In provocative and entertaining essays [that] will appeal to reflective readers, parents, and educators (Library Journal), one of the country's foremost education writers looks at the stories we tell our children. Available now in a revised edition, including a new essay on the importance of stoop-sitting and storytelling, Should We Burn Babar? challenges some of the chestnuts of children's literature. Highlighting instances of racism, sexism, and condescension that detract from the tales being told, Kohl provides strategies for detecting bias in stories written for young people and suggests ways to teach kids to think critically about what they read.

Beginning with the title essay on Babar the elephant-just one of a fine series of inquiries into the power children's books have to shape cultural attitudes, according to Elliott Bay Booknotes-the book includes essays on Pinocchio, the history of progressive education, and a call for the writing of more radical children's literature. As the Hungry Mind Review concluded, Kohl's prescriptions for renewing our schools through the use of stories and storytelling are impassioned, well-reasoned, and readable.

I Won't Learn From You, Herb Kohl's now-classic essay on not learning, or refusing to learn, is available for the first time in an affordable paperback edition along with four other landmark essays. Drawing on an idea of Martin Luther King Jr.'s, Kohl argues for creative maladjustment in the classroom and anywhere else that students' intelligence, dignity, or integrity are compromised by a teacher, an institution, or a larger social mindset.

This volume also includes The Tattooed Man, Kohl's autobiographical essay about hopemongering, which Kohl finds essential for all effective teaching in these difficult times.

Herbert Kohl, one of America's most influential and provocative educators, believes that the only way to persist and to grow as a teacher is to commit oneself to the development of the child rather than to the regimented training of the pupil. His book is a lively, personal testament of one teacher's efforts to cultivate the natural vitality of the learning process; it is also a wonderfully concrete and practical guide full of stories of individual students and how they were helped to grow through learning.

The prizewinning educator's brilliant and timely meditation on the misleading ways in which we teach the story of Rosa Parks

Published in hardcover in the fall of 2005 shortly before Rosa Parks died, She Would Not Be Moved is a timely and important exploration of how the story of Rosa Parks and the Montgomery bus boycott has been distorted when taught in schools. Hailed by the New York Times Book Review when it was first published as having the transcendent power that allows us to see . . . alternate ways of viewing our history and understanding what is going on in our classrooms, this expanded version of Kohl's original groundbreaking discussion deftly catalogs problems with the prevailing presentations of Parks and offers [a] more historically accurate, politically pointed and age-appropriate alternative (Chicago Tribune).

In addition to Marian Wright Edelman's introduction, She Would Not Be Moved includes an original essay by Cynthia Brown on civil rights activists Septima Clark, Virginia Durr, and Rosa Parks; a teachers' resource guide to educational materials about Rosa Parks and the civil rights movement; and an appendix explaining how to evaluate textbooks for young people about this critical period in U.S. history.

Winner of the National Book Award for children's literature, The View from the Oak is a groundbreaking work of ethology--the study of the way animals perceive the environment--from two of America's most respected educators. With this new, illustrated edition, The New Press brings back into print this classic exploration of the strange but marvelous ways in which living creatures experience space, sense time, and communicate with each other.

What do flowers in a meadow look like to a bee? How does the world appear to a snake who sees' by detecting minute temperature changes? What is it like to live in the water strider's two-dimensional universe? Including hands-on games and activities, The View from the Oak helps readers enter into the fascinating, often invisible world of nature. It is a superb book for families to share (Winston-Salem Journal).

Hailed as an impressive collection of remembrances and commentaries (Choice), The Muses Go to School brings together beloved and renowned artists--including Whoopi Goldberg, Phillip Seymour Hoffman, Rosie Perez, and Phylicia Rashad--to share their transformative school encounters with the arts that helped them discover their inner humanity and put them on the road to fully realized creative lives. These autobiographical pieces are paired with interpretive essays by distinguished educators to produce a powerful case for positioning the arts at the center of primary and secondary school curriculums. Spanning a range of genres from acting and music to literary and visual arts, these smart and entertaining voices make surprising connections between the arts and the development of intellect, imagination, spirit, emotional intelligence, self-;esteem, and self-;discipline of young people.

Herbert Kohl and Tom Oppenheim have created a superbly articulate assemblage of intensely personal, interdisciplinary voices (Booklist), revealing that creative arts are a critical element of any education.

With the passion and wisdom that have made him one of our leading educators, Herbert Kohl has written a wonderful book about how he has done theater with young people and how you can too. He tells how to explore improve, develop significant themes out of improve, use dialogue and monologue as starting points for students to write their own plays, develop full performance, and how to adapt plays and stories for performance. He also includes generous excerpts from plays and stories that are particularly good examples.

This book is for people thinking about becoming teachers as well as for people in teacher training and for people who are in the classroom and think of themselves as still learning how to teach. It is about the specifics of working with children and developing curriculum material. It is also about educational politics, the social structure of the school, and the ways in which the feelings we have as adults reflect the work we do in school.
--from the Preface by Herbert Kohl

Herbert Kohl is one of America's most thoughtful and best known-writers on education. In On Teaching he explores the reasons people choose to teach in elementary and secondary schools. He describes the skills and techniques they must develop in dealing with students and parents. He stresses the importance of becoming attuned to the social system that exists among fellow teachers as well as among the members of the community one serves.

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).