Additional information
by Charles Suhor (Author), Millie Davis (Foreword by)
In Creativity and Chaos: Progressivism in New Orleans Public Schools and the Nation 1967-1977, Charles Suhor brings to life the bold challenges to the status quo in education during a decade of national turmoil. The regimentation and rote learning of traditional schooling could not have escaped the restless temper of the times--Vietnam war protests, racial strife, assassinations, hippie communes, the sexual revolution, an emerging drug culture, and daring innovations in pop/rock music. Suhor describes his immersion in post-World War II popular culture of New Orleans as a rich backdrop for his years as an impassioned educational reformer at local and national levels. A risk-taking teacher and district supervisor of English, he plunged headlong into controversies over black literature, censorship, ebonics, the "new grammar," faculty integration, testing, standardization, and computer technology. He demonstrates how the sweeping national trends often took quirky, distinctive turns in a city that delights in marching to a different drummer. Suhor's engaging account takes the reader into classrooms as well as the intrigues of central office politics and national leaders' disputes on how to best teach students in a time of change. In no sense a doctrinal liberal, he lambastes the errors and excesses of the progressive moment and traces its decline and the backlash demand for a return to basic skills. Suhor concludes with an update on innovations that have waned or persisted in today's schools.
Author Biography
A native of New Orleans, CHARLES SUHOR was a high school English teacher and supervisor in the public schools of the Big Easy. Subsequently, he moved to Urbana, Illinois, where he was Deputy Executive Director of the National Council of Teachers of English, working extensively as an anti-censorship activist. He had a parallel career as a writer and jazz musician, publishing numerous articles and poems and playing drums with Al Hirt, Pete Fountain, Buddy Prima, and others. Among his books are the Scholastic Composition Series, Teaching Values in the Literature Classroom: A Debate in Print, Dimensions of Thinking, The Book of Rude and Other Outrages, and the award-winning Jazz in New Orleans: The Postwar Years Through 1970. He retired in 1997 to Montgomery, Alabama, where he is a freelance writer, speaker, and percussionist and a member of Parents, Families, and Friends of Lesbians and Gays.
