Dewey and Kohl, Anyon and Kohl
The reality of Herbert Kohl's sixth grade classroom, as he describes it in his book 36 Children, provides a practical model with which to consider the theories of John Dewey and the implications of Jean Anyon's article, "Social Class and the Hidden Curriculum of Work." With respect to Dewey, Kohl intuitively settles upon an educational approach that echoes some of Dewey's principles. These include his belief that the experiences of children are as real and valuable as those of adults, and that children often 'know' how best to develop their education, and the wrong interference from adults and institutions can prevent them from doing so. Anyon's paradigm of the four-tiered educational class-system informs our understanding of what Kohl was avoiding in his own fourth-tier class at the same time that it suggests some ways in which Kohl's experiment may have short-comings. Both Dewey and Anyon serve to emphasize the lack of an integrated program in Kohl's educational practice. As Kohl himself acknowledges, his practice was a single year in the long educational histories of thirty-six different children.
The agreement between the approaches of Dewey and Kohl runs deep. Their children are to be considered individually. They are inspired by their own interests. The role of the teacher is to see the long-range trajectory of students' interests, preparing the expansion of experience by presenting individualized problems that are both enticing and challenging to the student. The school experience is not isolated from the broader, life-experience of the children, nor that of the teacher; students and teacher are a part of a single community of learning, the teacher avoiding the role of authoritarian in the classroom. All of this practice/theory emerges from the important and, in both contexts ‹ the field of educational theory surrounding Dewey and the institutionalized practice surrounding Kohl ‹ new conception of the childhood experience as inherently valid. Though Kohl never quite articulates it, he would agree with Dewey's sentiment, that "to [the traditional approach of] preparation for a more or less remote future is opposed making the most of the opportunities of the present"(Dewey, Experience and Education pp. 19-20).
Dewey and Kohl's respective visions of education's role in social change derive to an extent from these common features. They are themselves similar to that extent. Writing from different social positions and at very different times in the development of thought around 'the educational institution,' their conceptions of the flavor of change that their students will effect differ significantly. A recognized leader in educational reform, Dewey must have felt himself the shaper of a comprehensive system or program of education that would affect students continuously for a long and important period of their life-experience. And this program would affect generations of students in this manner.
Meanwhile, Kohl found himself in the position of fighting to change only segments or departments of the well-established or well-entrenched, bureaucratic educational system. Far from earning him a position of leadership in education corresponding to Dewey's, his attempts at change landed him in a ghetto-school in Harlem. Perhaps in part because his approach evolved from actual practice as opposed to Dewey's attempts at comprehensive theory, Kohl's project was necessarily a small, almost hermetically isolated event within the context of an enormous urban educational system. Kohl describes the role of the administration and the system at large:
It was useless trying to fight the administration over their irresponsibility [with regard to use of very scarce resources]. I had done that before in another public school in New York City, had been given thoroughly evasive answers, and found myself transferred to Harlem at the end of the year. ...So I learned to keep quiet, keep the door of my classroom shut, and make believe that the class and I functioned in a vacuum, that the school around us didn't exist. [p. 42]

To anticipate our discussion of Anyon, we might say that Kohl identified with 'the professional' in his relationship to social institutions such as the schools in which he worked, whereas Dewey identified with 'the capitalist' in his sense of a comprehensive view of and control over such institutions.
It should not surprise, then, to find that they differ chiefly in their views of how change will be accomplished by their students. In his class, preparation of students to effect change consists primarily of revealing to them the possibility of change. Though theoretically modest next to Dewey, this approach is practically ambitious. Kohl's sixth-grade students are alarmed by the idea that their neighborhoods could have been the product of changes that brought it from a state of wilderness in the pre-colonial period to its present state of urban development (and decay). Their resistance to the notion of change expresses itself spatially as well as temporally when they do not believe the Park Avenue of wealthy Manhattan is the same as the Park Avenue of desperate Harlem. In the minds of the children, Park Avenue becomes a corridor of space-time whose basic meaning is: a single place can be different in time; a single time can be different in space. Though perhaps not planned to be so, the physical movements and activities Kohl and his class undertook were integrated with his more theorized attempts at providing students with a sense of reality that permitted and encouraged experimentative and imaginative change. Kohl writes of his history lessons,
I wanted the children to see themselves in the perspective of history, to know the changes of fortune, of the balance of wealth and power that have constituted history, and of the equally real change of the oppressed into the oppressor. I wanted them to be able to persist, revolt, and change things in our society and yet not lose their souls in the process. [p. 55]

