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SCHOOL IS BAD FOR
CHILDREN By John Holt Almost
every child on the first day he sets foot in a school building, is smarter,
more curious, less afraid of what he doesn't know, better at finding and figuring
things out, more confident, resourceful, persistent and independent than
he will ever be again in his schooling – or, unless he is very unusual and
very lucky, for the rest of his life. Already, by paying close attention to
and interacting with the world and people around him, and without any school-type
formal instruction, he has done a task far more difficult, complicated and
abstract than anything he will be asked to do in school, or than any of his
teachers has done for years. He has solved the mystery of language. He has
discovered it – babies don't even know that language exists – and he has
found out how it works and learned to use it. He has done it by exploring,
by experimenting, by developing his own model of the grammar of language,
by trying it out and seeing whether it works, by gradually changing
it and refining it until it does work. And while he has been doing this, he
has been learning other things as well, including many of the "concepts" that
the schools think only they can teach him, and many that are more complicated
than the ones they do try to teach him. In
he comes, this curious, patient, determined, energetic, skillful learner.
We sit him down at a desk, and what do we teach him? Many things. First, that
learning is separate from living. "You come to school to learn," we tell
him, as if the child hadn't been learning before, as if living were out there
and learning were in here, and there were no connection between the two.
Secondly, that he cannot be trusted to learn and is no good at it. Everything
we teach about reading, a task far simpler than many that the child has already
mastered, says to him, "If we don't make you read, you won't, and if you
don’t do it exactly the way we tell you, you can’t. In short, he comes to feel that learning is a passive
process, something that someone else does to you, instead of something you
do for yourself. In
a great many other ways he learns that he is worthless, untrustworthy, fit
only to take other people's orders, a blank sheet for other people to write
on. Oh, we make a lot of nice noises in school about respect for the child
and individual differences, and the like. But our acts, as opposed to our
talk, says to the child, "Your experience, your concerns, your curiosities,
your needs, what you know, what you want, what you wonder about, what you
hope for, what you fear, what you like and dislike, what you are good at or
not so good at – all this is of not the slightest importance, it counts for
nothing. What counts here, and the only thing that counts, is what we know,
what we think is important, what we want you to do, think and be.” The child soon learns not to ask questions - the teacher
isn’t there to satisfy his curiosity. Having learned to hide his curiosity,
he later learns to be ashamed of it. Given no chance to find out who
he is – and to develop that person, whoever
it is – he soon comes to accept the adults evaluation of him. He
learns many other things. He learns that to be wrong, uncertain, confused,
is a crime. Right Answers are what the school wants, and he learns countless
strategies for prying these answers out of the teacher, for conning her into
thinking he knows what he doesn't know. He learns to dodge, bluff, fake, cheat.
He learns to be lazy! Before he came to school, he would work for hours on
end, on his own, with no thought of reward, at business of making sense of
the world and gaining competence in it. In school he learns, like every buck
private, how to goldbrick, how not to work when the sergeant isn't looking,
how to know when he is looking, how to make him think you are working even
when he is looking. He learns that in real life you don't do anything unless
you are bribed, bullied or conned into doing it, that nothing is worth doing
for its own sake, or that if it is, you can't do it in school. He learns to
be bored, to work with a small part of his mind, to escape from the reality
around him into daydreams and fantasies – but not like the fantasies of his
preschool years, in which he played a very active part. The
child comes to school curious about other people, particularly other children,
and the school teaches him to be indifferent. The most interesting thing in
the classroom – often the only interesting thing in it – is the other children,
but he has to act as if these other children, all about him, only a few feet
away, are not really there. He cannot interact with
them, talk with them, smile at them. In many schools he can't talk to other
children in the halls between classes; in more than a few, and some of these
in stylish suburbs, he can't even talk to them at lunch.
Splendid training for a world in which, when you're not studying
the other person to figure out how to do him in, you pay no attention to
him. In
fact, he learns how to live without paying attention to anything going on
around him. You might say that school is a long lesson in how to turn yourself
off, which may be one reason why so many young people, seeking the awareness
of the world and responsiveness to it they had when they were little, think
they can only find it in drugs. Aside from being boring, the school is almost
always ugly, cold, inhuman – even the most stylish, glass-windowed,$2O-a square-foot
schools. And
so, in this dull and ugly place, where nobody ever says
anything very truthful, where everybody is playing a kind of role, as in a
charade where the teachers are no more free
to respond honestly to the students than the students are free to respond
to the teachers or each other, where the air practically vibrates with suspicion
and anxiety, the child learns to live in a daze, saving his energies for those
small parts of his life that are too trivial for the adults to bother with,
and thus remain his. It is a rare child who can come through his schooling
with much left of his curiosity, his independence
or his sense of his own dignity, competence and worth. So
much for criticism. What do we need to do? Many things. Some are easy – we
can do them right away. Some are hard, and may take some time. Take a hard
one first. We should abolish compulsory school attendance. At the very least
we should modify it perhaps by giving children every year a large number of
authorized absences. Our compulsory school-attendance laws once served a
humane and useful purpose. They protected childrens’ right to some schooling,
against those adults who would otherwise have denied it to them in order to
exploit their labor, in farm, store, mine or factory. Today the laws help
nobody, not the schools, not the teachers, not the children. To keep kids
in school who would rather not be there costs the schools an enormous amount
of time and trouble – to say nothing of what it costs to repair the damage
that these angry and resentful prisoners do every time they get a chance.
