The Discipline of Hope: Learning from a Lifetime of Teaching Hardcover - 1998

From the publisher

It has been thirty years since Herbert Kohl taught the sixth-grade Harlem class he wrote about in his classic "36 Children". He has been teaching ever since, in kindergarten through graduate school, as he has pursued his lifelong work with children, adolescents, college-age students, and education professionals. In "The Discipline of Hope", Kohl examines teaching as a vocation and as a skill, and examines his own love affair with it. He provides insight into how learning takes place in the widest range of circumstances, both in and out of a formal school setting. He demonstrates how schools and other centers of learning can be transformed so that they become places that nurture children while instilling discipline and how they can help students meet high academic standards, develop a sense of respect for themselves and others, and grow into successful adults.

"The Discipline of Hope" is grounded in the relationship between teacher and student; it dwells on the mutuality between the two as they teach each other. Kohl illustrates the knowledge, wisdom, techniques, and ideas that he has gathered from a lifetime of teaching by describing his real experiences in the classrooms and the schools he has worked in. These have ranged from an urban elementary school and an integrated public school kindergarten, to an experimental high school, to one-on-one reading tutorials; from a city storefront learning center to a rural education center and a college classroom. What emerges from Kohl's concrete description is a picture of how the process of education can be done well; how children, even in the most unlikely circumstances with the most difficult lives, can learn, and how they can themselves develop an active concern for justice and equity.