Kohl's approach to social change takes the position of the outsider. If, as is often the case, change is slow, students are to "persist." When students effect change, it is to be the change of "things," that is, specific things within the larger system. When change is cooperative, it is incremental, reflecting the tendency of Anyon's 'professional' to specialize and to focus on parts of the system at large. Major change is to take the form of "revolt." Whatever happens, it is important that the students not lose themselves, their souls, in 'the system,' whether it be the old, or the new one they create.
Fitting nicely into Anyon's 'capitalist' category, Dewey is optimistic about the prospects of students growing up to understand and change their society in an integrated fashion. Through the very process of thinking that they will learn in developing a sequence of expanding experiences, they will begin to understand the origins of the world around them. As Dewey sees things, cars, electricity, steel, and many other prominent features of human experience are the product of the same cycle of experience, impulse, reflection, hypothesis, and experiment that is supposed to drive his students. The degree to which Dewey values the scientific way of thinking as a means of social understanding and change is evident in the following:
Adherence to this method is not only the most direct avenue to understanding of science itself but as the pupils grow more mature it is also the surest road to the understanding of the economic and industrial problems of present society. For they are the products to a very large extent of the application of science in production and distribution of commodities and services, while the latter processes are the most important factor in determining the present relations of human beings and social groups to one another. [p. 80]

Dewey's system is designed to give students eventual command over the important social and economic forces of modern life.
Dewey would therefore criticize Kohl's educational approach for not providing the tools necessary for fully mastering the intricacies of society. Dewey's method seeks to provide students with knowledge and control over what exists, what may be experienced, while Kohl's approach seeks to provide students with a socio-historical framework that helps them give meaning to their own lives and to historical developments. Dewey wants the structure of experience itself ‹ as opposed to the 'message' of its content ‹ to lead naturally to the impulse for comprehensive change; Kohl wants the knowledge of possibility ‹ as conveyed through a presentation of history ‹ to inspire students to "persist, revolt and change things."
Though these flavors of social change are quite different, the classroom practices that each advocates or reports in striving for their respective achievement are, as we have seen, much the same. A key example of Kohl's classroom realization of Dewean principles is his assignment to his students a description of the residential block on which they live. In the structure of Kohl's narrative, this is an important moment in his initial efforts to eliminate distinctions between school and not-school life. It gives the children the opportunity to reflect on their experiences, and it leads both to a process of reasoning an 'appropriate' response to the situation, as well as the desire to know the words necessary for satisfying communication. Kohl describes his initial response (usually the one he prefers) upon hearing several tales of urban crime and decay from his young students:
I could do nothing about the facts, therefore my words were useless. But through listening, the facts remained open and therefore placed school in the context of the children's real world. [p. 45]

On the next page, he describes the assignment that develops from this response:
So I asked the class to write, as homework in the privacy of their apartments, and tell me what their block was like, what they felt about it. The papers were not to be marked or shown to anybody else in the class. If anybody objected, he didn't have to do the assignment. This was probably the first time in their school lives that the children wrote to communicate, and the first sense they had of the possibilities of their own writing. [p 46]

In Dewean terms, this opportunity is itself an educative experience, for it develops a receptiveness to new vocabulary, and that vocabulary, in turn, will open up the universe of possible experiences called literature. It is also a stage in the continuing development of experience in its relation to purposeful action. It challenges the children to reflect on their lives and order their experiences in such a way that they may become communicable. Dewey describes the process this way:
The formation of purposes is, then, a rather complex intellectual operation. It involves (1) observation of surrounding conditions; (2) knowledge of what has happened in similar situations in the past, a knowledge obtained partly by recollection and partly from the information, advice, and warning of those who have had wider experience; and (3) judgment which puts together what is observed and what is recalled to see what they signify. [pp. 68-9]

