The Plowboy Interview: John Holt

Article Tools

Image Gallery

Print

E-mail

Comments

RSS

HOLT: Absolutely not. I never formally studied education. I didn't even take any courses in psychology. To tell the truth, I didn't study any of the things that I'm now supposed to know something about .

PLOWBOY: Perhaps it was your own classroom experiences that sparked your interest in education. Where did you go to school?

HOLT: I won't answer that question.

PLOWBOY: You won't? Did I say some thing wrong?

HOLT: No, but I've come to believe that people's education is as much their private business as is their religion or politics. Let me just say that most of what I know I didn't learn in school, or in what people call "learning situations" . I don't owe anything to formal education for my love of language, reading, and music. I had those interests before I went to school, I lost a lot of them in such institutions, and I've managed to get them back since.

PLOWBOY: Wait a minute! You lost your love for learning while you were attending school?

HOLT: That's right. Take reading, for in stance. I taught myself to read when I was four or five years old. . . even though hardly anybody read aloud to me. I just looked at all the signs on the streets of Manhattan's East Side, where we were living . . . until, one day, I noticed a store that always had shirts in its windows and realized that the letters over that shop must have spelled "laundry"!

That was the first word I taught myself to recognize. I don't remember what the second word was, but I do recall that I liked to read, so I read lots of books that were too hard for me . . . which is the only way anybody ever gets to be a good reader. I even finished all of The Three Musketeers and other classic books of Alexandre Dumas-long, long books-in a single summer when I was about ten.

PLOWBOY: You m ust have been a good classroom student.

HOLT: Well, I knew how to "play the game", so I never had any difficulty with school. But I got bored with it as I got older, and-by the time I reached high school-I wouldn't read a book unless it had been assigned. I didn't start reading for my own pleasure again until eight or nine years after I got out of the Navy.

PLOWBOY: How could going to school have changed you so much?

HOLT: That's easy to figure out. It's a wellestablished principle that if you take somebody who's doing something for her or his own pleasure and offer some kind of outside reward for doing it-and let the person become accustomed to performing the task for that reward-then take the reward away, the individual will stop that activity. You can even train nursery school youngsters who love to draw pictures to stop drawing them, simply by giving them gold stars or some other little bonus for a couple of months . . . and then removing that artificial "motivation".

RSS | Comments | E-mail | Print