Recommending John Holt: ‘What oft was thought, but ne'er so well express'd’

Simran Luthra

The modern education system as we know it in the form of schooling isn’t something that has been around since forever. It may seem surprising, but formal education used to be reserved only for the elite until 200 years ago. Schools today, however, have come to be ubiquitous. In fact, schooling seems so ‘normal’ and ‘obvious’ that it has even come to take on the adjective ‘compulsory’. (The politics behind this is a separate story though.)

The lockdown in 2020 prompted by the global pandemic may be regarded as a significant moment for Indian education in that there was a disruption in the routine of school going and students stayed home; first not studying and then going online for classes. (There has also been great jubilation in the ed-tech world as it was hailed as the ‘moment of ed-tech’ owing to an unprecedented push to technology in school education.)

The experience of children of school-going age being at home for months is something that was as novel as the virus itself. And the spectrum of thoughts and emotions for parents, teachers, and students was a wide and at times even polarizing one, ranging from deep empathy and new-found respect for teachers and the effort they had to put in to adapt to digital classrooms, to feeling that schools shouldn’t be charging the usual fees as infrastructure costs had been reduced.

From this wide-ranging array of thoughts and opinions, one strain (that has no doubt existed even before in India,) came to the fore more strongly during the lockdown than before – the choice/possibility of homeschooling children. Homeschooling has become a more popular topic of discussion than it previously was. There’s been a flurry of activity on social media in general with parents taking a keen interest in the education of their children. Housing-society WhatsApp groups suddenly had parents asking for references of other parents who homeschool their children. After all, the lockdown was an almost existentialist moment in time; one that has made us question our routines and regular ways of living and doing things.

Another positive by-product of the lockdown has also been people renewing or discovering new interests and hobbies. In my case, I’ve taken to art and craft and reading books that were bought but hadn’t been taken out of the bookshelf with the intention of finishing them. John Holt’s How Children Fail and How Children Learn I’d read a while back and I recall being immensely impressed with Holt’s near-ethnographic account of the classroom processes of teaching and learning. The Under-Achieving School was another book of his that I’d been meaning to read which the renewed interest in homeschooling prompted me to do. Reading Holt by the way, is delightful experience, given his wit, turn of phrase and the philosophical underpinnings of his writings. I often caught myself smiling and nodding along in agreement with Mr Holt.

Today, John Holt seems even more relevant than ever. It seems strange to write about Holt in a magazine meant for school teachers. Strange, but not at all irrelevant. Holt himself was a teacher (albeit not a trained one, which many believe allowed him to look at the American education system more objectively). But more than anything else, he was an extremely keen and close observer of the teaching-learning processes and a stellar outcome of that are his books How Children Learn and How Children Fail.

Holt has observed the learner with a keenness that is rare. Teaching-learning have often been likened to both art and science. But between and besides the art and science, lies the humanity of those involved in the teaching-learning process. Holt ensures he also factors in the emotions: the insecurities, fears, joys, motivations, and even the egos of those involved in the process of learning.

Holt communicates the perspective of the concerned humanistic educator. However, and perhaps more importantly, he also engages in very skillful and perspective-taking and tries to look at a situation from the point-of-view of the learner. This is a much-needed skill/step that is mostly lacking in activities geared towards preparation for teaching such as lesson-planning or the final classroom teaching – taking into account how the persons in the classroom are actually thinking and feeling. Consider the following example from How Children Fail about the experience of writing examinations:
“It used to puzzle me that the students who made the most mistakes and got the worst marks were the first to hand in their papers. I used to say, ‘If you finish early, take time to check your work, do some problems again.’ Typical teacher’s advice; I might as well have told them to flap their arms and fly. When the paper was in, the tension ended. Their fate was in the lap of the gods. They might still worry about flunking the paper, but it was a fatalistic kind of worry, it didn’t contain the agonizing element of choice, there was nothing more they could do about it. Worrying about whether you did the right thing, while painful enough, is less painful than worrying about the right thing to do” (p. 53).

Holt’s writings are filled with such expositions, in which I am certain teachers will find themselves and their own deepest thoughts and concerns articulated. Holt’s sharp insight into the schooling system and his brutal honesty about it make him a thinker who must be engaged with. There’s so much romanticism and nostalgia associated with schooling, and all its trappings and rituals that we often accept as given many aspects that we would do well to interrogate. Holt does that through and through. And not just of the larger school system, but equally on matters related to pedagogy.

Here is another example from The Under-Achieving School:
“Teachers of English – or, as some schools say (ugh!), Language Arts – spend a lot of time and effort on spelling. Most of it is wasted; it does little good, and often more harm than good. We should ask ourselves, “How do good spellers spell? What do they do when they are not sure which spelling of a word is right?” I have asked this of a number of good spellers. Their answer never varies. They do not rush for a dictionary or rack their brains trying to remember rules. They write down the word both ways or several ways, look at them, and pick the one that looks best. Usually they are right.

Good spellers know what words look like and even, in their writing muscles, feel like. They have a good set of word images in their minds and are willing to trust these images. The things we do to “teach” spelling to children do little to develop these skills or talents, and much to destroy them from developing” (p. 73).

