Teaching Tough Kids: What We Can Learn from Five Provocative Educators.

TEACHING TOUGH KIDS: WHAT WE CAN LEARN FROM FIVE PROVOCATIVE EDUCATORS

By Bob Davis. Canadian Center For Policy Alternatives, 2004.

Progressive educators in every time and place face a contradiction at the heart of their efforts: the humanistic ideal, the democratic injunction

tells us that every person is an entire universe, that each can develop as a full and autonomous person engaged with others in a common polity and an equality of power. The capitalist imperative insists that profit is at the center of economic and political progress and develops a culture of competition, elitism, and hierarchy. An education for democracy fails as an adjunct to capitalism--either the schools or the system must change.

Bob Davis' Teaching Tough Kids offers a provocative new look at this age-old conflict. Davis explores the work of "five provocative educators" of the twentieth century--the redoubtable Deborah Meier, a living American, and four Europeans whose experiences span the twentieth century: Russia's Anton Makarenko, who came of age at the dawn of the Bolshevik Revolution; Poland's Janusz Korczak, who was murdered with his charges at Treblinka in 1942; France's Celestin Freinet, imprisoned by the Vichy government during World War II; and Great Britain's Chris Searle, who taught in working-class London and Sheffield as well as revolutionary Grenada and Mozambique. Davis describes each teacher in action, cites memoir and autobiography, uncovers biographical sketches and films based on those lives, and importantly, locates each in the concentric circles of context--historical flow, social condition, cultural surround that make these lives sensible and important. In each he finds a person wrestling with the knot of this fundamental contradiction: reverence, awe, respect for the humanity of every student, and energy, focus, effort to create a society in which that reverence can finally thrive.

Davis might have chosen a hundred others--one thinks of Paolo Freire, of course, and Sylvia Ashton-Warner, Carter G. Woodson, Herb Kohl, Septima Clark, Myles Horton, Charlie Cobb, Mike Rose, Linda Christiansen, George Wood, Bob Peterson, Rita Tenorio, W. E. B. Du Bois, or Bob Davis himself. But these five are well-chosen--each taught for many years, each founded a school, each developed innovative curriculum and wrote thoughtfully about teaching, and each faced the challenge of authoring a unique teaching life against a backdrop of, and while participating in, the upheaval to create a new, more peaceful, more just social order.

From these lives Bob Davis unpacks the struggle to be true to your students while keeping an eye on the world they will inherit. He further wrenches from them some common themes that will be helpful for further thinking and rethinking, for action, and for rethinking once more:

* Progressive teachers must see their students as whole human beings with hearts and minds, bodies and spirits that must somehow be taken into account. We must find our way beyond the half-language of labels.

* We must be serious in our efforts to teach our students the various literacies that will allow them to become competent and powerful in their worlds.

* We must provide opportunities for students to do and to make, and to become valuable and valued in their various communities.

* We must learn from rather than about the world--from work, not about work; from democracy, not about democracy; from nature, not about nature; from history, geography, literature, maths, and so on.

* We must bring the community into the school and the school into the community. Classrooms are contested spaces, and the sooner we face that fact, the more effective we might become.

An education for democracy begins with the belief that each person has the right and responsibility to participate publicly, that each can and should make a difference. The principles of associative living--community, equality, liberty--come to the fore.

Bob Davis' book is small but tough. It will fit easily into your backpack, right between the Vitamin C and your toothbrush, and as essential as either of these to the struggle ahead.