Almost every
child, on the first day he sets foot in a school building,
is smarter,
more curious, less afraid of what he doesn't know, better
at finding
and figuring things out, and more confident, resourceful,
persistent
and independent than he will ever be again in his
schooling – or,
unless he is very unusual and very lucky, for the rest of
his life.
Already, by paying close attention to and interacting with
the world
and people around him, and without any school-type formal
instruction,
he has done a task far more difficult, complicated and
abstract
than anything he will be asked to do in school, or than
any of his
teachers has done for years. He has solved the mystery of
language.
He has discovered it – babies don't even know that
language exists – and he has found out how it works and learned to use
it. He has
done it by exploring, by experimenting, by developing his
own model
of the grammar of language, by trying it out and seeing
whether
it works, by gradually changing it and refining it until
it does
work. And while he has been doing this, he has been
learning other
things as well, including many of the "concepts" that
the schools think only they can teach him, and many that
are more
complicated than the ones they do try to teach him.
In he comes,
this curious, patient, determined, energetic, skillful learner.
We sit him down at a desk, and what do we teach him? Many things.
First, that learning is separate from living. "You come to
school to learn," we tell him, as if the child hadn't been
learning before, as if living were out there and learning were in
here, and there were no connection between the two. Secondly, that
he cannot be trusted to learn and is no good at it. Everything we
teach about reading, a task far simpler than many that the child
has already mastered, says to him, "If we don't make you read,
you won't, and if you don't do it exactly the way we tell you, you
can't". In short, he comes to feel that learning is a passive
process, something that someone else does to you, instead of something
you do for yourself.
In a great
many other ways he learns that he is worthless, untrustworthy, fit
only to take other people's orders, a blank sheet for other people
to write on. Oh, we make a lot of nice noises in school about respect
for the child and individual differences, and the like. But our
acts, as opposed to our talk, says to the child, "Your experience,
your concerns, your curiosities, your needs, what you know, what
you want, what you wonder about, what you hope for, what you fear,
what you like and dislike, what you are good at or not so good at
– all this is of not the slightest importance, it counts for
nothing. What counts here, and the only thing that counts, is what
we know, what we think is important, what we want you to do, think
and be." The child soon learns not to ask questions –
the teacher isn't there to satisfy his curiosity. Having learned
to hide his curiosity, he later learns to be ashamed of it. Given
no chance to find out who he is – and to develop that person,
whoever it is – he soon comes to accept the adults' evaluation
of him.
He learns many
other things. He learns that to be wrong, uncertain, confused, is
a crime. Right answers are what the school wants, and he learns
countless strategies for prying these answers out of the teacher,
for conning her into thinking he knows what he doesn't know. He
learns to dodge, bluff, fake, cheat. He learns to be lazy! Before
he came to school, he would work for hours on end, on his own, with
no thought of reward, at the business of making sense of the world
and gaining competence in it. In school he learns, like every buck
private, how to goldbrick, how not to work when the sergeant isn't
looking, how to know when he is looking, how to make him think you
are working even when he is looking. He learns that in real life
you don't do anything unless you are bribed, bullied or conned into
doing it, that nothing is worth doing for its own sake, or that
if it is, you can't do it in school. He learns to be bored, to work
with a small part of his mind, to escape from the reality around
him into daydreams and fantasies – but not like the fantasies of
his preschool years, in which he played a very active part.
The child comes
to school curious about other people, particularly other children,
and the school teaches him to be indifferent. The most interesting
thing in the classroom – often the only interesting thing in
it – is the other children, but he has to act as if these other
children, all about him, only a few feet away, are not really there.
He cannot interact with them, talk with them, smile at them.
In fact, he
learns how to live without paying attention to anything going on
around him. You might say that school is a long lesson in how to
turn yourself off, which may be one reason why so many young people,
seeking the awareness of the world and responsiveness to it they
had when they were little, think they can only find it in drugs.
Aside from being boring, the school is almost always ugly, cold,
and inhuman.
And so, in
this dull and ugly place, where nobody ever says anything very truthful,
where everybody is playing a kind of role, as in a charade where
the teachers are no more free to respond honestly to the students
than the students are free to respond to the teachers or each other,
where the air practically vibrates with suspicion and anxiety, the
child learns to live in a daze, saving his energies for those small
parts of his life that are too trivial for the adults to bother
with, and thus remain his. It is a rare child who can come through
his schooling with much left of his curiosity, his independence
or his sense of his own dignity, competence and worth.
Our compulsory
school-attendance laws once served a humane and useful purpose.
They protected the children's right to some schooling, against those
adults who would otherwise have denied it to them in order to exploit
their labor, in farm, store, mine or factory. Today the laws help
nobody – not the schools, not the teachers, not the children.
To keep kids in school who would rather not be there costs the schools
an enormous amount of time and trouble – to say nothing of
what it costs to repair the damage that these angry and resentful
prisoners do every time they get a chance. Every teacher knows that
any kid in class who, for whatever reason, would rather not be there,
not only doesn't learn anything himself but makes it a great deal
tougher for anyone else. As for protecting the children from exploitation,
the chief and indeed only exploiters of children these days are
the schools.
We need to
get kids out of the school buildings, and give them a chance to
learn about the world at first hand. It is a very recent idea, and
a crazy one, that the way to teach our young people about the world
they live in is to take them out of it and shut them up in brick
boxes. Aside from their parents, most children never have any close
contact with any adults except people whose sole business is children.
No wonder they have no idea what adult life or work is like. A child
learning to talk does not learn by being corrected all the time
– if corrected too much, he will stop talking. He compares,
a thousand times a day, the difference between language as he uses
it and as those around him use it. Bit by bit, he makes the necessary
changes to make his language like other peoples. In the same way,
kids learning to do all the other things they learn without adult
teachers – to walk, run, climb, whistle, ride a bike, skate,
play games, jump rope – compare their own performance with
what more skilled people do, and slowly make the needed changes.
But in school we never give a child a chance to detect his mistakes,
let alone correct them. We do it all for him. We act as if we thought
he would never notice a mistake unless it was pointed out to him,
or correct it unless he was made to. Soon he becomes dependent on
the expert. We should let him do it himself. Let him figure out
what this word says, what is the answer to that problem, whether
this is a good way of saying or doing this or that. Our job should
be to help him when he tells us that he can't find a way to get
the right answer. Let's get rid of all this nonsense of grades,
exams, marks. We don't know now, and we never will know, how to
measure what another person knows or understands. We certainly can't
find out by asking him questions. All we find out is what he doesn't
know which is what most tests are for, anyway. Throw it all out,
and let the child learn what every educated person must someday
learn, how to measure his own understanding, how to know what he
knows or does not know.
People remember
only what is interesting and useful to them, what helps them make
sense of the world, or helps them get along in it. All else they
quickly forget, if they ever learn it at all. The idea of a "body
of knowledge," to be picked up in school and used for the rest
of one' s life, is nonsense in a world as complicated and rapidly
changing as ours. Anyway, the most important questions and problems
of our time are not in the curriculum, not even in the universities,
let alone the schools.
Children want,
more than they want anything else, and even after years of miseducation,
to make sense of the world, themselves, and other human beings.
Let them get at this job, with our help if they ask for it, in the
way that makes most sense to them.
The
above is excerpted from The Underachieving School by John Holt. Reprinted with permission
from Sentient Publications. Lewrockwell