'I Won't Learn from You': And Other Thoughts on Creative Maladjustment - Softcover

Herbert Kohl is one of the country's leading educators and the author of more than forty books, including the classic 36 Children. Recipient of the National Book Award and the Robert F. Kennedy Book Award, among others, he was founder and first director of the Teachers and Writers Collaborative and established the PEN West Center in San Francisco. Kohl lives in Point Arena, California.

Preface

Not-learning, hopemongering, and creative maladjustment are on my mind these days. Not-learning is the conscious decision no to learn something that you could learn.It consists, for example, of refusing to learn how to cheat on your axes cook crack cocaine, or yield to community pressure to become racist or sexist―choosing not to learn something that you find morally offensive or personally noxious. Hopemongering is the affirmation of hope and the dream of a just and equitable future despite all the contrary evidence provided by experience. Creative maladjustment is the art of not becoming what other people want you to be and learning, in difficult times, to affirm yourself while at the same time remaining caring and compassionate.

These three concepts presuppose a fundamental belief that we all have freedom of choice and free will, and that each of us is responsible for the kind of person he becomes and for the way he treats others. Not-learning, hopemongering, and creative maladjustment are the guiding principles of my teaching and my personal life―principles sometimes difficult to maintain, but nevertheless persistent and insistent in their demands on everyday life.

The essays in this book are reflections on the complexity of holding to one's dreams. I Won't Learn from You was written a few years ago, but I have been thinking about some of the stories and ideas in it for over twenty years. The ideas in it are rooted in my childhood and my teaching. There have been times when I've been unable to speak about what I've experienced, when events have overwhelmed my ability to understand or communicate them. The story of Akmir, which I've tried to tell in the title essay, has troubled me for years, and I probably would not have written it if other youngsters I know these days had not been living through the same pain Akmir experienced in his short life.

"The Tattooed Man" was equally difficult for me to write because it had to do with why I became a public school teacher and why I continue to teach and care about public schools after seeing so many public schools that don't work. Writing it took me back to my childhood dreams and fantasies, and to my own experiences as a student in the New York City public schools. The essay is not just about schools. It is as much about how one comes back home to serve the community after having left how childhood shapes vocation, and how moral values become everyday principles. It is the most personal writing I have ever done.

The essays on equity and political correctness are part of my ongoing attempt to clarify the way we talk about children and learning and oppose stigmatization of all kinds. They are attempts to engage people in the continuing struggle for social and economic justice and to place it in the context of teaching and learning.

The final essay "Creative Maladjustment," is about the need to remain within public education while trying to transform it. It is an attempt to show, through stories, the ways i which positive changes can be made within systems that seem unmoveable and dysfunctional.

All of these essays are extended stories, teaching and learning tales. They provide approximations o theories and expositions of ideas based on my experiences and those of people I've been privileged to work with or work for. Taken together they proclaim the abiding importance of teaching hope, resisting arbitrary authority, and taking control of one's own learning. They are my way of sharing the problems and rewards of trying to do decent work in a too-often indecent society and of affirming the importance of all our stories.