Product Description

A call to arms against the increasingly hostile climate of public education, hailed by Bill Ayers as "a wise and measured handbook for the struggle ahead."

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).

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #704377 in Books
• Published on: 2005-08-02
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 160 pages

Review
A call to arms. -- The New York Times

Expresses a refreshing idealism about the possibilities of the classroom. Give this book to anyone who wants to teach. -- Mike Rose, author of Possible Lives: The Promise of Public Education in America

[A] passionate declaration of war against a punitive, self-defeating system. -- O, The Oprah Magazine

About the Author
Herbert Kohl is the author of more than forty books, including the classic 36 Children. A recipient of the National Book Award, he was founder and first director of the Teachers and Writers Collaborative in New York and established the PEN West branch in San Francisco, where he now lives.

Customer Reviews

A nice antidote to "teacher proof" instruction
When I went through the Success For All "Wings" training, I found myself and the others at my table acting "incredibly stupid" as a means of subverting the training. We got very silly. It occured to me that the kids do the exact same thing in class as a response to overly controlling teacher instructions. This book is a very thoughtful examination of how and why kids act silly and dumb in class. He gives examples of "stupid" situations that children react to by acting stupid, such as the case of the six year olds who did not believe that a picture of a woman mopping showed that she liked to mop, as they were supposed to in order to give the correct answer. They felt that mopping was something one had to do but did not necessarily like, but there was no room for such distinction on the test.
He goes on to suggest that the same kind of stupid behavior as a protest against oppressive and stupid but mandated methods of teaching is affecting teachers as well.

As a teacher in an elementary school, I really enjoyed this thoughtful and insightful book. I would strongly recommend reading it.