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The Education of John Holt continued from the previous page.
"We don't need to be taught how to learn: we're born knowing and wanting to. It's our nature, our genes, our biological inheritance. The hardest thing for parents to learn is hands-off. Teach less, not more."
"Beyond a very small dose, teaching impedes learning. The way we can help learning is by answering their questions if and when they have them, helping them, if and when they ask for help."
A woman stood up. "I'm a professional educator," she said, "though I hate to say it in this room. It doesn't seem to me that public schools are to blame They aren't the villains."
He answered sharply. "The word villain' didn't come into the conversation until you put it in. Neither did the word blame. You brought these words with you."
During his lunch a dark-haired woman came over. "What bothers me," she said, "is that there seems so much chance in letting children decide what they want to learn. Shouldn't there be an element of something more than chance?"
"Well," he said, "we disagree on the amount of chance."
I don't know she persisted, "I just think there is so much we can— "
He cut her off. "Fine, if that's what you think. Good. You have a right to think it. I think something different."
The woman paused bewildered. She seemed to expect something more but Holt's hunch was that she just wanted to argue. After many lectures people ask him. "How can you be so patient?" but on this day his patience wore thin. He was as he said, "All argued out. It's a waste of time." He noticed a baby crawling in the center of the floor. Somebody had dropped an orange and the baby was crawling towards it. He walked over and leaned down. He wanted to see what the baby did with the orange.
As a young man John Holt had no interest in children. He wanted to be a physicist. He was the oldest of three children in a well-to-do family. His father was an insurance broker who raised his children between New York City and fashionable Connecticut commuter towns. By the ninth grade Holt was attending a prestigious New England boarding school, and later an even more prestigious eastern university, but he always requests that their names not be revealed.
"I no longer believe in degrees" he says, "and if I could get rid of mine I would. I quit answering questions about my educational background a long time ago, except to say the things I'm supposed to know so much about I never learned in schools."
He refers to his childhood as 'gloomy' and by his own account as a teenager he was unpopular. But at boarding school he often found classmates outside his door at exam time. The word had spread that Holt could explain how to do math and science better than the teachers. By the time he went to college he desperately wanted to be liked. "The more I worried and the harder I cried the less liked I seemed to be." But at college too the lines formed outside his door for tutoring and advice on term papers. It was in 1940 and to flunk out meant certain military duty. He was never one to turn anybody away. "If somebody were to ask me what sort of a name I would apply to myself," he says, "I would say, I am a problem-solver. I like to solve my own problems and if people ask me, help to solve theirs."
He graduated from college in 1943 and was commissioned an officer on the submarine Barbero, which he calls, "the best learning community I have ever known."
"I was 21 and this was the first real job I'd ever done. It became my job to keep the boat in underwater balance to prepare it to dive everyday."
"Once when I was officer of the deck the captain came on deck. He said, "You know, Jack, you're not a passenger up here. You can turn this thing in a big circle if you want to." But what he was really saying to me was, “If you have to turn it in a circle in order to feel that you really have the power to do it; then do it.” And that ten-second sermon had a great effect on me."
The submarine sank two enemy ships in the Java Sea before it was damaged by a bomb. On the way to Pearl Harbor after repairs word came that Hiroshima had been destroyed by an atomic bomb. Holt, the former Physics student, thought world devastation would be only a matter of time. He saw a solution in world government, and when he was discharged he began working for the World Federalists in New York City. He stayed six years, giving over 600 lectures, bombarding newspapers with letters, and in his travels becoming an instant uncle to over 50 World Federalist families.
He toured Europe for a year after leaving the organization, and when he returned home he visited his sister, who lived near Santa Fe. He said he was thinking of becoming a farmer. She replied he was wonderful with her children so why didn't he teach? No, he said, that didn't sound very pleasant.
But she persisted and told him to visit Rocky Mountain School near Aspen, which had just opened. They would grow their own food he could learn farming there.
He liked the school and stayed without pay in exchange for room and board until a regular teacher quit and he was hired. He slept in a converted wood shop, stepping over mounds of sawdust to reach his cot. "They gave me the bad students to teach," he says "but it has always been from the bad students that I learned something. You may have fun talking to the A students but you don't learn anything about teaching from them."
Four years later he moved east to Boston. He was then 34 years old. He came to study music and a friend offered him an apartment at the foot of Beacon Hill where Holt has made his home ever since. He began observing a fifth grade class in an exclusive private school.
The school hired Holt but within a year grew disenchanted by, among other things, his insistence that testing was probably harmful to learning, and fired him. He taught in two other private schools, but his beliefs about learning met with little favor there either, and again he was fired.
