[5] Born into a Jewish household, Kohl attended the Bronx High School of Science[6] and studied philosophy and mathematics at Harvard University from 1954 to 1958.
In 1964, Kohl's first book, The Age of Complexity, about analytic and existential philosophy, was published at the same time that he was teaching sixth grade.
He is still engaged in them now having lived through cycles of reform and reaction, none of which succeeded in creating excellent education for the children of the poor.
An assessment by the Scientific Analysis Corp. documents that during Kohl's tenure, Other Ways offered no basic skills, focusing instead on subjects such as Taoist Science, the Unconscious and Decision Making, Guerrilla Theatre, Urban Survival, Seamanship, etc.
[17] BESP was one of eight projects funded nationally by the federal Experimental Schools Program (ESP), which was launched in 1970 as part of the U.S. Office of Education.
One student's experience at the school, including a tumultuous sexual relationship with an Other Ways teacher and administrator that began during Kohl's tenure, is documented in the voluminous diary writings of Tammy Bellah that appear in Melanie Bellah's Tammy: A Biography of a Young Girl (Aten Press, 1999).
Kohl's writing had significant influence on other education writers and theorists including John Holt, Jonathan Kozol, Richard Farson, Ivan Illich, Paul Goodman, George Dennison, James Herndon, Charles E. Silberman, John Taylor Gatto, Neil Postman and others.
In 1976, Herbert and Judith Kohl, his wife, wrote The View from the Oak, which won the 1978 National Book Award, Children's Literature.
Over the years, it has sponsored a summer camp, where he taught theater, and hosted a number of seminars on education and social justice.
Such seminars have involved educators such as Myles Horton and Septum Clarke of the Highlander Center, Joseph and Helen Featherstone, William Ayers, Len Solo, Ira Glaser, Norm Fruchter, Asa Hilliard, Courtney Cazden, Phillip Lopate, Cynthia Brown, and Ron Jones.
Kohl also spent a year (1985–1986) teaching in a one-room schoolhouse in Point Arena, and he created, under a grant from the Agency for International Development and the University of Massachusetts Amherst (June 1986 – January 1986), a month-long residential session and a semester's internship in the New York City schools for the heads of teachers' colleges from Botswana sponsored by UMass Amherst.
From September 1997 to June 1999, he worked towards planning a funding strategy in education for the Foundation, and in the process, he managed to support a number of projects that promise effective school reform.
In the spring of 2000, after his Fellowship at the Open Society Institute was completed, Kohl accepted the challenge of building a small, autonomous teacher education program centered on equity and social justice at the University of San Francisco (USF).
The book proposes a way of supporting principals that is a cross between psychotherapy and dramaturgy, which they tried out for three years and decided to call edutherapy.
In 2012, Kohl published a collaborative book with Tom Oppenheim and the Stella Adler Acting Studio, of which he is Director, on advocating support for the arts, as necessary components of any decent public education.
In conjunction with this book, "The Muses Go to School: Inspiring Stories about the Importance of Arts in Education," he interviewed artists such as Phylicia Rashad, Rosie Perez, Philip Seymour Hoffman, Moises Kaufman, Bill T. Jones, and Whoopi Goldberg, and educators such as Maxine Greene, Frances Lucerna, Lisa Delpit, and Steve Seidel.
At the center of all of his work is the belief that a quality education for all children is a pedagogical imperative and a social justice issue.