Teaching the Taboo: Courage and Imagination in the Classroom

by Rick Ayers, William Ayers

''Drawing from a lifetime of deep thinking about education and courageous commitment to precious students, Rick and William Ayers have given us a marvelous book. Their devastating critique of the pervasive market models in education and their powerful defense of democratic forms of imagination in schools are so badly needed in our present day crisis!'' -- Cornel West , Princeton University


'' Teaching the Taboo is provocative, challenging, funny in places, wild enough and sensible enough to be useful, inspiring, and practical for educators who are working to negate the educational madness that is infecting the schools.'' -- Herb Kohl , author of 36 Children and Painting Chinese


''Like all good teachers, the Ayers brothers challenge us to enter and engage our deepest, darkest questions and/or concerns in the classroom. In the end, the best thing we can do as critical educators is to teach that which is TABOO!'' -- David Stovall , University of Illinois at Chicago


''Don't be mistaken -- what counts as 'taboo' is often the very thing that must be addressed for change to occur, as brilliantly illustrated in this new book by Richard and William Ayers.'' -- Kevin Kumashiro , founding director of the Center for Anti-Oppressive Education and author of The Seduction of Common Sense


Education at its best is about opening doors, opening minds, and inviting students to become powerful choice-makers as they forge their own pathways into a wider world. While many teachers long for teaching to be something transcendent and powerful, they all too often find themselves teaching obedience and conformity. This dynamic book -- by two renowned educators -- is filled with classroom stories of everyday teachers grappling with many of today's hotly debated issues. These stories of courage and resistance will help today's teachers confront the cynicism and demoralization that has gripped the profession in this age of standardization and testing. It will help teachers to teach initiative, to teach imagination, to ''teach the taboo.'' This is a hands-on manual for anyone looking to evolve as an educator.

Genres: Education, Teaching

132 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2011

Reviews

[Hilmg · Rating 5 out of 5]

“The pedagogy of the taboo is a pedagogy of curiosity. It asks us to be inquisitive and brave. It insists that wherever we’ve come to and whatever the established order of things, we always want to ask the next question. A pedagogy of the taboo is a pedagogy of the unknown. It acknowledges that in an infinite and expanding universe, each of us is finite and limited. What we experience & know is puny, a speck on a dot, and infinitesimal. We can always discover more, learn more, know more, and still we can never get to the bottom of it; we can never know all there is to know.… We search for the banned and the excluded, the segregated and suppressed. We are determined to search for the rest of the story, just as we are destined to fall short.” - RA & WA

[Marna · Rating 4 out of 5]

Authors support public education and teachers; feel standardized tests waste student and teacher's time and are not a measure of learning; instead sorts students according to economic/society levels. The problem is that education authorities (local, state, national) believe that these tests measure learning/.

[Jared Barcelos · Rating 2 out of 5]

There seems to be no teaching spectrum here, and that's why I'm only giving this book a two star rating. There are two sides to teaching presented in this book, and one is deplorable, with no redeeming qualities whatsoever, and the other is the ideal. However, teachers must live and work in this current system and exact change from the inside. Finding a path that lies between these two teaching worlds which leads towards the ideal is more realistic than staging an uprising against the "teaching machine." I agree with much of what is said, but it is presented with language that distracts from the realities of the situation.

[Chalida · Rating 3 out of 5]

Deep appreciation for the Ayers brothers-- one who helped me out so much when teaching journalism my first years of teaching, the other whose life story has stuck in my head for so long and for his book Teaching Towards Freedom. Here the Ayers find the crawl spaces that teachers are working in humanizing students. It's beautiful and sometimes frustrating but mostly that frustration is a little bit out of my own jealousy.

[Amy · Rating 4 out of 5]

Liked! Good thinking.

[Mills College Library]

371.102 A978 2014