John Holt and his work in the news

Dear Abby is a column now written by Jeanne Phillips and syndicated nationwide by Universal Press. The following exchange was printed in papers around the US in March, 2005.

Dear Abby: You printed a letter form a student who received detention for "respectfully disagreeing" with her teacher during a discussion of world events In your reply, you suggested that the writer's comment may have been "disruptive," justifying the detention, and advised that it would have been more "diplomatic" to have voiced the disagreement in private. I take exception to your answer.

I am semiretired now, but as a manager I had tremendous difficulty convincing subordinates that it was not only safe to disagree with me, but that I need their frank opinions. I trace this to a situation described by John Holt in his 1964 book How Children Fail, in which he points out that the education system kills creativity, teaching students to anticipate what the teacher wants to hear and to feed it back to him or her.

It is despicable that a teacher would conduct a "discussion" in which she entertains only opinions that agree with her own and punishes those that don't. The result for the students and our country is tragic. You should have supported the student.

Laurence F. Freidman, Ph.D.

Dear Dr. Freidman: You're right; I should have. And thousands of readers wrote to tell me so. (The e-mails, when printed out, weighed more than 15 pounds.)

The Autumn, 2005 issue of Education Revolution, The Magazine of Alternative Education, has a cover story about John Holt and GWS. They reprinted excerpts from the first 10 issues of GWS magazine. To order a copy of this magazine, visit www.EducationRevolution.org.

To order complete copies of the first 12 issues of Growing Without Schooling magazine, including a cumulative index, visit www.FUN-Books.com and order Growing Without Schooling, Vol. 1: A Record of a Grassroots Movement.