John Holt

Roland Meighan, Richard Bailey

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781441127914
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

John Holt, the American educator, was passionate about the need for alternatives to traditional institutional schooling, seeing schools as often hindering children from learning rather than helping them; he became an important proponent of homeschooling or 'unschooling', was a pioneer in youth rights theory and had a profound influence on school reform in particular and educational philosophy in general. Here, Roland Meighan challenges the often held notion that Holt's work was 'romantic' and impractical within the context of compulsory schooling. He brings together the work and thinking of John Holt into applicable theory for education students, enabling readers to appreciate the view that individuals outside the education system can influence and change what is happening within it.

Part 1

Intellectual Biography

Chapter 1

Becoming a Radical

There was little in the first part of John Holt’s life to indicate the fame that was to overtake him later. He was born in 1923 in New York City, the eldest of three children, and grew up in the New England area of the USA. His two sisters, Jane and Susan, married to become Jane Pitcher and Susan Bontecou and had families – one had five children and the other six – but John remained single. This was not of his choosing, he used to explain, for he was open to the idea of marriage, but it just never happened.

He died of cancer in 1985 aged 62. By that time he had written ten books with memorable and challenging titles and even more memorable and challenging contents. His work had been translated into 14 languages. His first two books sold over a million copies and became some of the best-read books on education ever produced. Professor Ted Wragg of Exeter University noted in conversation with me that of all the books he ever recommended on education, John Holt’s were the most read and appreciated, and caused the most debate and feedback.

Holt was not impressed by the schools and colleges he attended, even though they were ‘good’ schools and colleges for the wealthy and ‘successful’, and he preferred not to even name them. All the important things that he knew, had not been learned in these institutions, he declared, so why give them any credit? I can sympathize with Holt here, since I remember trying to explain to relatives and others that the grammar school for boys I attended in my youth was just an endurance test and that my real education was taking place in my family, my neighborhood, the church, the youth club and the local public library. My observations stimulated little comment or discussion other than vague accusations of ingratitude, so I soon learned to keep my thoughts to myself.

During the Second World War, Holt served as a commissioned officer on a submarine in the Pacific after graduation from college in 1943. He wrote that he learned many lessons about teamwork and cooperation while living on a submarine. The submarine sank two ships in the Java Sea before it was itself damaged by a bomb.

After the destruction of Hiroshima by an atomic bomb, Holt concluded that the devastation of the world was only a matter of time unless good people took action. So, he worked in the peace movement for the World Federalist Movement in New York City for six years, giving hundreds of lectures and traveling to Europe and elsewhere. After a further year touring Europe, he returned to the USA and visited one of his sisters in Santa Fe. He told her he was thinking of becoming a farmer, but her response was that he was so good with her children, he should consider teaching.

Holt was not keen, but his sister persisted and persuaded him to visit Rocky Mountain School near Aspen, which had just opened, and since the school intended to grow its own food, he could learn farming there. He worked as a volunteer until a regular teacher left and he filled the vacancy. He worked mostly with the ‘bad’ students, and it was from these that he learned most about the challenges of teaching. So, without the persuasive powers of his sister, Holt might have remained in obscurity for the rest of his life.

During this time, he began to write a series of letters to various friends containing his observations about teaching and learning. John’s own self-image was that of ‘problem solver’, so having taken up teaching he set about solving the various problems he was now encountering. Later, these became part of the text of his first book, How Children Fail.

Four years later, aged 34, he moved to Boston. The move came about more or less by accident. He had been invited to look after a friend’s apartment while the friend was away for a year. Holt found Boston to his liking and he lived there for the rest of his life. A Boston school hired him to teach, but his insistence that testing was harmful to learning was not welcomed and he was asked to leave.

At two other schools, his ideas were not welcomed either, and each time he was asked to leave. Schools were just a means to an end, Holt’s declared, and when people accused him of deserting schools and teachers, he responded that he never identified with them in the first place. He worked in them to develop answers to questions about learning and children, not because he ever believed in them.

How Children Fail became a best-seller more or less by accident. The first print run was not doing too well, but Pitman Publishing, being rather short of titles, decided to keep it on their list for a little longer. In the meantime, Holt wrote a letter to Eliot Fremont-Smith, book reviewer of the New York Times. Fremont-Smith read the book and wrote a front-page endorsement of this new book (‘possibly the most penetrating and probably the most eloquent book on education to be published in recent years . . . ’), and sales soared. The next month it sold 2,000 copies. In 1966 Holt’s second book, How Children Learn, was in print and soon Holt became something of a celebrity, giving lectures, speeches, and radio and television interviews. His writing was eventually translated into 14 different languages as he developed an international reputation for his radical ideas on education in general, and schools in particular.

