Is school as it is designed today at the heart of our detached view of ourselves and the world? As I read more of John Holt , I sense that it is.
He was asked "If America’s schools were to take one giant step forward this year toward a better tomorrow, what should it be?"
His reply was: "It would be to let every child be the planner, director, and assessor of his own education, to allow and encourage him, with the inspiration and guidance of more experienced and expert people, and as much help as he asked for, to decide what he is to learn, when he is to learn it, how he is to learn it, and how well he is learning it. It would be to make our schools, instead of what they are, which is jails for children, into a resource for free and independent learning, which everyone in the community, of whatever age, could use as much or as little as he wanted."
Holt is influencing many people even long after his death. .
"Education, with its supporting system of compulsory and competitive schooling, all its carrots and sticks, its grades, diplomas, and credentials, now seems to me perhaps the most authoritarian and dangerous of all the social inventions of mankind. It is the deepest foundation of the modern and worldwide slave state, in which most people feel themselves to be nothing but producers, consumers, spectators, and "fans," driven more and more, in all parts of their lives, by greed, envy, and fear. My concern is not to improve "education" but to do away with it, to end the ugly and antihuman business of people-shaping and let people shape themselves.
This does not mean that no one should ever influence or try to influence what others think and feel. We all touch and change (and are changed by) those we live and work with. We are by instinct talkative and social creatures, and naturally share with those around us our view of reality. Both in my work as writer and lecturer, and among my friends, I do this all the time. But I refuse to put these others in a position where they feel they have no choice but to agree with me, or seem to agree. This is why, except as an occasional visitor, I will no longer do my teaching in compulsory and competitive schools..."
I took this quote from an interview with Grace Llewellyn and in turn from a post by Chris Corrigan
Here is the essence of Holt's thoughts taken from "How Children Learn"
. This book did not change, as I hoped it might, the way schools deal with children. I said, trust them to learn. The schools would not trust them, and even if they had wanted to, the great majority of the public would not have let them. Their reasons boil down to these: (1) Children are no good; they won't learn unless we make them. (2) The world is no good; children must be broken to it. (3) I had to put up with it; why shouldn't they? To people who think this way, I don't know what to say. Telling them about the real learning of real children only makes them cling to their theories about the badness and stupidity of children more stubbornly and angrily than ever. Why do they do this? Because it gives them a license to act like tyrants and to feel like saints.
... What is lovely about children is that they can make such a production, such a big deal, out of everything, or nothing ... All that energy and foolishness, all that curiosity, questions, talk, all those fierce passions, inconsolable sorrows, immoderate joys, seem to many a nuisance to be endured, if not a disease to be cured. To me they are a national asset, a treasure beyond price, more necessary to our health and our very survival than any oil or uranium or name what you will ...
More if you want
A letter to Dr. Bliss
I think children learn better when they learn what they want to learn when they want to learn it, and how they want to learn it, learning for their own curiosity and not at somebody else’s order.
I believe that learning would be greatly improved if we could completely or at least largely abolish the fixed curriculum in its present sense. I do not believe that testing and grading form any inherent or useful function in learning; in fact, they corrupt and impede the learning process.
I am altogether opposed to any kind of so-called ability grouping in school. I think that in many more cases than not it is the act of instruction itself that impedes learning and nowhere else more than in the field of reading; in short, I feel that children would learn to read better and more easily if they were not taught.
I think we need to find ways to get more people into the schools who are not teachers. I do not think it is helpful to have children spend all their time with people who have no other concerns than children. I would like to see streams of people coming into the schools who are there to talk about their outside life and work in the world. I would also like to see children encouraged and helped to use the resources of the world outside the school to further their learning. I believe that compulsory school attendance no longer serves a useful function, either to schools, teachers or students, and that it should be done away with or greatly modified.
I think we have made education, which should be something that helps young people move into the world and do useful work there, into an enormous obstacle standing in their way, and I think we need to find ways to remove that obstacle. In short, I am opposed to all kinds of credential requirements as preconditions for doing work. I think we should remove every possible obstacle between any child and any gainful or useful contribution he wants to make to society. Everything we say and do tends to separate learning from living, and we should try instead to join them together...
