The Beat of a Different Drum - Asperger’s Syndrome

Posted on July 30th, 2005 in Autism Spectrum Disorder, Otherways Magazine, Special Needs

By Susan Wight

“If a man does not keep pace with his companions, perhaps it is because he hears a different drummer. Let him step to the music which he hears, however measured or far away.”
- Henry David Thoreau

In many ways Asperger Syndrome seems to be the latest fad. ADD and ADHD were the fashionable diagnosis to explain school difficulties five to ten years ago and now Asperger’s Syndrome (or Asperger’s Disorder as it is sometimes known) seems to be in every magazine and newspaper. There has, even in the words of the experts, been ‘an explosion of cases’ of Asperger’s Syndrome in recent years and one can’t help wondering why. Whilst the expert explanation is that this is simply a case of better diagnosis, you could be excused for wondering whether Asperger’s Syndrome really exists.

“Whoops Wrong Planet Syndrome”

John Holt: Unassuming Reformer

Posted on July 30th, 2005 in Otherways Magazine

John Holt “I learned whatever I learned about children by prolonged and careful observation, and even more importantly, as a result of continued failures to teach them, in more or less orthodox school fashions, the things people said they should learn.”

Born in New York City in 1923, Holt attended private schools but felt they were irrelevant to his education. He once said, “Most of what I know I did not learn in school and indeed was not even ‘taught’.” He described his childhood as “gloomy” and said he was unpopular as a teenager but that at boarding school and in college people lined up outside his door for tutoring and advice.

He served in a submarine during World War II, an experience he later described as one of the best learning environments he was ever in. After the war, he joined the United World Federalists, an organization working towards world peace.

After working with them for six years, he toured Europe for a year and, on his return to America, planned to become a farmer but his sister suggested that, as he was wonderful with children, he might like to teach at a school which had just opened near Aspen. The school planned to grow their own food and John could learn something of farming there. John made arrangements to work there as a cook without pay. He slept in a granary on the premises until another teacher quit and he was given the job.

“On the whole, I was a perfectly conventional schoolmaster … The only difference between me and the average teacher was that - because hadn’t taken any education courses - I didn’t know all the alibis that conventionally trained instructors use . . . excuses which imply that something’s wrong with students who don’t learn. I thought… that if my pupils weren’t grasping their lessons, it was my responsibility to figure out a way to explain the subject so that they would understand it!”