As Mel Allen remarked in his piece on John Holt for Yankee magazine in December 1981, Holt’s writing style was very accessible, in contrast to most of the output on schools and education. So Holt soon became one of the few writers to reach the mass audiences, and his work was taken up in the UK by Penguin Books with great success.

Holt found common cause with A.S. Neill, founder of Summer hill School, and they met first in 1965. Their common ground began with the proposition that children can be trusted to learn about their world with far less adult interference than is commonly believed. Shortly before Neill died, in 1973, Holt visited Summerhill again, when they talked as much about death, since Neill was ailing, as about education. Holt was not to know that his own death was not too far away – 12 years away, in fact.

Holt also spent time with Ivan Illich. In 1969 he was invited to be involved in seminars in Cuernavaca, Mexico, and spent two weeks there working with Illich, and this pattern was repeated for another four years. Illich had developed the view that schools and schooling were a disastrous idea in poor countries and locked them more deeply in poverty, dependency and helplessness. Following this concern, Illich became interested in the whole effect of schooling in rich countries too, and Holt was one of a number of people invited to contribute to the seminars. But the purpose, Holt decided, was more of a learning exchange than anything formal, as the visitors sought to gain from Illich’s ideas and Illich sought to pick their brains.

One irony Holt noted was that for all his national and international reputation as an educational commentator, his adopted city of Boston ignored his existence: ‘Of the 24 years I have lived in Boston, I’ve been known as a kind of educational expert for 17 of them. In those 17 years only one person connected with the Boston school system has ever talked to me.’ This person turned out to be a teacher of remedial mathematics to Hispanic high-school youngsters, who reported later that Holt’s suggestions had been very helpful to him.

But Holt’s relationship with teachers in general fluctuated. While he was talking about classrooms and what might be done to make them more effective learning environments, he was apparently on their side. But when he talked about the need to go way beyond such damage limitation and recycle schools into learner-managed places, he lost their sympathy. Teachers, he observed, were not very brave people, and certainly not brave enough to engage in radical changes. At first he thought 75 per cent of teachers were with him, then perhaps 50 per cent, then, later still, 25 per cent. In the end, he concluded that the figure was more like 2 or even 1 per cent.

By 1981, the forces of regressive education in the USA began to reassert themselves with slogans such as ‘Back to the Basics’. Much the same thing happened in the UK. Holt reluctantly began to conclude that regressive attitudes might even make up the majority view. ‘Very few people, inside the schools or out, were willing to support or even tolerate giving more freedom, choice and self-direction to children’ (Teach your Own, p. 4). Freedom had not been treated as a serious proposition but as a possible motivational device. When it did not bring quick results it was soon discredited. This led Holt to write two books with a different message, Escape from Childhood and Instead of Education, where he explored the uncomfortable idea that most adults in the USA distrust and rather dislike most children, sometimes even their own. He proposed that people whose lives are hard or boring or painful or meaningless – people who suffer – tend to resent those who seem to suffer less than they do, and will make them suffer too if they can. People in chains with no apparent hope of losing them want to put chains on others. The great majority of boring, regimented schools were doing exactly what most people wanted them to do: Teach children about Reality; Teach them that Life Is No Picnic; Teach them to Shut Up and Do What You’re Told.

John Holt was not impressed. He said of such schools that they demonstrated that a school based on such a view was not just a good idea gone wrong, but a bad idea from the start. He concluded that ‘Back to the Basics’ was really code for ‘No More Fun and Games in School’. Most adults in the USA, he observed, do not care all that much about reading, since they read little themselves. Like most Americans, young or old, they spend much of their leisure time watching TV. What they want their children to learn is how to work – but not good and skillful work they can be proud of. Few have that kind of work themselves, or ever expect to. They want their children, when their time comes, to be able and willing to hold down full-time unpleasant jobs of their own. The best way to get them ready to do this is to make school as much like a full-time, unpleasant job as possible.

This was not just a working-class attitude, he noted. A middle-class couple who had transferred their son to the school Holt was teaching in were pleased that there had been a great improvement in both their son’s studies and his behavior, but expressed some anxiety about how much fun he was having in school. After all, he was going to have to spend the rest of his life doing things he did not like, and he might as well start getting used to it.

The reason for these bleak attitudes was not cruelty or mean-spiritedness, but fatalism. In their view, this was how the world was, and there was little chance of its changing for the better. In addition, such people had developed faith in violence as a way to solve problems, despite the evidence of its failure. While such parents were in a majority, Holt concluded, any radical school reform was doomed.

