“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!”
Four years later he moved to Boston and together with colleague Bill Hull began making notes on the strategies children employ to meet or dodge the demands of teachers. The school tired of John’s controversial approach and he was fired but he then began work in another school. He was struck by the difference between the frightened, timid, evasive and self-protecting attitude of the ten-year-olds he was teaching and the bold adventurous preschoolers of his acquaintance.
His observations from this time formed the basis for his book, How Children Fail which was published in 1964. Holt says, “I pointed out that children do poorly in school because they’re bored with the meaningless work . . . scared of being punished or humiliated . . . and confused by the fact that most teaching progresses from abstract concepts to concrete examples instead of – as would be more sensible – the other way around. In essence I’d realized, from observing and teaching, that school is a place where children learn to be stupid!”
In 1965, Holt met A.S.Neill and was impressed by his belief that children can be trusted to learn about their world with little adult interference. In Holt’s second book, How Children Learn, he pointed out that children “are by nature, smart, curious, and eager to learn. In fact… babies are such active, skillful seekers of knowledge that they learn more in the first five years of their lives than most older folks ever do in ten! I suggested that we simply provide young people with schools where there are a lot of interesting things to look at and work with . . . but that we let the children learn in their own ways. If they have questions, answer the questions. If they want to know where to look for something, show them where to look… Students who are placed in an environment where they feel safe to explore and receive help when they need it will do fine. And I thought, at the time, that once I and others showed enough people that fact, then surely everyone would want to try the “new” way of teaching.”
Following the success of these two books (which together have sold over a million and a half copies) Holt became a sought-after speaker on school reform all over America and was well respected by many educators. Throughout the next decade, his writing explored social issues relating to schooling (The Underachieving School, 1969); educational theory and practice (What Do I Do Monday? 1970); alternative schools (Freedom and Beyond, 1972); and children’s rights (Escape From Childhood: The Needs and Rights of Children, 1974).
By the early seventies, Holt was reluctantly coming to see that the school reform he had so fervently worked towards for so long was not ever going to come because the system was fundamentally flawed. Inspired by his contact with Ivan Illich, author of Deschooling Society, Holt’s books from this period show his thinking moving from the classroom and school system to an analysis of children’s place in society. School reform, he said, was “doomed from the start, simply because nobody really wanted to make the schools better. You can’t believe how much I hated facing that truth.”
Instead of talking about how schools could be reformed, he began asking new questions: Were schools, however organized, necessary at all? Were they the best place for learning? His next book, Instead of Education: Ways to Help People Do Things Better (1976) called for an underground railroad to help children escape from compulsory schooling. This book contains a lot of practical suggestions for making the world of adults more accessible to children. Following its publication, Holt received letters from parents who recommended home education as a viable educational alternative and he almost immediately worked to support home education, beginning the publication of Growing Without Schooling (the first homeschooling magazine) in 1977.
“It’s not that I feel that school is a good idea gone wrong,” he said, “but a wrong idea from the word go. It’s a nutty notion that we can have a place where nothing but learning happens, cut off from the rest of life.” He encouraged people to believe they could teach their own children. “Teaching is not a mystery… anybody who knows something can help anybody else who wants to learn it; in fact, what passes for official “teacher training” often makes people much less effective educators than they would have been if they hadn’t had it.”
Ideally, he saw homeschooling as moving beyond running a house like a miniature school. “I think that learning is not the result of teaching, but of the curiosity and activity of the learner. A teacher’s intervention in this process should be mostly to provide the learner with access to the various kinds of places, people, experiences, tools, and books that will correspond with that student’s interest… answer questions when they’re asked … and demonstrate physical skills. I also feel that learning is not an activity that’s separate from the rest of the life. People learn best when they’re involved with doing real and valuable work, which requires skill and judgment.”
Holt’s work with Growing Without Schooling continued for the remainder of his life. He also frequently wrote and spoke on behalf of families who were fighting court cases in order to keep their children out of school as home education was illegal in many states of America at that time. His support for home educators extended to Australia by mail and he visited Australia in 1981, giving a well-attended talk at the Melbourne Zoo organized by the Alternative Education Resource Group (the forerunner of HEN). With his encouragement, the group decided to publish Otherways following the example set by Growing Without Schooling.
In 1979 Holt published Never Too Late about his experiences as an adult learning to play the cello without a musical background. His only book specifically about home education, Teach Your Own was published in 1981.
Throughout his life, even at the height of his popularity, Holt remained an unassuming man. He was very conscious of looking after the world. He bathed in a plastic dishpan and, when finished, carried the water out to a small compost heap. He later carried the compost to nearby gardens and spread it around. “It’s my contribution,” he said, “however small, to a situation I can’t do much to change.” Similarly, when out walking he took a plastic shopping bag in which to collect rubbish. Except for indulging in classical records and Brazil nuts he was very frugal with himself. “He just doesn’t seem to want things,” a friend said, “but if a friend needs money for a project, he finds it and he never seems to care if the project works out or not.”
When Mel Allen went to interview him in 1981 he was surprised to find Holt in a crowded office, sitting on a stack of newspapers four inches high in front of a cluttered desk which was shielded from the sun by folding cot propped against a window. Allen wrote that a photographer arrived and wanted to take a photo of Holt with children in it, “He shifted uneasily. �I won’t be photographed playing with children I don’t know,’ he said firmly. �I won’t make them into actors in a play called See How Good John Holt Is With Children.’”
Allen noted that some “may wonder how he could presume to understand children, and worse to give advice about children, without ever coming home dog-tired work to face a house full of kids.” Holt’s reply was that would have liked to marry, that wasn’t his choice not to and his books are not a set of theories but came directly from his observations of children. He a great deal of time just watching children, being with them, being accepted by them and observing how they reacted to various situations. Mel Allen wrote, “He watches children with the intensity of a naturalist observing from a blind.” He believed that children who were provided a rich and stimulating learning environment would learn what they are ready to learn, when they are ready to learn it.
“But sometimes”, said a friend, “he’ll see children doing something and he’ll rave about it and I’ll think ‘nearly every mother knows that’. To which Holt replied, “Yes, but I want mothers to know these things are important.’”
A second book on home education, Learning All The Time was left unfinished at the time of Holt’s death in 1985. It was completed by his associates using materials from Growing Without Schooling and published posthumously in 1989. Patrick Farenga, who worked closely with Holt in his final years, revised and published a new edition of Teach Your Own in 2003.
John Holt’s books give a strong sense of his liking and respect for children as well as his faith in their ability to learn in their own ways and, through his writings he has left an enduring inspiration for home educators around the world.
References:
Plowboy interview
The Education of John Holt: http://www.holtgws.com/educationofjh.html
John Holt Biography: http://www.holtgws.com/johnholtpage.html