The baleful influence of John Holt

I received an email last night, reproaching me for singling out Leslie Barson as  somebody who would like to see the abolition of compulsory education in this country. It was pointed out that many of the better known figures in the British home educating scene share her feelings about this.  This is of course quite true and it makes one wonder how many more of John Holt’s stranger views are held by modern home educators in this country.  Voting at the age of three? Four year-olds being allowed to drive cars on the roads? Five year-olds injecting heroin?   Abolishing the age of consent and legalising paedophilia? But let us focus today upon just one of Holt’s key ideas; that children should be free to abandon education and start work whenever they feel ready to do so. It is this which Leslie Barson  thinks a good idea and she is not alone.

Something to bear in mind here is that well-meaning and good-hearted people tend to assume that everybody else is like them. The home educators who would like to see the end of compulsory education are thinking in terms of parents taking responsibility for their children’s education and not being forced into it by the state. It is a noble vision, but one which history teaches us would have the direst consequences for children. Let’s look both at the past and present to see what the likely consequence would be if there was no compulsion to ensure that our children received an education. Compulsory education in this country came into force in 1880 and there was enormous opposition to it from parents. During the following decade, prosecution of parents for their children’s non-attendance at school was the commonest offence in this country, apart from drunkenness. There were over a  100,000 cases a year. These were not home educating parents who resented the state trying to usurp parental authority. They were mothers and fathers who wanted their small children to go to work and earn money. They were driven by economic necessity, rather than a philosophy of education.

More recently, before the school leaving age was raised to 16 in 1972, many working class children at grammar schools were forced to leave school before taking their GCEs, because their parents wanted them to get jobs. An awful lot of children were thus deprived of the chance to go into higher education. This still happens today. I know of a number of cases of children who have left school with good GCSEs and want to attend sixth form or college. Their parents tell them that they can’t afford to keep supporting them and so the children have to get jobs instead. Raising the school leaving age to 18 will rescue some of these children and enable them to go on to university if they wish. Compulsory education protects these young people and allows them to fulfill their potential.

The problem is that many home educating parents come from comfortable, middle class backgrounds and simply don’t know how things work in the real, ordinary world. If compulsory education was abolished and parents were not forced to send their children to school, many would not bother at all about their children’s education. Their only concern would be how soon they could have another wage coming into the house, so that they could cope with the next electricity bill. Lower the school leaving age to 14 and masses of working class children will be forced to drop out of school for this reason. Ideas like this will generally benefit the middle classes  and penalise horribly children from working class homes. Raise the school leaving age to 18 and this will have the opposite effect. 

I hope to look in future posts about which other of John Holt’s ideas might be popular among home educators today. I have an idea that examining this question  might shed light upon the frantic reluctance of some of these types to allow anybody from the local authority into their homes! Those who would abolish compulsory education and allow eight and nine  year-olds to work in the fields again, as they did before 1880, are clearly not overly committed to the welfare of young children; to put the case mildly.

I have written extensively on this question of compulsory education and the effect that it has had upon improving the lot of working class children. In particular, the introduction of compulsory education in the late 19th century is covered in Chapter 1 of Elective Home Education in the UK, Trentham Books 2010. The business about working class children being compelled to leave at 15, before sitting their GCEs, is treated in detail in The Best Days of our Lives; School Life in Post-War Britain, The History press 2013.

Compulsory education

I have been reading the Newcastle Report, a Royal Commission set up in 1858 in order to examine and report on the state of education in Britain. Some of its findings and recommendations are surprising, particularly when you bear in mind that only ten years later compulsory education was introduced in this country. The Newcastle Report had this to say on the subject;

"Any universal compulsory system appears to us neither attainable nor desirable. An attempt to replace an independent system of education with a compulsory system, managed by the Government, would be met by objections, both religious and political."

Today most people view school as such a natural and integral part of modern life that it seems incredible that a Royal Commission could have come down so firmly against the idea of compulsory education. Interestingly, the words that they used to dismiss the idea could be used to today by the opponents of the regulations about home education contained in the Children, Schools and Families Bill. What would be the practical results if the element of compulsion were to be wholly removed from education? I suppose that we and our children are in general so used to the concept of kids having to go to school or at the very least be educated, that it would throw everyone into confusion at first!

