Educational Essay

School Is Bad for Children
John Holt
The author of this essay, John Holt (1923–1985), was an educational theorist who taught
for many years in elementary and secondary schools in the United States. A critic of formal
education in general and the U.S. educational system in particular, Holt lectured nationally and
internationally about school reform and wrote a number of books about the subject. The following
essay dealing with the hazards of formal education first appeared in the magazine The Saturday
Evening Post in 1969.
Almost every child, on the first day he sets foot in a school building, is smarter, more 1
curious, less afraid of what he doesn’t know, better at finding and figuring things out,
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 2
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 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 3
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, say 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 not of 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
CORE READING 1 School Is Bad for Children
60 CHAPTER TWO Education
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, 4
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,1 how to goldbrick,2
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 isn’t 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 5
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 many
schools he can’t talk to other children in the halls between classes; in more than
a few, and some of these in stylish suburbs, he can’t even talk to them at lunch.
Splendid training for a world in which, when you’re not studying the other person
to figure out how to do him in,3 you pay no attention to him.
In fact, he learns how to live without paying attention to anything going on 6
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 as 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,
inhuman – even the most stylish, glass-windowed $20-a-square-foot schools.
And so, in this dull and ugly place, where nobody ever says anything very truthful, 7
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 sense of his own dignity, competence, and worth.
So much for criticism. What do we need to do? Many things. Some are easy 8
– we can do them right away. Some are hard, and many take some time. Take a hard
one first. We should abolish compulsory school attendance. At the very least we
1 buck private: Person of the lowest rank in the U.S. Army and Marine Corps.
2 goldbrick: To avoid assigned duties or work.
3 do him in: Cheat him. (In some contexts, “to do someone in” means to kill a person.)
61
should modify it, perhaps by giving children every year a large number of authorized
absences. Our compulsory school-attendance laws once served a humane and useful
purpose. They protected 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
school 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. Kids caught
in the college rush more often than not work 70 hours or more a week, most of it
on paper busywork. For kids who aren’t going to college, school is just a useless time
waster, preventing them from earning some money or doing some useful work, or
even doing some true learning.
Objections. “If kids didn’t have to go to school, they’d all be out in the streets.” 9
No, they wouldn’t. In the first place, even if schools stayed just the way they are,
children would spend at least some time there because that’s where they’d be likely
to find friends; it’s a natural meeting place for children. In the second place, schools
wouldn’t stay the way they are, they’d get better, because we would have to start
making them what they ought to be right now – places where children would want
to be. In the third place, those children who did not want to go to school could find,
particularly if we stirred up our brains and gave them a little help, other things to do
– the things many children now do during their summers and holidays.
There’s something easier we could do. We need to get kids out of the school 10
buildings, 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. Fortunately,
educators are beginning to realize this. In Philadelphia and Portland, Oregon, to
pick only two places I happen to have heard about, plans are being drawn up for
public schools that won’t have any school buildings at all, that will take the students
out into the city and help them to use it and its people as a learning resource. In
other words, students, perhaps in groups, perhaps independently, will go to libraries,
museums, exhibits, courtrooms, legislatures, radio and TV stations, meetings,
businesses, and laboratories to learn about their world and society at first hand. A
small private school in Washington is already doing this. It makes sense. We need
more of it.
As we help children get out into the world, to do their learning there, we can get 11
more of the world into the schools. 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. We need to bring a lot
more people who are not full-time teachers into the schools and into contact with
the children. In New York City, under the Teachers and Writers Collaborative, real
writers, working writers – novelists, poets, playwrights – come into the schools, read
their work, and talk to the children about the problems of their craft. The children
CORE READING 1 School Is Bad for Children
62 CHAPTER TWO Education
eat it up. In another school I know of, a practicing attorney from a nearby city comes
in every month or so and talks to several classes about the law. Not the law as it is
in books but as he sees it and encounters it in his cases, his problems, his work. And
the children love it. It is real, grown-up, true, not My Weekly Reader,4 not “social
studies,” not lies and baloney.
Something easier yet. Let children work together to help each other, learn from 12
each other and each other’s mistakes. We know now, from the experience of many
schools, both rich-suburban and poor-city, that children are often the best teachers
of other children. What is more important, we know that when a fifth- or sixthgrader
who has been having trouble with reading starts helping a first-grader, his
own reading sharply improves. A number of schools are beginning to use what some
call Paired Learning. This means that you let children form partnerships with other
children, do their work, even including their tests, together, and share whatever
marks or results that this work gets – just like grown-ups in the real world. It seems
to work.
Let the children learn to judge their own work. A child learning to talk does not 13
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 people’s. In the same way, kids learning to do all the
other things they can 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 it out, with
the help of other children if he wants it, what this word says, what is the answer
to that problem, whether this is a good way of saying or doing this or that. If right
answers are involved, as in some math or science, give him the answer book, let him
correct his own papers. Why should we teachers waste time on such donkey work?
Our job should be to help the kid 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.
We could also abolish the fixed, required curriculum. People remember only 14
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.
4 My Weekly Reader: Popular weekly magazine for elementary school students.
63
Anyway, the most important questions and problems of our time are not in the
curriculum, not even in the hotshot universities, let alone the schools.
Children want, more than they want anything else, and even after years of 15
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.
Reading Journal
In your journal, write about one of the following topics.
1 Describe your reaction to one of Holt’s major criticisms of schools or one of his
recommendations for improvement.
2 Discuss whether your own education has been similar to that described in the
essay.
3 Choose a topic of your own related to the reading.
Main Ideas
Answer the following questions, referring to the notes you took when reading the
essay. Then share your answers with a partner.
1 What major criticisms of formal education does Holt discuss in paragraphs 1–7?
2 What are Holt’s recommendations for improving the quality of schools?
Summarize the suggestions presented in paragraphs 8–15.
3 What is the main point Holt is making in the essay? Summarize his central idea
in one or two sentences. Use your own words. Begin with the sentence In the
essay “School Is Bad for Children,” John Holt argues that . . .
Reflecting on Content
Answer the following questions with a partner. When possible, support your
answers with observations based on your own experiences.
1 What do you think might happen if compulsory school attendance were
abolished?
2 What do you think of Holt’s support for the notion of schools without school
buildings?
3 Do you agree with Holt that schools should get rid of grades and exams?
CORE READING 1 School Is Bad for Children