How to Get Through

It was a shock to see 36 black faces before me. It is one thing to be liberal and talk, another to face something and learn that you're afraid.

Despite an education at Harvard, Oxford and Columbia Teachers College, Bronx-born Herbert Kohl was clearly not ready for his first day in an East Harlem sixth grade. One minute he found his 36 Negro children sullen, silent, indifferent. The next they were boisterous, rowdy and defiant. "A child would tell me to get my nigger hands off him, and I couldn't see the pathos and self-mockery of the statement."

Unlike many another young white teacher, Kohl stopped fretting about whether he had his class under control and began concentrating on getting through to his unruly charges. Eventually, he discovered that they had an untouched capacity for learning, and a creative gift that escaped conventional means of testing. "Not every child can be reached," he writes, "and there are some children uninterested in learning anything; but they are very few, and even with them one doesn't know."

Joy & Despair. Like Bel Kaufman's Up the Down Staircase and Jonathan Kozol's Death at an Early Age, Kohl's 36 Children (New American Library; $5) is another narrative about the trauma of teaching in a ghetto school. Avoiding Miss Kaufman's accent on humor and Kozol's emotionalism, Kohl tells his story straight--and convincingly conveys one teacher's joy in the potential of his students and his despair at a system that beats them down.

Kohl's book is essentially a plea for honesty in dealing with such children. He felt "betrayed into hypocrisy" by assigned texts that depicted life as filled only with goodness--and "no hypocrite can win the respect of children, and without respect one cannot teach." Kohl is mercilessly honest about his own mistakes, concedes that "I've hit children in anger, and insulted them maliciously when they threatened me too much." Despite such pedagogical errors, Kohl found that "it is honesty, not Tightness, that moves children."

Kohl also found other ways to move them. He ignored unrealistic texts, discarded rigid class schedules, introduced more free time--always seeking clues to what might stir them. He brought in clippings of a championship fight, books on mythology and military service, records to dance by on Friday afternoons. He passed up warnings that it is "unprofessional" to see his students outside the classroom, invited them to his apartment. Kohl nearly wept when a boy accidentally shattered a piece of pre-Columbian statuary, yet he decided the visits were worthwhile because they showed him "how narrow the view from the teacher's desk is."

Eventually, Kohl learned to accept the fact that "conflict, disagreement and irrationality" would always show up in his classroom, that a child who opens up one day may clam up the next. But open up they did. One girl, reported by previous teachers as three years behind in reading, amazed Kohl by her sure, rapid understanding of books that interested her. "I wouldn't read for those teachers," she explained to Kohl. "Listen"--then she mimicked her own previous bumbling style of reading.

Smash or Be Smashed. Kohl let the children's own writings tell much of his story--and their poems, fables and essays provided unmistakable evidence of an unfettered gift for language that matched their world. Many graphically described the junkies, stabbings and muggings in their neighborhoods. One boy wove a wistful tale of how a barbarian Christian in the time of Periclean Athens grew from a downtrodden weakling into the conqueror of Rome, mainly on the strength of good luck. Another's fable posed the dilemma of a boy about to be flattened by a machine unless he pushed a button occupied by two ladybugs. He loved the bugs but pressed the button. The moral, wrote the student, was "smash or be smashed." With the help of some judicious coaching, Kohl's 36 children jumped one to three years ahead on reading proficiency. Yet the book is not a success story. Most of his former students, Kohl reports, later became disinterested or dropouts. Appalled by the cynicism of veteran teachers he met, the irrelevance of most courses, Kohl concludes that until the whole system is changed, the inspiring efforts of a few well-meaning teachers only raise in students hopes that cannot be fulfilled by the rest of their education. As one of his students told him: "Mr. Kohl, one good year is not enough." Convinced that reform will only come from the outside, Kohl quit to join a group at Columbia University seeking to revise English teaching in New York City schools.

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