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Instead of Education by John Holt
John Holt (1923-1985) was a writer, educator, lecturer, and amateur musician who wrote ten books, including How Children Fail, How Children Learn, Never Too Late, Teach Your Own; and Freedom and Beyond. His work has been translated into fourteen languages and How Children Fail has sold over a million copies in its many editions. The magazine he founded, Growing Without Schooling,and the associated organization, Holt Associates, keep his vision and legacy alive.
Holt is the grandfather of the deschooling and homeschooling movements in North America. His remarkable personality and clear vision of an unschooled world is as poignant now as when it was written. Holt's work speaks to so many people in part because his thinking evolved very publicly through the course of ten books. The following pieces, excerpted from Instead of Education, have been chosen from among literally dozens of brilliant books, essays, and lectures which Holt produced.
THIS IS A BOOK IN FAVOR OF DOING-SELF-DIRECTED, PURPOSEFUL, meaningful life and work, and against "education"-learning cut off from active life and done under pressure of bribe or threat, greed and fear.
It is a book about people doing things, and doing them better; about the conditions under which we may be able to do things better; about some of the ways in which, given those conditions, other people may be able to help us (or we them) to do things better; and about the reasons why these conditions do not exist and cannot be made to exist within compulsory, coercive, competitive schools.
Not all persons will give the word "education" the meaning I give it here. Some may think of it, as I once described it, as "something a person gets for himself, not that which someone else gives or does to him." But I choose to define it here as most people do, something that some people do to others for their own good, molding and shaping them, and trying to make them learn what they think they ought to know. Today, everywhere in the world, that is what "education" has become, and I am wholly against it. People still spend a great deal of time - as for years I did myself-talking about how to make "education" more effective and efficient, or how to do it or give it to more people, or how to reform or humanize it. But to make it more effective and efficient will only be to make it worse, and to help it do even more harm. It cannot be reformed, cannot be carried out wisely or humanely, because its purpose is neither wise nor humane.
Next to the right to life itself, the most fundamental of all human rights is the right to control our own minds and thoughts. That means the right to decide for ourselves how we will explore the world around us, think about our own and other persons' experiences, and find and make the meaning of our own lives. Whoever takes that right away from us, as the educators do, attacks the very center of our being and does us a most profound and lasting injury. He tells us, in effect, that we cannot be trusted even to think, that for all our lives we must depend on others to tell us the meaning of our world and our lives, and that any meaning we may make for ourselves, out of our own experience, has no value.
Education, with its supporting system of compulsory and competitive schooling, all its carrots and sticks, its grades, diplomas, and credentials, now seems to me perhaps the most authoritarian and dangerous of all the social inventions of mankind. It is the deepest foundation of the modern and 'worldwide slave state, in which most people feel themselves to be nothing but producers, consumers, spectators, and "fans," driven more and more, in all parts of their lives, by greed, envy, and fear. My concern is not to improve "education" but to do away with it, to end the ugly and antihuman business of people-shaping and let people shape themselves.
By "doing" I do not mean only things done with the body, the muscles, with hands and tools, rather than with the mind alone. I am not trying to separate or put in opposition what many might, call the "physical" and the "intellectual." Such distinctions are unreal and harmful. Only in words can the mind and body be separated. In reality they are one; they act together. So by "doing" I include such actions as talking, listening, writing, reading, thinking, even dreaming. The point is that it is the do-er, not someone else, who has decided what he will say, hear, read, write, or think or dream about. He is at the center of his own actions. He plans, directs, controls, and judges them. He does them for his own purposes - which may, of course, include a common purpose with others. His actions are not ordered and controlled from outside. They belong to him and are a part of him.
