I might never have picked up the book if the title hadn't spoken to me. "I won't learn from you" sums up one of my deepest fears about formal education (including staff development). In an article I read just the other day, Allan Quigley stirred up this fear again. He claims that teachers and ABE students have such wildly different experiences with formal education that teachers can't extrapolate from their own experience to connect with low literate adults. "The assumption that learners and teachers come from a common schooling background or share a common emotional base of experience is far from accurate. We have two very different perceptions of the schooling reality." ("Understanding Attrition and Improving Retention," Chapter 6, p. 165, in Rethinking Literacy Education: The Critical Need for Practice-Based Change; B. Allan Quigley; S.F.: Jossey-Bass Publishers, 1997.) Kohl's first essay helps ease this fear because he acknowledges the gap and finds moments in his own history that enable him and his reader to traverse it. Quigley's insistence that students and teachers are so different may challenge us to throw aside our assumptions, but it is Kohl who offers us hope. We don't have to resign because we aren't in some way the "right" teachers. We can meet the challenge.
When students decide, "I won't learn from you," they go into "not-learning" mode. "Not-learning" describes any number of behaviors that a learner uses to keep new information from getting into the brain. Young children put their hands over their ears. Less blatant forms of resisting learning include running a silent monologue to concentrate on which competes with and blocks the voices outside. Kohl writes:
Not-learning . . . tends to strengthen the will, clarify one's definition of self, reinforce self-discipline, and provide inner satisfaction. . . . Not learning tends to take place when someone has to deal with unavoidable challenges to her or his personal and family loyalties, integrity and identity. In such situations there are forced choices and no apparent middle ground. To agree to learn from a stranger who does not respect your integrity causes a major loss of self. The only alternative is to not-learn and reject the stranger's world. (p. 6)
Kohl uses examples from his own life as well as from students. He not-learned Yiddish though he was immersed in it. Out of loyalty to his mother who didn't know it and was therefore excluded from this part of family and community life, he made sure not to understand it. I can think of workshop participants who were forced to be present and therefore refused to engage. I call on such strategies when someone in authority uses misogynist language and texts.
The confusing thing is the difference between not-learning and failure. Kohl defines failure as "a mismatch between what the learner wants to do and is able to do. . . . (T)he results of failure are most often a loss of self-confidence accompanied by a sense of inferiority and inadequacy." (p. 6) This is a profile adult educators can recognize instantly. Though Kohl has separated failure and not-learning, I wonder if they are always such pure phenomena. Is it possible that one could start out not-learning and that when the terms for learning have changed, one settles down to learn, only to encounter failure? Maybe the failure is not due to lack of intelligence, but because a developmental window slammed shut in the meantime.
"Not-learning" is a helpful concept to have in mind when certain students enter adult ed. classrooms. Their self-esteem is intact; they have an attitude and are generally unlike downtrodden, grateful students who regularly appear. One of Kohl's gifts is his ability to connect and to learn from his not-learners. I plan to study the sections again where he tricks a young boy into reading and where he finds himself learning from Akmir, a young African-American man who not-learned in order to keep himself from internalizing racist messages in his schooling.
Reading theory on "democracy in education" was never my favorite (YAWN), but Kohl's essay "Uncommon Differences: On Political Correctness, Core Curriculum, and Democracy in Education" captivated me. The tone of this essay seems more angry than the others. The middle section, which critiques E. D. Hirsch Jr., moves quickly, though the ideas require thought and the arguments are built methodically. "Uncommon Differences" first appeared in 1992 when discussions of multicultural curriculum were in their heyday and Hirsch and others attempted to redirect this trend by reasserting classically-derived core curriculum in the form of lists of what eveyone needs to know. Since then, the debate has shifted somewhat to standards and curriculum frameworks. Read against this backdrop, Kohl's words still carry an important warning.
Hirsch claims that a common core of knowledge creates fairness in education. Nazi Germany had a core curriculum, as did the Stalinist Soviet Union. It elevates the values of the people who legislate that core to the status of universal standards of excellence; but if the core reproduces the inequities that exist in a society, it is simply another attempt to keep power relations from changing. (p. 120)
As the field struggles to finalize curriculum frameworks and to spin actual curriculum following those guidelines, Kohl reminds us that this process must be ongoing.
What we might come up with is a continually emerging and self-renewing curriculum, with a constantly evolving and shifting core and a critique informed by student voices and the voices of their communities-that is, with a curriculum that is part of the struggle to make a democracy out of the United States. (p. 125)
Kohl cites experiences where schools and communities are at war because the schools, run by white teachers and administrators, refuse to adapt. They are using traditional, non-inclusive texts and rhetoric, and parents and children of color object. What happens when a different scenario occurs? Community members and school administrators gang up on a progressive teacher for crossing some boundary in a multicultural, anti-racist or anti-homophobic approach to curriculum? Educators must then use "creative maladjustment"-a strategy Kohl borrows from Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. In his final chapter, Kohl discusses how to remain sane and principled in settings which are inequitable. This chapter is helpful, especially for those of us who wonder why we are always getting into trouble for doing the right thing.
Though "Creative Maladjustment" has the final word in the book, I prefer to end on the second essay, "The Tattooed Man." I wish this had been on my night table last winter when burnout threatened. If every task seems too tremendous in the accomplishing phase and yet tiny in its significance, I recommend this essay. One of its images is of a peddler from Kohl's childhood, a dirty, despised rag and clothing collector.
I was scared of him too, but also loved him because the scorn, disdain, mockery, and foolishness he encountered didn't seem to bother him at all. He had secrets that I wanted to know and, scared as I was, I was determined to talk to him. I don't know if I ever did, but at some point during my adolescence I constructed a short exchange we might have had, one which has stuck in my memory. I told him I knew what he was buying, but that I wondered if he was also selling something, and his response was, "Hope, I'm selling hope."He was a hopemonger. I have never forgotten that-hope can be sold, it can be taught or at least spread, it can survive in the strangest and most unlikely places. It is a force that does not disappear. I keep that idea as a counter to the cynicism of reality-mongers, who try to sell the idea that compassion is a form of weakness and hope and justice are illusions. It is a guiding principle of my teaching and writing, one that provides the moral grounds of the struggles I have been involved in over the past thirty years. (p. 43)
Central to what you see in someone is what you are looking for. If you want to find a child's weaknesses, failures, personal problems, or inadequacies, you'll discover them. If you look at a child through the filter of her or his environment or economic status, and make judgments through the filters of your own cultural, gender, and racial biases, you'll find the characteristics you expect. You'll also find yourself well placed to reproduce failure and to develop resistance in some children, a false sense of superiority in others. On the other hand, if you look for strengths and filter the world through the prism of hope, you will see and encourage the unexpected flowering of child life in the most unlikely places. (p. 44)
Sometimes in order to keep hoping it is essential to know that one is in good company. "I Won't Learn From You" and Other Thoughts on Creative Maladjustment is good company. Kohl's thirty-year commitment to public education proves that hope is nourishing sustenance for the long haul. He is reassurance for those in doubt that educators who see their students' strengths, who honor multiple perspectives, and who distinguish between not-learning and failure can have a profound effect.