Герберт Коль: Пионер прогрессивного образования

American educator best known for his advocacy of progressive alternative education
persons of a similar name

Herbert Ralph Kohl (born August 22, 1937) is an American educator best known for his advocacy of progressive alternative education and as the author of more than thirty books on education. He founded the 1960s Open School movement and is credited with coining the term "open classroom".

Born into a Jewish household, Kohl attended the Bronx High School of Science and studied philosophy and mathematics at Harvard University from 1954 to 1958. At Harvard he was president of the Signet Society During the 1958–59 academic year he attended University College, Oxford on a Henry Fellowship, and in 1959–1960 he studied philosophy at Columbia University with a Woodrow Wilson Fellowship. Deciding against an academic career, Kohl entered Teachers College, Columbia University, in 1961 and, in 1962, received an MA in teaching, while qualifying for a permanent K 8 teaching certificate in New York City public schools. In 1962 Kohl became a sixth grade teacher in the New York City public schools, something he had dreamed of doing since childhood.

Kohl has been teaching and writing for over 45 years. During that time, he has taught every grade from kindergarten through graduate school but not in that order. His career as a teacher began in 1962 in Harlem, where he continued to work for six years. From September 1964 to June 1967, under a grant from the National Institute of Education, he ran a storefront school for junior high and high school students, taught high school psychology and writing, and worked as curriculum coordinator for the Parent Board of the I. S. 201 Community School District. In 1967, he became the founding director of the Teachers & Writers Collaborative, a project intended to transform the teaching of writing in the schools. He is still a board member of the Collaborative. In 1964, Kohl's first book, The Age of Complexity, about analytic and existential philosophy, was published at the same time that he was teaching sixth grade. His first writings on education, Teaching the Unteachable (New York Review of Books, New York, 1967) and The Language and Education of the Deaf (The Urban Review Press, New York, 1967), set the themes for much of his future work. They centered on advocating for the education of poor and disabled students and critiquing and demystifying the stigmatization of students who are perfectly capable of learning. In 1967, 36 Children (New American Library, New York, 1967) was also published, and Kohl was drawn into national debates on the education of African American and other minority student and into conversations on school reform and the nature of teaching and learning. He is still engaged in them now having lived through cycles of reform and reaction, none of which succeeded in creating excellent education for the children of the poor. The problems persist, and he still believes that by hard, imaginative effort, they can be solved. In 1968, Kohl moved to Berkeley, California, where his family lived for the next nine years. He was a Visiting Associate Professor, half time in the English Department and half in the School of Education, at the University of California, Berkeley during the spring semester of 1968. Then, he received a grant from the Carnegie Corporation of New York (September 1968 to June 1969) to work with Allan Kaprow, the "happener" who was a Professor of Art at the State University of New York, Stony Brook, on teacher education and the development of creative curriculum that crossed disciplinary and artistic boundaries. Working with Kaprow freed him to cross boundaries, work with students in theater, and experiment with interactive media. The unlikely marriage, made by Margaret Mahoney of Carnegie, had a profound influence on Kohl's teaching and thinking about learning. An alternative high school, Other Ways emerged during that collaboration and it was supported, in 1969, by a grant from the Carnegie Corporation (September 1969 to June 1970) and then the Ford Foundation (September 1970 to June 1971). It was one of the first attempts to create a series of alternative educational options within public school systems and part of the free school movement. An assessment by the Scientific Analysis Corp. documents that during Kohl's tenure, Other Ways offered no basic skills, focusing instead on subjects such as Taoist Science, the Unconscious and Decision Making, Guerrilla Theatre, Urban Survival, Seamanship, etc. For that reason, students were simultaneously enrolled at one of the regular secondary schools, where they also took classes. In Spring 1971, Other Ways became part of the Berkeley Experimental Schools Project (BESP), leading to Kohl's resignation, due to loss of the school's independence as well as staff and student conflict. BESP was one of eight projects funded nationally by the federal Experimental Schools Program (ESP), which was launched in 1970 as part of the U. S. Office of Education. The announced federal aim of the program was to effect “comprehensive change” within local school districts. Kohl's perspective on Other Ways can be found in Half the House (Dutton, New York, 1974). One student's experience at the school, including a tumultuous sexual relationship with an Other Ways