Holt saw the effect of compulsory schooling on teachers as demeaning. Since compulsory school attendance laws force teachers to do custodial work anyway, real teaching becomes more and more difficult. If you add to this the requirement to implement a regressive vision of education of the ‘No More Fun in Schools’ variety, teaching increasingly becomes a grim and repressive task. It would be in the teachers’ best interests to do away with compulsion and establish instead what has been called elsewhere the ‘Invitational School’.

His most fervent supporters turned out to be parents and, when he realized this, he began to work with the emerging home-based education movement, referred to in the USA as homeschooling. As regressive ideas came back into fashion, John Holt decided to work with the minority of more optimistic parents who wanted something different. At first this was with groups who were active in setting up small alternative schools. These usually struggled because of the problems of finance.

But some of these parents had begun to educate their children at home and needed support. Therefore, John Holt established a service organization called Growing Without Schooling. Home-based education became the focus of his writing and activity. His work, and the work of many others, has borne fruit. Today, over one million families in the USA are engaged in home-based education. Home-based education in the USA has its own research journal, its own publishing house and a considerable range of commercial publications and services.

Part 2

Critical Exposition of John Holt’s Work

Chapter 2

Overview

It was said of John Holt that even if his writing had not been so good, he certainly knew how to craft an interesting book title! Here are the ten titles in order:

How Children Fail (1964)

How Children Learn (1967)

The Underachieving School (1970)

What Do I Do Monday? (1970)

Freedom and Beyond (1972)

Escape from Childhood (1975)

Instead of Education (1976)

Never Too Late (1979)

Teach Your Own (1981)

Learning All the Time (1989).

And finally, there was the periodical entitled

Growing Without Schooling (1977 onwards).

The titles of his books indicate a developing theme: a critical review of schools in the USA as they existed in the 1960s and 1970s that gradually gave way to a growing disenchantment with any efforts to change them. Finally, Holt concluded they would not change, and indeed could not, given their basic coercive and impositional task. To change in any fundamental way, they would have to become invitational and give up on compulsion. They would have to be completely recycled. Schools, as Holt put it, were mostly in the prison business, for their prime task was custodial. To be more in the education business they would have to adopt the model of the public library and become invitational.

Holt’s perceptions of schooling became more and more negative over time. In The Underachieving School, he began to argue that schooling was a kind of child abuse, but also an abuse of teachers. Teachers also suffer from the school attendance laws, Holt argues, because they are diverted from educational matters into being school prison guards and school police. The primary function of teaching becomes corrupted. Coaching learners gives way to the requirement to coerce. The results are that people who go into teaching full of hope and good intentions gradually become used to thinking of themselves as having the role of police and of the children as their natural enemies. It becomes no more possible to have open, friendly and mutually helpful relationships between most teachers and students than it is between most prison guards and prison convicts – and for exactly the same reasons.

People find it hard to believe that order will be maintained without compulsion, yet Holt observed that in the Boston Public Library he saw a great many students of all backgrounds behaving just as reasonably, sensibly and considerately as everybody else. A key difference was that they were there by choice and could leave whenever they wanted.

People protest that schools are compulsory to protect civil rights, to serve an ‘entitlement’ to education. Holt said that this had had some credibility in the past in preventing children from being used as cheap labor. But times change, and the market for child labor is hardly an issue – and, in any case, if protection is needed, it can be covered by child employment and child abuse laws.

But, Holt states, compulsory schooling is now the main form of child abuse, and children need protection from it. School is an abuse of human rights, an idea explored in Holt’s book Escape from Childhood. In a democracy, being put into a custodial situation is only permitted if an offence has been committed and proved, or evidence can be presented that this is likely to be proved in a properly conducted hearing – ‘due process’. Holt asks what offense children have committed to be put into school custody. They are young and have huge gaps in their knowledge and understanding, but these are not offenses against society and its rules, as are theft, murder and rape.

Holt is not impressed by the teachers who agree to do this work. In The Underachieving School, teachers are put under the microscope. Most new teachers are selected on the basis of their success in a system that stresses competitive examinations and the rote learning of disconnected facts. It is no surprise that they usually carry this method for...

Table of contents

• Cover-Page
• Half-Title
• Series
• Title
• Contents
• Series Editor’s Preface
• Foreword
• Part 1   Intellectual Biography
• Part 2   Critical Exposition of John Holt’s Work
• Part 3   The Reception and Influence of John Holt’s Work
• Part 4   The Relevance of Holt’s Work Today
• Bibliography
• Index
• Copyright