This is not a book about such a doing society - or what it might be like. It is enough to say that it would be a society whose tools and institutions would be much smaller in scale, serving human beings, rather then being served by them; a society modest and sparing in its use of energy and materials, and reverent and loving in its attitude towards nature and the natural world. This is a book about how we might make the societies we have slightly more livable for do-ers, about the resources that might help some people, at least, to lead more active and interesting lives - and, perhaps, to make some of the beginnings, or very small models of such a society. It is not a book about how to solve or deal with such urgent problems as poverty, idleness, discimination, exploitation, waste, and suffering. These are not education problems or school problems. They have not been and cannot and will not be solved by things done in compulsory schools, and they will not be solved by changing these schools (or even by doing away with them altogether). The most that may happen is that, once freed of the delusion that schools can solve these problems, we might begin to confront them directly, realistically, and intelligently.
The trouble with talk about "learning experiences" is that it implies that all experiences can be divided into two kinds, those from which we learn something, and those from which we learn nothing. But there are no experiences from which we learn nothing. We learn something from everything we do, and everything that happens to us or is done to us. What we learn may make us more informed or more ignorant, wiser or stupider, stronger or weaker, but we always learn something. What it is depends on the experience, and above all, on how we feel about it.
A central point of this book is that we are very unlikely to learn anything good from experiences which do not seem to us closely connected with what is interesting and important in the rest of our lives. Curiosity is never idle; it grows out of real concerns and real needs. Even more important, we are even less likely to learn anything good from coerced experiences, things that others have bribed, threatened, bullied, wheedled, or tricked us into doing. From such we learn mostly anger, resentment, and above all self-contempt and self-hatred for having allowed ourselves to be pushed around or used by others, for not having been smart enough or strong enough to resist and refuse. Some would claim that most people in their daily lives do a great many things-dull, repetitious, and meaningless work, driving a car for hours in traffic, watching television-from which they learn nothing. But of course they learn something. The people doing moronic work learn to hate that work, and themselves for having to do it-and, in time, all those who do not have to do it. The people driving cars in traffic learn to think of all the other people they see, driving or walking, as nuisances, obstructions, even as enemies, preventing them from getting where they want to go. And people watching television learn over and over again that the people they see on the screen, "real" or imaginary, are in every way better than they are--younger, handsomer, sexier, smarter, stronger, faster, braver, richer, happier, more successful and respected. When the time finally comes to come back from Dreamland to reality, and get up wearily and turn off the set, the thought is even more strongly in their minds, "Why couldn't I have been more like them?"
Doing is learning
Another common and mistaken idea hidden in the word "learning" is that learning and doing are different kinds of acts. Thus, not many years ago I began to play the cello. I love the instrument, spend many hours a day playing it, work hard at it, and mean someday to play it well. Most people would say that what I am doing is "learning to play the cello." Our language gives us no other words to say it. But these words carry into our minds the strange idea that there exists two different processes: (1) learning to play the cello; and (2) playing the cello. They imply that I will do the first until I have completed it, at which point I will stop the first process and begin the second; in short, that I will go on "learning to play" until I "have learned to play," and that then I will begin "to play."
Of course, this is nonsense. There are not two processes, but one. We learn to do something by doing it. There is no other way. When we first do something, we probably will not do it well. But if we keep on doing it, have good models to follow and helpful advice if and when we feel we need it, and always do it as well as we can, we will do it better. In time, we may do it very well. This process never ends. The finest musicians, dancers, athletes, surgeons, pilots, or whatever they may be, must constantly practice their art or craft. Every day the musicians do their scales, the dancers exercise at the barre, and so on. A surgeon I knew would from time to time, when not otherwise busy, tie knots in fine surgical gut with one hand, without looking, just to keep in practice. In that sense, people never stop "learning to do" what they know how to do, no matter how well they do it. They must “learn" every day to do it as well as they can, or they will soon do it less well. The principal flutist of the Boston Symphony used to say, "If I miss a day's practice, I hear the difference; if I miss two days', the conductor hears the difference; If I miss three days’, the audience hears the difference."
* Teen Liberation c/o ARISE! 2441 Lyndale Ave. S. Minneapolis, MN 55404 *
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