Kohl takes the children's impulse to tell him verbally what they experienced and guides it through a somewhat flawed approximation of a Dewean transformation into purposeful action. After giving students the chance to stop and reflect formally on their experiences, Kohl asks them to tell him what they want to do about it. Their responses are highly imaginative, and most lack for the most part any appeal to "what has happened in similar situations in the past." Dewey might claim that this is in part because Kohl is working with poorly educated sixth-graders, but, more importantly, because Kohl's attempt at transforming impulse or naked experience into purposeful thought follows an inappropriate sequence. Kohl properly encourages (1) the "observation of surrounding conditions," but switches (3) for (2) in the ordering of subsequent development. He has the children formulate a plan before they have any inkling of "what has happened in similar situations." Kohl's well-considered course in the history of social change comes too late, and Kohl therefore misses an opportunity to help the children fully develop their ability to order their experiences and act purposefully.
Such important differences notwithstanding, Dewey would likely be very surprised that Kohl's intuitive approach to pedagogy could yield results so like those of his own theory. He was insistent on the importance of having reasons for particular educational practices, and not reasons merely derived from prevailing social attitudes, but reasons grounded in the systematic reflection upon past experience (p. #?). Though he would have serious misgivings about the relatively unreflective or unsystematic source of Kohl's technique, he would find little of Kohl's actual practice in conflict with his own theory. And as a pragmatist, the impression of such results on him would mitigate his misgivings.
If Dewey and Kohl are largely the theoretical and practical sides of the same coin, Anyon stands outside their system of values and goals. Whether her four-tiered educational-class paradigm applies to American education at large or not, its components help us understand Kohl's situation and, as we have seen, a little of Dewey's.
Kohl demonstrates a consciousness of the dangers of a working-class style of teaching. Anyon characterizes such a style as controlling and authoritarian. The teacher of the working-class school refers to the objects of the class-room as if they are hers. She endeavors to maintain as far as possible total control over classroom environment, including both the physical objects and the behavior of the students. Anyon:
The (four) fifth grade teachers observed in the working-class schools attempted to control classroom time and space by making decisions without consulting the children and without explaining the basis of their decisions. The teacher's control thus often seemed capricious. ... The children had no access to materials. These were handed out by teachers and closely guarded. Things in the room "belonged" to the teacher: "Bob, bring me my garbage can." The teachers continually gave the children orders. [p. 261]

The importance of what Anyon describes becomes clear when we hear Kohl describing his own struggle to break out of such habits. If a conscientious teacher such as he has difficulty, others are likely to find it impossible. Kohl:
I wasn't sure how to take Robert's request. My initial feeling was that he was taking advantage of me and trying to waste time. I felt, along with the official dogma, that no moment in school should be wasted ‹ it must all be preplanned and structured. Yet why shouldn't it be "wasted"? Hadn't most of the class wasted years in school, not merely moments?
...I watched closely and suspiciously, realizing that the tightness with time that exists in the elementary school has nothing to do with the quantity that must be learned or the children's needs. It represents the teacher's fear of loss of control and is nothing but a weapon used to weaken the solidarity and opposition of the children that too many teachers unconsciously dread. [p. 21]

Kohl also criticizes the facile dualism prevalent in the texts and other educational materials provided at his school. It takes him over six weeks to begin the process of abandoning these instruments of regimentation in favor of materials and approaches that lead to a more complex sense of meanings. The methods of working-class schools are ingrained both in terms of physical resources and in terms of prevailing pedagogy.
In Kohl's classroom, children are learning not "how to follow procedure" but rather how to give meaning and context to their experiences both in their own thinking and in their expression, which is usually creative and not analytic. In these respects, his practices correspond to those of the teachers in Anyon's "affluent professional" schools, where students "work should attempt to interpret or 'make sense' of reality," and should "involve individual thought and expressiveness, expansion and illustration of ideas, and choice of appropriate method and material"(pp. 264-5).
For all its moments of agreement with Anyon with regard to the important features to be addressed in conventional working-class schools, 36 Children contains at least one passage that challenges the four-tiered paradigm. From a vantage-point much like Anyon's, Kohl considers the social relations of students and teachers across class-divisions:
I witnessed the same [personal] ignorance of children in a private school I once visited, only it was disguised by a progressive egalitarian philosophy. The teachers and students were on a first-name basis; together they chose the curriculum and decided upon the schedule. Yet many of the teachers knew no more of their classes than the most rigid public-school teachers. They knew only of their pupils and their mutual relationships in contexts where the teacher was a factor. It was clear to me, watching the children when the teacher left the room, that the children's preferences [held in a kind of performance] "for the teachers" were not the same as their human preferences (which most likely changed every week. [p. 23]

Thus, it is not enough for Kohl to emulate the "affluent-professional" classroom. He sees his project as challenging notions that exist in all ranges of school of 'what school is about.' Rather than establishing an artificial, academic- or school-relationship with students, Kohl is
...convinced that the teacher must be an observer of his class as well as a member of it. He must look at the children, discover how they relate to each other and the room around them. There must be enough free time and activity for the teacher to discover the children's human preferences. Observing children at play and mischief is an invaluable source of knowledge about them. [p. 23]

