A School Must Have a Heart

Description

Join Chris on this twenty-year tour of his singular writings on children and education. His parable-like stories and probing essays deliver his insights with a clarity and immediacy seldom found in books about teaching and learning.

Chris’s four decades of experience with kids of every imaginable kind in deeply human settings have earned him a profound understanding of just what it is they need in order to develop to their fullest. While so much of the educational literature today deals with children as though they were disembodied brains, A School Must Have a Heart explores every dimension of learning and development—and doesn’t stop until it gets to the heart of the matter.

Here’s what others are saying:

“When national education ‘reform’ has come to mean standardization, conformity, and academic rigor mortis, Chris Mercogliano comes along to remind us that real reform is creating schools where children are respected as human beings and where learning consists of living encounters with the amazing world around us. A School Must Have a Heart reminds me of the best of the education classics of the late 1960’s: John Holt’s How Children Fail, Herb Kohl’s 36 Children, and George Dennison’s The Lives of Children.”

—Thomas Armstrong, Ph.D, author of In Their Own Way

“Chris Mercogliano knows what’s important in education: Kids learn and thrive when they’re treated with respect, and when they’re loved, appreciated, and supported by caring adults. What a better world it would be if everyone involved with children were to read and act on this insightful book!”

—Wendy Priesnitz, author of Beyond School: Living As If School Doesn’t Exist

“A riveting book by a master teacher, superb writer, and keen observer who helps us imagine what education could be. Educational reformers take note: If the students at the Albany Free School can accomplish so much, let’s discover the potential in every child!”

—Kathy Hirsh-Pasek, author of Einstein Never Used Flash Cards

“A School Must Have a Heart is a book to keep by one’s bed and read a few chapters each night to assure one of more beautiful dreams. Except that these stories emerge from real experiences, available to us all if… Thanks, Chris, for many good nights.”

—Deborah Meier, author of In Schools We Trust

Chris Mercogliano was a teacher at the Albany Free School for thirty-five years and stepped down as director in June, 2007 to concentrate on writing and speaking about non-controlling education and child rearing. He is the author of Making It Up As We Go Along, the Story of the Albany Free School (Heinemann 1998), Teaching the Restless, One School’s Remarkable No-Ritalin Approach to Helping Children Learn and Succeed (Beacon Press 2004), How to Grow a School: Starting and Sustaining Schools That Work (Oxford Village Press 2006), In Defense of Childhood: Protecting Kids’ Inner Wildness (Beacon Press 2007), and A School Must Have a Heart (Oxford Village Press 2014). His essays, commentaries and reviews have appeared in numerous publications around the world, as well as in seven anthologies. He has been featured on National Public Radio’s “All Things Considered,” Canadian Broadcasting Corporation Radio’s “Ideas,” and other nationally syndicated radio shows. The father of two wonderful daughters, he lives with his wife Betsy on a one-acre farm in downtown Albany, New York.