teacher and administrator that began during Kohl's tenure, is documented in the voluminous diary writings of Tammy Bellah that appear in Melanie Bellah's Tammy: A Biography of a Young Girl (Aten Press, 1999). Tammy Bellah was the eldest daughter of sociologist Robert N. Bellah. She committed suicide in 1973. In 1972, Kohl became co director of the teacher education program at the Center for Open Learning and Teaching, and he taught a combined kindergarten–first grade at a Berkeley public elementary school while he was acting as a master teacher for its teacher education students. For ten years (1970 to 1982), he wrote a monthly column for Teacher Magazine, and he contributed many reviews and articles for publications such as The New York Times, The Times, The Nation, and The New York Review of Books. Kohl also wrote a number of books during that period including The Open Classroom, Golden Boy as Anthony Cool, Reading, How to, A Book of Puzzlements, Mathematical Puzzlements, On Teaching, Growing With Your Children, and Half the House. Kohl's writing had significant influence on other education writers and theorists including John Holt, Jonathan Kozol, Richard Farson, Ivan Illich, Paul Goodman, George Dennison, James Herndon, Charles E. Silberman, John Taylor Gatto, Neil Postman and others. In 1976, Herbert and Judith Kohl, his wife, wrote The View from the Oak, which won the 1978 National Book Award, Children's Literature. In 1977, they moved to Point Arena, California, and established the Coastal Ridge Research and Education Center. Over the years, it has sponsored a summer camp, where he taught theater, and hosted a number of seminars on education and social justice. Such seminars have involved educators such as Myles Horton and Septum Clarke of the Highlander Center, Joseph and Helen Featherstone, William Ayers, Len Solo, Ira Glaser, Norm Fruchter, Asa Hilliard, Courtney Cazden, Phillip Lopate, Cynthia Brown, and Ron Jones. The Center also worked with Amnesty International developing a curriculum on conscience and human rights and with the ACLU developing a Bill of Rights curriculum. Kohl also spent a year (1985–1986) teaching in a one room schoolhouse in Point Arena, and he created, under a grant from the Agency for International Development and the University of Massachusetts Amherst (June 1986 – January 1986), a month long residential session and a semester's internship in the New York City schools for the heads of teachers' colleges from Botswana sponsored by UMass Amherst. During the 1980s, Kohl also spent time working with a number of pioneers in the computer world. He was on the Board of the Atari Education Foundation and consulted with Alan Kay's Vivarium Project of Apple Computers. His work with computers also involved being a games columnist for Recreational Computing Magazine and Publish!, spending several years (1983–1985) as Director of Software Development for Scientific American, co authoring four books on computer programming and games for Reston Publishing Company, and editing a series of books on games and computers for them as well. Also during that period, as a member of the Executive Board of PEN, American Center, he established the PEN American Center West. Kohl continued writing over these years and teaching occasionally as a Research Fellow at the University of San Francisco. He was the Gordon Sanders Professor of Education at Hamline University in St. Paul in 1988–1989 and then later spent more time in the Twin Cities area, as Benedict Professor of Educational Studies at Carleton College in 1995. Meanwhile, he was engaged with developing pedagogical content and structure that would take advantage of the strengths and experiences of poor and minority students. Throughout the 1980s, Herb and Judith Kohl worked with Myles Horton on his autobiography, The Long Haul (Doubleday, New York, 1990). It won the Robert F. Kennedy Book Award in 1991. From September 1994 to June 1997, Kohl had the opportunity to work, through a grant from the Aaron Diamond Foundation, with the Fund for New York City Public Education September. The goal of the project was to design structures for the development of small, theme based and community oriented schools of choice within the city's public school system. The Fund morphed into New Visions Schools and is engaged in implementing that work. In 1997, Kohl was appointed a Senior Fellow at the Open Society Institute, the US foundation that is part of the Soros Foundation Network. From September 1997 to June 1999, he worked towards planning a funding strategy in education for the Foundation, and in the process, he managed to support a number of projects that promise effective school reform. Kohl has found himself both teaching and writing throughout his adult life. He feels that writing is a private matter, education a public one. They play off each other, nurturing and informing each other. Both are a source of energy and give him a feeling of being of use to others. His books published from 1982 to 1999 include Basic Skills (Little Brown, Boston, 1982), Growing Minds (Harper and Row, New York, 1986), Making Theater (Teachers and Writers Collaborative, New York, 1988), I Won't Learn from You (The New Press, New York, 1994), and Should We Burn Barbar? (The New Press, New York, 1995), and The Discipline of Hope (Simon and Schuster, New York, 1998).