The Education of John Holt

By Mel Allen

First published in YANKEE December, 1981.

His first book How Children Fail sounded an alarm for the modern school system and helped launch the educational reform movement of the mid 60's. Although today there is hardly a teacher in America who doesn't know his name, few, if any, know the man.

"A lot of people have come to me and said, "Your books have changed my life, and I believe them." — John Holt.

One afternoon this past July I went to see John Holt, who was working in his fourth-floor office on Boylston Street in downtown Boston. Holt, possibly this country's best known, if not its most controversial education writer, was sitting on a stack of newspapers four inches high placed on a chair in front of a desk cluttered with books and papers. The newspapers were yellowing. One was dated February 29, 1980 in front of his desk was a green folding cot, standing upright to shield him from the sun that slanted through the windows.

"I may not be good at making things," he said, "but I love to improvise." He pointed proudly to the wooden splint and tape that held the cot upright. He worked bare-chested and wore shorts in the heat; his skin full of freckles, and a fan whirred beside him as he composed on his Olivetti memory-storing typewriter, his pride and joy.

In contrast to so much of the writing on schools and learning, one reads Holt easily, and he has become one of the very few education writers to have reached the masses. How Children Fail and How Children Learn, the most successful of his nine books, are among the best-selling education books ever.

This afternoon he was putting the finishing touches on a revised edition of How Children Fail (to be published this spring by Delacorte). When the original was published in 1964 it all but launched the educational reform movement, a movement that reached its peak a decade ago before being swept aside by "back to basics."

"My first thought," he says about his revision, "was that it would be easy maybe add a few words here and there. But I found I had a lot more to say. My thinking had really moved on since then. It's a whole new book. Really John Holt up to date."

By the mid-seventies Holt had decided that for him, meaningful school reform was impossible. Four years ago he began his own magazine Growing Without Schooling. In the magazine, in lectures, on talk shows (after an appearance on the Phil Donahue show Holt received 10,000 letters) and in a new book Teach Your Own (Delacorte) he stressed that the best learning environment for a child was not in the school, no matter how humane, but in a supportive home.

"It's not that I feel that school is a good idea gone wrong," he says, "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."

His office is crowded, containing besides Holt, three assistants, and between his book writing and the magazine work, one must walk bowlegged to keep from knocking the boxes of books, or tape recorder, or stacks of envelopes. Though he claims to know where everything is, in fact he usually doesn't and he will root through boxes, growing more unnerved by the minute. But the alternative is worse: to devote hours - "no days" - to straightening everything out, time better put to other uses.

"So much seems to be happening in his head all at once," said a friend. "Whenever he gets an idea he goes after it on a horseback." There seems little that doesn't intrigue Holt, but at the top of his list would seem to be writing, children, playing the cello, ecology, food and physical fitness, in no particular order. On any given day one might hold sway over all the others.

A photographer arrived for a photo session. She said she wanted a photo 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."

He dressed for the photograph. He put on a faded blue work shirt, its pocket crammed with pens. He put on a floppy tan hat to protect his balding scalp from the sun. He picked up an empty plastic shopping bag and set off down Boylston Street, then turned into Commonwealth Avenue.

He spied a discarded soda bottle. He popped it into his bag. He spied another. Soon he had filled the bag and emptied it into a trash can, then began his hunt anew, not without a trace of anger at the litter despoiling a city he regards as utterly beautiful.

John Holt has a shower in his apartment, but he never uses it. When he wants to bathe he places a green plastic dishpan in his bathtub. He puts a few gallons of water in it. He gets in the tub and stands in a very large plastic tray designed for catching crankcase oil. He dips a sponge in the water and squeezes it over his body, the water collecting beneath. When he's finished he carries-the water through his kitchen to a small sunken courtyard, where he pours it onto a pile of leaves and garbage. He keeps earthworms in his courtyard and they feed on the pile making compost. He has no garden his own, but someday, when the compost has accumulated, he hopes to carry it to nearby gardens and spread it around.