Every teacher knows that any kid in class who, for whatever reason, would
rather not be there, not only doesn't learn anything himself but makes it
a great deal tougher for anyone else. As for protecting the children from
exploitation, the chief and indeed only exploiters of children these days
are the schools. Kids caught in the college rush more often than not work
70 hours or more a week, most of it on paper busy work. For kids who aren't
going to college, school is just a useless time waster, preventing them from
earning some money or doing some useful work, or even doing some true learnings. Objections. "If kids didn't have to go, they’d all be out in the streets.”
No, they wouldn’t. In the first place, even if schools stayed the way they
are, children would spend at least some time there because that's where they’d
be likely to find friends; it's a natural meeting place for children. In the
second place, schools wouldn’t stay the way they are, they'd get better, because
we would have to start making them what they ought to be right now – places
where children would want to be. In the third place, those children who did
not want to go to school could find, particularly if we stirred up our brains
and gave them a little help, other things to do – the things many children
now do during their summers and holidays. There's
something easier we could do. We need to get kids out of the school buildings,
give them a chance to learn about the world at first hand. It is a very recent
idea, and a crazy one, that the way to teach our young people about the world
they live in is to take them out of it and shut them up in
brick boxes. Fortunately, educators are beginning to realize
this. In Philadelphia and Portland, Oregon , to
pick only two places I happen to have heard about, plans are being drawn
up for public schools that won't have any school buildings at all, that will
take the students out into the city and help them to use it and its people
as a learning resource. In other words, students, perhaps in groups, perhaps
independently, will go to libraries museums, exhibits, courtrooms, legislatures,
radio and TV stations, meetings, businesses and laboratories to learn about
their world and society at first hand. A small private school in Washington
is already doing this. It makes sense. We need more of it. As
we help children get out into the world, to do their learning there, we can
get more of the world into the schools. Aside from their parents, most children
never have any close contact with any adults except people whose sole business
is children. No wonder they have no idea what adult life or work is like.
We need to bring a lot more people who are not full-time teachers into the
schools, and into contact with the children. In New
York City, under the Teachers and Writers Collaborative, real writers working
writers – novelists, poets, playwrights – come into the schools, read their
work, and talk to the children about the problems of their craft. The children
eat it up. In another school I know of a practicing
attorney from a nearby city comes in every month or so and talks to several
classes about the law. Not the law as it is in books but as he sees it and
encounters it in his cases, his problems, his work. And the children love
it. It is real, grown-up, true, not My Weekly Reader, not “social
studies,” not lies and baloney. Something
easier yet. Let children work together, help each other, learn from each other
and each others’ mistakes. We now know, from the experience of many
schools, both rich-suburban and poor-city, that children are often the best
teachers of other children. What is more important, we know that when a fifth-or
sixth-grader who has been having trouble with reading starts helping a first
grader, his own reading sharply improves. A number of schools are beginning
to use what some call Paired Learning. This means that you let children form
partnerships with other children, do their work, even including their tests,
together, and share whatever marks or results this work gets – just like
grownups in the real world. It seems to work. Let
the children learn to judge their own work. A child learning to talk does
not learn by being corrected all the time – if corrected too much, he will
stop talking. He compares, a thousand times a day, the difference between
language as he uses it and as those around him use it. Bit by bit, he makes
the necessary changes to make his language like other peoples. In the same way, kids learning to do all the other things
they learn without adult teachers – to walk, run, climb, whistle, ride a bike,
skate, play games, jump rope – compare their own performance with what more
skilled people do, and slowly make the needed changes. But
in school we never give a child a chance to detect his mistakes, let alone
correct them. We do it all for him. We act as if we thought he would never
notice a mistake unless it was pointed out to him, or correct it unless
he was made to. Soon he becomes dependent on the expert. We should let him
do it himself. Let him figure out, with the help of other children if he
wants it, what this word says, what is the answer to that problem, whether
this is a good way of saying or doing this or that. If
right answers are involved, as in some math or science, give him the answer
book, let him correct his own papers. Why should we teachers waste time on
such donkey work? Our job should be to help the kid when he tells us that
he can't find a way to get the right answer. Let's
get rid of all this nonsense of grades, exams, marks. We don't know now,
and we never will know, how to measure what another person knows or understands.
We certainly can’t find out by asking him questions. All we find out is what
he doesn't know which is what most tests are for, anyway. Throw it all out,
and let the child learn what every educated person must someday learn, how
to measure his own understanding, how to know what he knows or does not know. We
could also abolish the fixed, required curriculum. People remember only what
is interesting and useful to them, what helps them make sense of the world,
or helps them get along in it. All else they quickly forget, if they ever
learn it at all The idea of a "body of knowledge," to be picked
up in school and used for the rest of one' s life, is nonsense in a world
as complicated and rapidly changing as ours. Anyway,
the most important questions and problems of our time are not it the curriculum,
not even in the hotshot universities, let alone the schools. Children
want, more than they want anything else, and even after years of miseducation,
to make sense of the world, themselves, other human beings. Let them get at this job, with our help if they ask for
it, in the way that makes most sense to them. Copied
from Saturday
Evening Post February
8 1969 Reprinted with permission
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