Would parents continue to send their children to school if compulsory education were abolished? Probably they would. An awful lot of the parents to whom one talks look forward to the day that their children will be going to school. many of them dislike the school holidays, especially the long Summer holiday. There is also the popular belief that children have to go to school to learn. Most parents would be frightened of the consequences of a child not being taught at school. Indeed, we know this to be true, because of course parents do not have to send their children to school as things currently stand. A very tiny minority fail to do so. School is popular with parents.

School is also, by and large, popular with the children themselves. They like the opportunity to get away from their parents, to meet their friends and so on. I believe that some of them even learn there!

In other words, despite the fact that school is not compulsory and never has been, the overwhelming majority of parents and children seem to like it just fine. At a guess, the situation would not change at all if a new law was passed which abolished the compulsory element from education altogether. Things would carry on just as they do now.

Why many children are much better off in school than at home

Yesterday I mentioned briefly some of the children who started school at the same time as my daughter. Many of these children did not appear to have been raised in a modern industrial society. To be blunt, some of them looked as though they were hardly used to standing upright, never mind learning to read and write. Having done quite a bit of home visiting in the past, I was not particularly surprised to see these children; I know only too well what sort of homes they come from. It is not that their families are poor in the conventional meaning of the word. They have 72 inch plasma screen televisions in every room, computers, games consoles, no books, but a huge book-shelf full of DVDs and computer games. In some of these homes, there is literally no printed matter at all. Needless to say they usually have a TV in their bedrooms. Meals are eaten with their fingers while squatting round the television. Often the house will reek of stale urine because nobody has got round to teaching the kids to control their bladders. Spoken language is hardly used at all in such homes, except for control and rebuke. The very concept of a conversation, as in the sense of one person speaking and then remaining silent while another person speaks is quite alien to them.

For these children, school is a rescue, a last chance for society to reclaim its most vulnerable members from the descent into barbarism. Leave those kids where they are and in a generation or two they will be crawling around on all fours, having lost all skills save for the ability to wield a remote control. At least at school there is a slender chance that some of these children might actually make something of their lives, might make some sort of intellectual progress. They will not see books unless they attend school. They will not learn to read and write, nor encounter even the most basic historical knowledge. It really is this desperate.

I talked yesterday about support groups with which I used to be involved when my daughter was a baby. The sort of activities that we did with those small children were very basic, yet utterly vital for them if they were to have the remotest chance of benefiting from school when they were five. For instance, simple turn taking games. The idea of taking a turn, waiting for somebody else to do something before you have a go, is wholly unknown in many homes in the land. This skill is of course essential even for a conversation. At school, a child will be completely unable to learn, if he does not realise that while the teacher is speaking, he must sit quietly and wait until she has stopped talking before he speaks himself. This simple skill, which most of the sort of parents one finds on home education message boards take for granted, is altogether lacking in many small children when they start school. They have never actually taken part in a conversation and so do not know the rules. If they want something, they will grab it. If frustrated, they throw spectacular tantrums. Some of them void urine without even being aware that there might be a special time and place to do so.

If education for these children did not mean compulsory schooling, then their outlook would be bleak indeed. If their parents realised that it was not legally necessary to send them to school, then they would not bother to get dressed in the morning to take them to school. I am glad indeed that most parents believe schooling to be required by law! Without this false idea, the outlook for many thousands of children in this country would be pretty grim. Ironically, it is children from such homes who sometimes start refusing to go to school at all as teenagers. If the parents hear about home education, they might then deregister them, which is an absolute disaster for the child concerned. It is children from these homes, both the very young and the teenagers, about whom so many professionals are worried. Tony Mooney, a well known home education inspector, has been castigated often on the HE-UK and EO lists for talking about children on council estates who have been withdrawn from school. This is not snobbishness but genuine concern for the welfare and future prospects of children for whom a lifetime on state benefits is the only realistic prospect. Regular attendance at school offers them the only available route away from this depressing way of life.