Anyon would be pleased to find that her critical description of school systems can serve an end. Kohl shows us that, though many schools may follow the patterns Anyon describes, they do not do so by necessity. An energetic and bold teacher can make his classroom teach the skills that prevail in professional-class schools even when presented with the scarce resources of a Harlem school. Kohl would emphasize that he can do even more.
None of these three educational thinkers would call Kohl's project a general success. A year of "affluent-professional" education is not likely to change the class-mobility of students who will have spent their remaining seven or eleven years in environments that expect little from them except the appearance of diligent obedience to authority and to procedure. Neither will Kohl's efforts by themselves change the New York City school system significantly. Like his history-lessons, Kohl's classroom offers a firm sense of possibility, it does not itself change things.
Indeed, Kohl's inspiration is not enough, even as a demonstration of possibility. Not every teacher in a Harlem school can be a Harvard graduate. Even if every teacher tried to emulate Kohl's intuitive and humanizing approach, students of working-class schools would remain very limited by the class of their schools.
Though Kohl's project falls short of grand success in these ways, it is successful as an isolated approach to teaching thirty-six sixth-graders who have not had and will not have adequate opportunity to learn. The experience of an eleven-year-old is in every way as inherently important as that of a thirty-year-old. Its quality should be good. It should be satisfying and enjoyable. It should nevertheless open up toward a continuum of experience that will provide satisfaction and enjoyment in the future (see Dewey, p. 27). Kohl gives his students a year of such experience by making school a part of their life and life a part of their school-experience.
In many ways, all of them good, Kohl carries this Dewean pursuit of educative experience farther than Dewey ever suggests in Experience and Education. He opens his home and his personal life to students and allows them to do the same. He takes children out of the classroom and gives them a sense of where they are in both time and place. Dewey's idea seems to be that students will come to understand and command their technological, economic and social circumstances by a kind of symbolic experience that is to take place within the relatively structured setting of 'the school.' Yet he also shows some understanding of the importance of the extent to which Kohl takes his idea:
"A primary responsibility of educators is that they not only be aware of the general principle of shaping actual experience by environing conditions, but that they also recognize in the concrete what surroundings are conducive to having experiences that lead to growth. Above all, they should know how to utilize the surroundings, physical and social, that exist so as to extract from them all that they have to contribute to building up experiences that are worth while." [p.40]

We have already seen how Kohl moves his students physically through the actual economy, technology and society that they will face. Because of the limits of their previous experience, the students experience this spatial movement not only as what is, but also as what can be. Many teachers would overlook the significant opportunity afforded by such basic experiences as the field-trip, but Kohl does not.
If there is an area in which Kohl did not do well, perhaps even as well as was possible, it is his consciousness of assumptions or habits about gender. It is difficult to know how representative of his classroom Kohl's writing is, yet from several instances I get the sense that he was much better at observing the social and intellectual development of the boys than that of the girls. He makes the attempt to understand the mechanics of three boys' "wild improbable mockery of tag"(p. 22) while referring to the admittedly less immediately-fascinating activity of the girls as "gossiping." He analyses and finds out the workings of the first case, while the other he sees only the surface of, making no attempt at an analysis of it in 36 Children. He even refers to a girl as "one of the the gossipers"(p. 16); he makes little attempt to penetrate the process of gossip, or its subject-matter, or to differentiate between those who engage in it. When he introduces checkers and chess into the days' periodic 'free-breaks,' it is their effect on boys that interests him. The boys who previously commanded attention and respect by their physical superiority were forced to adjust to the fact that physical superiority does not always correspond to checker- or chess-playing superiority (p. 27). I can believe that the girls took to reading books and magazines more readily and fully than the boys. This would indeed afford Kohl little opportunity for interesting observation or comment. Nonetheless, the conspicuously boy-weighted proportion of anecdotes that involve boys to those involving girls leads me to believe that Kohl should have done more to understand the development and needs of girls in his class.
Considering his circumstances, Kohl was successful in accomplishing his educational goals. The goals themselves were appropriate to the particular group of children he was teaching. Kohl's resistance to habit in pedagogy and his emphasis on responding intuitively to what can be observed in children when they are given some freedom to express their impulses are both models for educators in general. However, the nature of these characteristics is that they do not suggest imitable practice. Nor should we wish to imitate Kohl, for his practice was a response to particular and limiting circumstances that should be altered, in a Dewean sense, comprehensively.

Bibliography
Herbert Kohl, 36 Children
New York 1988
Penguin Books USA Inc.

John Dewey, Experience and Education
New York 1963
MacMillan Publishing Company