The Plowboy Interview: John Holt

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So I went to visit the school. I sat in on classes, answered students' questions, kicked a soccer ball around, and-by the end of the daydecided that the institution was a good place for me to work. I told the man who ran the school that I wanted a job. His reply could have been construed as discouraging: He said, "We'd be glad to have you, but we haven't got any place to put you . . . we haven't got any money to pay you . . . and we haven't got anything for you to do."

PLOWBOY: Yes, I can see how some folks just might take that as a rejection!

HOLT: Well I wasn't ready to be rejected. I responded, "As long as you get some kind of roof over my head, I don't much care where you put me. If you're feeding me, I can live without money for a while. And I think I can probably find something to do." The man laughed, threw up his hands, and told me to come ahead.

And to this day I believe that anyone who wants a chance to get started learning and doing serious work has only to make such an offer . . . one that-as they say- cant's be refused.

One of the foundations on which schools rest is the belief that children are mostly no damn good.

Anyway, I started out sleeping on a cot in a granary that was being converted to an infirmary, and working as the breakfast cook, but I eventually became a fully paid staff member. On the whole, I was a perfectly conventional schoolmaster . . . who gave the high-school-aged students lots of tests and flunked my pupils right and left. The only difference between me and the average teacher was that-because I hadn't taken any education courses-I didn't know all the alibis that conventionally trained instructors use ... excuses which imply that something's wrong with students who don't learn. I thought, if you can imagine such a simple-minded idea, that if my pupils weren't grasping their lessons, it was my responsibility to figure out a way to explain the subject so that they would understand it!

Well, it took me four years to discover that an awful lot of the youngsters did poorly in school because they expected to do poorly. So I decided to try working with younger children. . . I thought maybe I could reach girls and boys before they got into a defeatist frame of mind.

At that point I moved to Cambridge, Massachusetts and began working in the fifth grade class of a man who-like me -wanted to figure out why many children don't learn well. The class was part of a very selective private school. In fact, the students' parents were the elite of the area's intellectual community, and all-of the pupils had scored above 120 on I.Q. tests. Strangely enough, though, most of these children acted "dumb" in class. Many of my fifth graders couldn't add or subtract . . . although-back in second grade-the same students had passed all their addition and subtraction tests with ease!

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