Monday 9 May 2011

John Holt and his assertions


I have been idly leafing through my old copy of How Children Fail. This is such a dreadful book that it is something of a mystery to me why it has been so popular over the years. For those fortunate enough to be unaware of his work, Holt was a teacher and wrote a number of books criticising education in schools. He does not produce evidence for his views, other than basing them upon trivial events which he witnessed in the schools where he was teaching. His books are written as though by a guru, whose word one must simply take on trust for the pronouncements. This is essentially what is known in logic as 'bare assertion'. Holt makes statements and one must take his word for it. Let's look at a few examples:


Learning is not everything and certainly one piece of learning is as good
as another



Schools should be places where children learn what they most want to
know, instead of what we want them to know



A child who wants to learn something that the school can't and doesn't
want to teach him will be told not to waste his time



These three statements were selected more or less at random from the final section of Holt's book. Let us see what we can make of them.


The first uses the neat rhetorical trick of beginning with an incontrovertibly true assertion and then following it up with a piece of nonsense. 'Learning is not everything' is of course absolutely true. The second part, 'one piece of learning is as good as another' is not true. When my brother was at school, he had no interest in anything but sport, particularly football. Although he made great efforts to avoid learning anything that he was taught, he memorised a huge amount of information relating to football. He could tell one which teams won which matches, going back for decades. In addition to this, he knew who had scored the winning goals and a lot more besides. If Holt's claim that 'one piece of learning is as good as another' were true, then in later life my brother should have found the knowledge of who scored the winning goal in the FA cup final in 1957, every bit as useful as understanding percentages as they are used in loan rates. I can assure readers that this has not been the case! Not all pieces of learning are as good as each other.


When Holt tells us that 'schools should be' this or that; it means nothing. he is really saying that he would like schools to be this way; not that there is any reason why they should be like that. I dare say that if I said here that schools should have all the desks facing the front, the teacher imposing silence and the return of the cane; it would be easier to spot this flaw in reasoning. If I said that schools should be like this, all I would be doing would be exposing my own personal prejudices, not saying anything at all profound.



What about the final statement, 'A child who wants to learn something that the school can't and doesn't want to teach him he will be told not to waste his time'. Who on earth will tell him that? His parents? His teacher? It sounds a bit mad, really. Is Holt saying that if a child wishes to go to ballet classes or learn Latin in his spare time, somebody will tell him not to, because it is a waste of time? I never heard of such a thing, although I suppose that some parents might feel that way. Is this a general thing though? One suspects not. And if it is not common, why on earth mention it in this way as though it were a universal practice for parents and teachers to disourage children from having hobbies and learning things out of school? The whole of Why Children Fail is like this; Holt's own opinions and prejudices tricked out as folk wisdom. Not only that, but the entire thing is served up in a mawkish and avuncular manner, as though Holt sees himself as the wise old village elder, transmitting his ideas to the next generation. Not a recommended read.

24 comments:

  1. An American guru. He claimed that the reason children don't learn in schools is because of fear. That claim appears to conflict with the teachers who routinely apply/applied Maslow's Hierarchy theory to their teaching practice.

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  2. He didn't seem to grasp the concept of Differentiated Learning Styles.
    His philosophies are considered dated and flawed by academics educational psychologists.

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  3. Yet his books still sell like hot cakes. He is enormously popular with home educators, many of whom one suspects are not aware that his ideas have been discredited.

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  4. "mawkish and avuncular"


    From the fool that frequently condemns people for not using plain English.

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  5. 'He didn't seem to grasp the concept of Differentiated Learning Styles.'

    I'm also having difficulty understanding it. Do you mean 'Different learning styles'? Are you getting that mixed up with 'differentiated teaching strategies?'

    Learning and teaching are different things.

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  6. No, I meant styles.
    Perhaps you were deliberately reading it out of context, a rather bad habit and terribly ill mannered.

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  7. Simon, I suspect that they confuse home schooling with unschooling.
    Whether that confusion is intentional or not is anybody's guess.

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  8. It looks very much like someone doesn't quite appreciate the English language and concise use of vocabulary.

