Author and Director of the Coastal Ridge Research and Education Center in Point Arena, California
Nominated by: Ted M. Kahn
Herbert Kohl attended the Bronx High School of Science and studied philosophy and mathematics at Harvard, Oxford, and Columbia University. He has been teaching and writing for over thirty five years. From 1962 to 1968 as a teacher in Harlem, he ran a storefront school for junior high and high school students and was founder and first director of the Teachers and Writers Collaborative.
His first writings on education included: Teaching the Unteachable, The Language and Education of the Deaf, and 36 Children, The Open Classroom, Golden Boy as Anthony Cool, Reading, How to, A Book of Puzzlements, Mathematical Puzzlements, On Teaching, Growing With Your Children, and Half the House. He and his wife Judith wrote The View from the Oak, which won the 1977 National Book Award for Children’s Literature.
In 1977 Kohl moved to Point Arena, California and established the Coastal Ridge Research and Education Center. He developed a national education funding initiative for the foundation. He then became Director of the Center for Teaching Excellence and Social Justice at the University of San Francisco. At the present time he is Director of the Coastal Ridge Research and Education Center in Point Arena, California.
Other publications include: Basic Skills, Growing Minds, Making Theater, The Question is College, From Archetype to Zeitgeist, I Won’t Learn from You, and Should We Burn Barbar?, The Discipline of Hope, and A Grain of Poetry. He also co-authored Pack Band and Colony with Judith Kohl. With Judith Kohl and Myles Horton, founder of the Highlander Center, he co-authored The Long Haul, which won the Robert F. Kennedy Book Award, Stupidity and Tears, and most recently Painting Chinese and The Herb Kohl Reader.
He is co-editor of the soon to be published The Muses Go to School: Conversations on the Necessity of the Arts in Education. In 2010 he was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship.