"Schools were always a means to an end for me," he says. "I had to work in schools in order to answer my questions on learning and children's intelligence. But I never identified myself as a schoolteacher. So today when some people who still want to reform schools accuse me of desertion, my feeling is that I never signed up in that army in the first place."
John Holt's friends, when asked to describe his approach to life call him "childlike" "I am happy to say they're right," Holt says.
Sometimes, in his enthusiasm, he fails to realize that everything that happens to him, everything he observes, may not interest others equally. "He will cook a potato," says a friend, "and when he tells about it, it will be like he's the first person who ever cooked a potato."
He has already made plans about how he will handle his eventual demise, an experience he intends to take full advantage of. "I'm going to be the central actor in the drama of my own death," he says. "I'm going to say to whoever comes by. 'Death is the agenda here. I've done lots of other things and it's what I have left to do. If you don't want to talk about it, don't come here.'"
Holt says, "I like listening more than talking most of the time. One of the things I like most about visiting friends is that I get a vacation from talking."
His friends smile at this view of himself. When he visits friends he often will talk from Friday to Sunday, spilling out ideas, describing his dreams, discussing books and concerts, and his friends will be worn from the effort to keep pace while he leaves invigorated. He takes his deepest quiet from music. "One of the best things I like about my cello is that it is worthless," he says, but once after playing a duet with a five-year-old girl, he emerged from the bathroom of his host, yellow toothbrush protruding from his mouth, to exclaim. "We need more fun in music. More giggles. Did you notice how her bow hand relaxed when she giggled."
"His feelings lie very close to the surface," says a friend. "When he's with us we're either laughing or crying. Whenever he tells a story he is not just telling it, he's reliving it for us."
He is always moved when telling of his friendship with A.S. Neill, the famed founder of Summerhill School in England. He met Neill for the first time in 1965, shortly after How Children Fail came out, and was to be heir to Neill's belief that children can be trusted to learn about their world with little adult interference. And in the crusty Scotsman who delighted in bawdy Scottish jokes told in a thick burr, Holt had found a friend.
Shortly before Neill died in 1973, Holt returned to Summerhill. His book Escape From Childhood had just been published and he was anxious about Neill's opinion. But Neill said, "I've not read your book. I can't read books anymore. I can't remember what I have read." So they talked of growing old and Neill said, "I have no fear: Death is" — and he gestured like blowing out a candle. There's no future that I look forward to seeing. But there's just one thing," he said. And he leaned close to Holt and said, "I can't stand not knowing how it's going to turn out."
It was early June, a few weeks after his speech in Antioch, New England and John Holt sat in the shade by the pond in the Boston Common watching the swan boats glide by. His blue work shirt and green Levis were slightly torn. Except for indulging in classical records and Brazil nuts he is frugal with himself. "He just doesn't seem to want things," says a friend, "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."
I was with him and I had told him that I had often thought his writings had altered my life. A decade earlier I had been teaching fourth grade in a public school in Maine. He nodded.
"I think the largest good we reformers did was we changed a lot of people's lives. A lot of people who were teaching and kidding themselves over what they were doing saw more clearly what was going on, and got on to something else." I asked what had gone wrong with the reform movement: days that Holt calls "my gung-ho period."
"Teachers are not very brave about change," he said. "I used to think 75 percent of the teachers I met were allies," he said. "Then 50 percent, then 25. Now I think a lot of people I thought, as friends were really not; they were enemies. I discovered that I couldn't talk to teachers about any kinds of changes, however small, even tiny little ways to teach addition or spelling, without them saying. "Why are you criticizing us?" They believe that everything they are doing is right and anything that goes wrong is not their fault. They are hermetically sealed to any change. To my friends who still call themselves reformers I say, "You change the schools so that children can at least talk at lunchtime. Until you've done that don't talk to me about how I should change them."
"I think in time the home schooling movement will do more to change schools than anything I ever did when I spent most of my time talking to schools. Only when enough people give them a vote of no confidence will schools begin to think seriously about change."
"Of the 24 years I've lived in Boston, I've been known as a kind of educational expert for 17 of them. In those 17 years only one person connected with the Boston school system has ever talked to me. He was a teacher of remedial mathematics to Hispanic school kids. He called up and asked if he could talk about some of his problems. I said sure. We talked and he went away with a bunch of suggestions. Sometimes after he said to me. "I tried out all that stuff and it really helps." And he's the one person who ever came to me for help in solving a problem."
Suppose, I asked, the home schooling movement stopped growing, with its influence as fleeting and as muted as that of the reformers; what would John Holt do then?
He smiled, "A boxer once told me," he said, "you never practice getting up from the mat."
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