The Plowboy Interview: John Holt

Article Tools

Image Gallery

Print

E-mail

Comments

RSS

Clearly the learning wasn't taking hold. So instead of giving more and more drills and testsas many of the other teachers were doing-my friend and I tried to find ways to get the children actually think ing about math.

This approach was so controversial that the institution finally got rid of me, and I started teaching in my own classroom at another school. Now I had, since becoming involved in education, written many letters about what I was observing in schools, and a friend of mine suggested that I try to put the letters in a book. Pitman Publishing Company was interested in the idea, and eventually printed my first book, How Children Fail.

PLOWBOY: What message did you try to convey with How Children Fail?

HOLT: To put it simply, I pointed out that children do poorly in school because they're bored with the meaningless work . . . scared of being punished or humiliated . . . and confused by the fact that most teaching progresses from abstract concepts to concrete examples instead of-as would be more sensiblethe other way around. In essence I'd realized, from observing and teaching, that school is a place where children learn to be stupid!

Most all youngsters are-by naturesmart, curious, and eager to learn. In fact-as I pointed out in my second book, How Children Learnbabies are such active, skillful seekers of knowledge that they learn more in the first five years of their lives than most older folks ever do in ten!

PLOWBOY: Did you propose any reforms that you felt would help children learn?

HOLT: I suggested we simply provide young people with schools where there are a lot of interesting things to look at and work with . . . but that we let the children learn in their own ways. If they have questions, answer the questions. If they want to know where to look for something, show them where to look.

PLOWBOY: In other words, you feel that youngsters should choose what to learn rather than having the sequence or path of instruction determined for them. That idea represents a 180° turn from traditional education.

HOLT: It certainly does, but it works: Students who are placed in an environment where they feel safe to explore and receive help when they need it will do fine. And I thought, at the time, that once I and others-like Jim Herndon, who wrote How to Survive in Your Native s Land . . . and George Dennison, the author of The Lives of Childrenshowed enough people that fact, then surely everyone would want to try the "new" way of teaching. That's not what happened, of course.

PLOWBOY: Weren't there lots of alterna t ive programs and open schools formed at that time?

HOLT: True, similar ideas did become fashionable for a while. But-and it took me years to figure out this "but"-most of this country's so-called innovative education projects, and there were never very many for all the talk, were begun solely to get some of the money the U.S. government was offering for such programs. When that federal money ran out, the programs stopped.

RSS | Comments | E-mail | Print