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  9. Simon, have you noticed how his books are being rehashed by our home grown home school gurus?

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  10. Holt's books are re-diddled versions of philosophies from Ivan Illich and A.S Neill.

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  11. 'Simon, have you noticed how his books are being rehashed by our home grown home school gurus?'

    I have indeed noticed this, but hesitate to name names!

    'Holt's books are re-diddled versions of philosophies from Ivan Illich and A.S Neill.'

    This is also true.

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  12. It is worth mentioning that Holt also wanted to abolish the age of consent and thought that adults and children should be free to have sex together. In Why Children Fail, he refers to 'an eight year-old friend of mine'. I have a suspicion that if I as a grown man started talking here about 'eight year-old friends of mine', it might raise the odd eyebrow. It is a bit creepy. Somebody mentioned A S Neill above, and he too believed in free love for children in a way that I do not quite go along with. People need to take time to read these autors and see what they are really saying before they become too enthusiastic about them. In particular, I think that rather than Why Children Fail, people who approve of Holt should read Escape from Childhood.

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  13. 'Perhaps you were deliberately reading it out of context, a rather bad habit and terribly ill mannered.'

    Go on, Psychoanalyse me. Like you did with that poor anon yesterday. LOL!

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  14. Good god psychoanalyse you!
    You're obviously somone with deeply entrenched anger issues and personality disorders.

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  15. 'You're obviously somone with deeply entrenched anger issues and personality disorders.

    Cheers!

    Now do Simon!

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  16. 'Thought that adults and children should be free to have sex together'

    Oh dear oh dear oh dear......

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  17. My biggest criticism of the books I have read is that John Holt can wax lyrical about what schools do wrong, how they fail, how terrible they are. He went on and on about what schools ought to be but nowhere in these books does he seem to present any real ways to change or improve aducation.

    Seems like he made his money saying an awful lot about very little. but thats just my opinion.

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  18. Don't mention it...I did that one for free.

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  19. C...you have a good point there, perhaps that's why our home grown HE gurus are so keen to plagiarise his diddlings. All talk no action, no commitment but plenty of profit.

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  20. 'Education' I mean, obviously.

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  21. Anonymous - I agree with that. I don't even buy his fear philosophy either as for most school was not scary. If he'd said boredom he might have won my interest but he came out with such rubbish at times.

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  22. Exploiting Fear sells books...

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  23. Is this the third or fourth time you've repeated this post, Simon? Running out of ideas?

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  24. I think most of the 'fear' stuff comes from Holt's experience teaching in very regimented school environments in the 1950s and 60s - he was reacting to that environment. His ideas on education are sometimes very obviously dated: like many writing in the 1970s, he did not believe in the existance of dyslexia or other learning disabilities, felt that cognitively disabled children should never interact with othe children in public, and was a proponent of much greater sexual permissiveness for teenagers than would be considered OK today. His language also has dated badly...note the phrase "my 8-year-old-friend" that Simon points out above.

    C: "He went on and on about what schools ought to be but nowhere in these books does he seem to present any real ways to change or improve aducation." Most of that commentary can be found in Growing Without Schooling - the compilation of the early stuff from there can be found in a collected book called "Growing Without Schooling: A Record of a Grassroots Movement"
    (http://www.fun-books.com/books/7108.htm)
    Most of his ideas as expressed through his organisation are also fairly dated: much more suited toward the early US homeschooling movement, when most HS families were rural hippies or academics.

    One odd thing is that GWS did help families with more structured educational goals, and even ran a postal writing-tutor service for teenagers, even though if you listened to the more doctrinaire US 'unschoolers', you would never know that this was the case.

    The same is true of Grace Llewelyn, the best known of Holt's heirs nowadays, BTW. If you listened to her describe herself, she'd say she's totally against structure and for 'radical unschooling', but if you actually read The Teenage Liberation Handbook, Real Lives, Freedom Challenge, or Guerilla Learning, you find that she really advocates an approach very similar to what Simon describes doing with his daughter, though with a greater student control over the choice of subjects.

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