl in The New York Times Book Review Teachers, parents, and would-be public-education reformers are battling a failing system. Facing strict budgets and misguided scrutiny, educators are confronted with unprecedented demands and a system that often works against them. Stupidity and Tears, by National Book Award-winning educator Herbert Kohl, is a much-needed call to resistance that offers concrete examples of teaching well under pressure. Kohl's central concern is the importance of teachers' work, both individually and collectively, in the struggle to keep democracy and hope alive at a time when teachers and their students are under siege. Topics discussed include the unflagging pressures of standards-based assessment, the pain teachers feel when asked to teach against their pedagogical conscience or to a high-stakes test, the development of a capacity to sense how students perceive the world, and the strength of the social imagination. Stupidity and Tears is rich with suggestions on developing positive and direct resistance to contemporary forces that threaten social justice.

Herbert Kohl has written more than forty books. He was founder and first director of the Teachers & Writers Collaborative and established the PEN West Center and the Institute for Social Justice and Education at the University of San Francisco