
Stupidity and Tears: Teaching and Learning in Troubled Times
Pages: 320
|Published: 1 Jan 2004
Description
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).