"My actions sometimes are on the edges of some kind of normal distribution curve," he says, "and I guess that's what eccentric means. But they are not queer or nutty. My actions are eminently sensible. We have to save water and turn waste into soil. It's my contribution, however small, to a situation I can't do much to change."

He crossed to the Public Gardens and through the Common. He is not a romantic about children but the sound of their laughter or crying always stops him, and he must investigate what is going on. Hearing children laugh is often enough to start him laughing as well. He watches children with the intensity of a naturalist observing from a blind, and whenever he sees them looking back at him he turns away abruptly as though suddenly fascinated with a passing cloud.

On the playground a boy of about six approached the top of a concrete mountain, grasping handrails as he climbed. Suddenly a man clambered after the boy, lifting him to the top

.

"No, no." Holt muttered. "Who is that man? What's he think he's doing? That child doesn't wont or need his help." He walked to the mountain and looked crossly at the man, who seemed not to notice. For a moment Holt seemed ready to say something, but the moment passed and he remained silent. "I've finally learned the limits of argument," he said. "It took me a long while but I've learned when to save my breath." His interest in children sometimes prompts people to question why he never married and raised a family of his owe, especially when they learn that his two sisters have six and five children. Others have wondered how he could ever really presume to understand children, and worse, to give advice about children, without ever having to come home dog-tired from work to face a house full of kids.

He answers he would like to have married; it wasn't his doing that he never did. He adds that his books are not a set of theories, but come entirely from his observations and his contacts with hundreds of children over many years in their homes and schools, watching many of them grow from infants into adults.

"But sometimes." says 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 replies, "Yes, but I want mothers to know these things are important."

Eighteen years ago Holt would send to friends copies of letters he had written to a teaching colleague named Bill Hull. They were filled with his observations on how children learned or failed to learn in his classes. He was trying to solve a puzzle. He taught under seemingly ideal conditions. His biggest class being only 20 children. He was free to try things out. But the good students stayed good and the bad students stayed bad. He explained things to the kids and they seemed to understand, then the next time he gave a test, they'll flunk again.

One friend, Peggy Hughes, whose children Holt taught says, "His letters made my children come alive for me." She urged him to make a book of them. Eventually the letters caught the interest of a young publishing house named Pitman. They were edited into a book, How Children Fail. It went all but unnoticed.

"At a bigger publisher it would have been remaindered and out of print in six months," Holt says, "but Pitman needed titles and kept it on." Meanwhile he wrote another letter, this one to Eliot Fremont-Smith, book reviewer of The New York Times.

"I don't mind being ignored," wrote Holt, "but I think I'm saying something unique." Fremont-Smith read the book and wrote a front-page rave. "Possibly the most penetrating and probably the most eloquent book on education to be published in recent years." The next month it sold 2000 copies. "There's no question if that hadn't happened there'd be no How Children Learn."

Once he was out walking when he heard a whisper as he passed by: "That's John Holt." He had a rush of vanity followed by, "Oh damn, that takes away my privacy." He prefers the story of the woman from the Harvard School of Education who exclaimed. "Everyone at school knows your books but nobody knows who you are." He thought happily, "That's just the way I'd like to have it."

One day in mid 1980 John Holt went to Keene, New Hampshire, to give a speech at the Antioch New England Graduate School of Education. The lectures are a necessity. His fees of up to $ 1,000 (often less) help sustain his magazine, and he lives under constant financial tension despite royalties from his books. The room where he spoke was small, and packed with 200 people. Once he outdrew Bob Hope when both appeared in a small Ohio city, and he has often talked to audiences of several thousand, but he says ruefully, "I was more of a media star then."

As often happens, his lecture rambled following the convolutions of his thoughts. He has a high, flat voice, and he spoke slowly, at times stopping dead in mid-sentence to better collect his thoughts. He talked about the failure of schools and the future of homeschooling, using phrases that were as well-worn and familiar to his devotees as a neighborhood walking path but if they had heard it or read it all before, they seemed not to mind it.

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