What is deeply satisfying about reading Holt is that he discusses pedagogical matters and connects them to the philosophical aims of education. It is of great value for an educator to be able to connect the micro with the macro, especially since teaching-learning is such a complex process that when one zooms in on the details, one starts looking at the trees and forgets about the forest.

Talking about language again, Holt says:
“…the real reason that our schools do not turn out people who can use language simply and strongly, let alone beautifully, lies deeper. It is that with very few exceptions the schools, from kindergarten through graduate school, do not give a damn what students think. Think, care about, or want to know. What counts is what the system has decided they shall be made to learn. Teachers’ manuals for the elementary and even secondary grades instruct teachers to have “discussions” in which they “Bring out the following points”. What kind of a discussion is that?” (p. 84)

Holt emphasizes for his readers time and again that education is deeply political. The aspect of the ‘hidden curriculum’ is something that Holt describes (even if he doesn’t use the term) and more importantly, he discusses at length the larger society. Schools are, after all, a part of the larger society and not disconnected from it. What is valued in society at large also comes to be valued in conventional schools.

It is an essential exercise to relate the rituals and practices we follow in school (which constitute the ‘hidden curriculum’) with how the larger society and world function. In what ways are schools preparing children for the world once they grow into adults? Is it to become conforming, subservient individuals, who value competition and self-interest over cooperation and generosity?

One of the basic assumptions Holt challenges is that learning for children cannot happen without schools. In fact, Holt argues that traditional schooling instead of being able to whet the appetite for learning can actually kill it. Human beings, he argues, are naturally curious beings and have a need to learn, much like any of our other fundamental needs.

Holt’s own journey was one of progressive disillusionment with the American schooling system. He tried for a while as a teacher, but then turned towards homeschooling, and then finally to unschooling/deschooling. If I were to summarize Holt’s enterprise I can describe it as ‘to rescue education from schooling’.

Holt seems to be the kind of person who remembers very clearly how it feels to be a child. And while reading him, one can almost connect with that child and recollect the frustrations that perhaps we experienced too as children (a really powerless group of humans). The deep empathy that Holt inspires on every page for the child is one of the biggest takeaways of reading him. As a case in point, let’s look at the names of some of the chapters from the Under-Achieving School: ‘Schools are Bad Places for Kids’, ‘The Fourth R: The Rat Race’, ‘Teachers Talk Too Much’, ‘Making Children Hate Reading’, and so on.

Professor, Krishna Kumar, former NCERT Director, has also called out some of the key aspects of the Indian classroom, such as the centrality of the textbook, the authoritarian nature of the teacher as problems that must be addressed. And while the discourse is changing in theory as moving away from rote learning to experiential or constructivist learning, or a greater emphasis on ‘joyful learning’, how much of the ground reality is different is something each teacher can answer for themselves. Mostly, all of what Holt has described holds true for the education system even today, nearly half a century later.

The fact that Holt, who lived and wrote in the 1960s and 70s, and in fact others (such as Ivan Illich) started a movement around deschooling/unschooling society, which still hasn’t seen the light of day in a mainstream capacity says a lot about society and schooling systems around the world. Schools are here to stay at least for the masses. They are practically suited to the world as it has shaped up (rather been shaped into) and the purpose schools serve as day-care centers is a major reason for why they will continue to exist. Homeschooling or unschooling is still a privilege that many parents cannot afford due to various constraints. It basically isn’t a viable option for the masses yet.

But is it time to reimagine schools more radically? No doubt schools have progressively become less oppressive spaces over the last few decades in some ways. And there’s been considerable deliberation and reflection on the kinds of schools that should exist in theory in terms of schools being more democratic spaces, being child-centric, focus on experiential learning, and so on. The bigger question is who’s going to lead the revolution? Who’s going to lead the reforms?

So again, you may be wondering what business a thinker on education who propounds homeschooling, has in a magazine meant for teachers? Teachers, I would like to believe are first and foremost invested in education rather, than in the schooling system. I believe it has to be the teacher in the classroom, personally motivated to doing things differently than she herself has experienced and being less worried about the consequences of disappointing the current school system. Reading Holt is important because he calls out the schooling system on very important aspects. This unapologetic appraisal of what we are doing inside schools and why, is urgently required.

If there’s one thing to imbibe from Holt it is his profound faith in the innate potential of children. It is our view of children that needs to undergo a major shift; from believing that they’re not interested in learning, or don’t pay attention, aren’t committed enough and so on to trusting them, their intentions and motivations, and truly respecting them.

On that note, I deeply and sincerely recommend reading John Holt. It’s bound to make better teachers, parents, and human beings of us. And I am sure in your experience of reading him, you shall find yourself – your deepest worries, concerns, thoughts that you may have sidelined because well, that’s how things have been done so far. That’s the reason I’ve quoted the words of Alexander Pope; these are thoughts and concerns we’ve often had, but the passion and urgency with which John Holt expresses them will convince us to not ignore those thoughts. Please gift yourself the experience of reading him. It’ll be some of the best time you’ll have invested.

The author is based in Pune and is currently pursuing her PhD. in Education from TISS, Mumbai. She has completed her Masters in English from Jadavpur University and Masters in Education (Elementary) from TISS, Mumbai, and taught Hindi at Stanford University, California while on a Fulbright fellowship. She is passionate about language, social studies education, human rights, gender, like skills and teacher education in particular. She can be reached at simranluthra@gmail.com.