The Discipline of Hope: Learning from a Lifetime of Teaching Book

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.

Central to this book and at the core of the act of teaching as Kohl describes it is what he calls "the discipline of hope" -- the stubborn refusal to accept limits on what students can learn or what teachers can do by helping them discover the power of their minds. At a time when so many are complacent or skeptical about the possibilities of education, this book, with the experiences it describes, of teacher and taught, is an affirmation that provides guideposts, insight, and wisdom.