Excerpts From John Holt’s Teach Your Own
Do you want to improve the schools? John Holt tried; not only can’t the schools be reformed, he concluded, but they aren’t even necessary.
Are schools the best place for learning? Are they even a good place? “Except for people learning a few specialized skills,” he writes, “I began to doubt that they were. Most of what I knew, I had not learned in school . . . I suspected this was true of most people.”
An author and educator (he wrote How Children Fail and How Children Learn) Holt is now the leading advocate of home schooling, and the editor and publisher of a magazine by and for home-schooling families, called Growing Without Schooling; much of the material in his new book, Teach Your Own, first appeared in the magazine.
Because Holt is a pragmatist who knows what he’s talking about, Teach Your Own may be a revolutionary book. He confronts directly and persuasively the common objections to home schooling: how can children learn what they need to know? Won’t they miss the valuable social life of the school? How can parents find time to teach their children? He’s as sensitive to these fears as he is to the grimness of most schools, where children spend half their waking hours.
“Except when tired or hungry, or in the grip of passion, pain, or fear,” he writes, children “are moved to act almost entirely by curiosity, desire for mastery and competence, and pride in work well done. But the schools, and many adults outside of school, hardly ever recognize or honor such motives, can hardly even imagine they exist. In their place they put Greed and Fear.”
Teach Your Own is also a practical manual for parents, and children, who have made the decision to stay out of school. There are chapters on living with children all day, on children and work, legal strategies, dealing with school authorities, and so on. Much of the book is in the words of parents who are doing it.
Why do people take or keep their children out of school? Mostly for three reasons: they think that raising their children is their business not the government’s; they enjoy being with their children and watching and helping them learn, and don’t want to give that up to others; they want to keep them from being hurt, mentally, physically, and spiritually.
First, two questions: (1) How many such people are there? (2) What kind of people are they?
Good short answers to these questions would be (1) nobody knows and (2) all kinds.
The reason no one knows or can find out how many families are teaching their own children is that many of these people, fearing with good reason that if the local schools knew they were teaching their own children they would make trouble for them, are doing this in secret. Sometimes they simply hide their children from the local schools, don’t even let them know they exist. Sometimes they tell the local schools, perhaps truthfully, perhaps not, that they have registered their children in some private school. Sometimes they have registered their own home as a school, which in many states is easy to do. Sometimes they and a few other families register as a church-related school. There is simply no way to tell how many such people there are. Thus, there is no way to tell how many of the registered private schools in any state are schools as most people understand that word, i.e., special buildings with specialized hired teachers, and how many are disguised homes with the parents doing the teaching.
Dr. Raymond Moore, author of the books Better Late Than Early (New York: Reader’s Digest Press, 1954) and School Can Wait (Provo, Utah: Brigham Young University Press, 1975), who has a great interest in these matters and is in touch with many home-schooling families, thinks that there may be as many as thirty thousand families teaching their own children. I would say somewhat less, unless the children taught under the Calvert and Seventh-Day Adventist programs are included, which would make the figure much higher. At any rate, these families are a small minority. How fast is this figure likely to grow? My guess is that as long as our political temper remains about what it is, that is, if we don’t get into a war and turn ourselves into an armed camp, the number of people teaching their own children will grow rapidly. For as far into the future as I can see, however, most children will be going to some school, i.e., some special place where they are taught by paid teachers.
Who are these home-schooling families? Again, it is hard to tell. Only a minority of them read Growing Without Schooling, not all of those who read it write to us, and those who write talk mostly about their children, not about their background or work or income. Most of our subscriptions and letters come from rural or star routes, small towns, or low- to middle-income suburbs. I have traveled enough so that I know the names of the wealthy suburbs of many large American cities, and I know that we get almost no mail or subscriptions from these. We also get very little mail from the cities themselves.
What about income, education, race? The little evidence we have suggests that the average income of home-schooling families is close to the national average. We have had almost no correspondence with people who, judging hy their addresses, writing paper, businesses, etc, were obviously rich. Many families who write us have incomes well below the national average; they have chosen to live in the country or in small towns on very modest incomes, supporting themselves by small-scale farming, crafts, small businesses, etc. Some home-schooling mothers are on welfare. As to educational background, my guess is that most of the families who read GWS have been to college. Some of our most successful home-schooling families, however, have not been beyond high school. I suspect that a somewhat higher percentage of the people now using church-based correspondence schools have not been to college. As to race, I have no way even of guessing. A few of our readers and suhscribers have Hispanic surnames. Other than that I know nothing, except, as I say, that so far we have had little contact with people in cities.
In sum, we are so far talking about a group of Americans, probably mostly white, more rural than urban, otherwise quite average in everything except stubbornness, courage, independence, and trust in themselves and their children.
The Incompetence Of Schools
One reason people take their children out of school is that they think they aren’t learning anything. In an article in the March 1978 issue of the Radcliffe Quarterly I pointed out that, with few exceptions, schools are appallingly incompetent at their work, even as they define it, having found it easier to blame all their failures on their students.
When I began work at the Colorado Rocky Mountain School, my first teaching task was to tutor an otherwise bright and capable seventeen-year-old whose skills were at about second grade level. High-priced specialists in his hometown had pronounced him “brain damaged.” In spite of the label he wanted to read, write, and figure like everyone else, wanted me to help him, and thought I could help him.
Not having studied “education,” I had never heard of “brain damage.” But it was clear to me that whatever those words might mean, it was my responsibility and duty to find out what was keeping this boy from learning and to figure out something to do about it. I soon learned that he had a very precise and logical mind, and had to understand one thing thoroughly before he could move on to the next. What had stopped his learning almost at the start of his schooling was that he had not been able to understand fully many of the things that teachers were telling him about reading, arithmetic, spelling, etc., and either could not ask the right questions to find out what he needed, or else could not get answers to the questions he asked. Some of his questions I could answer right away; others kept me thinking and wondering for many years. But even though I did not solve all his problems, my conviction that they could be solved may have been help enough. A few years later he wrote me from an army post, telling me what books he was reading — serious, adult books. He had clearly solved his problem himself.
What I had tried to be is what I would now call a serious teacher. I was not willing to accept fancy excuses as a substitute for doing what I had undertaken to do — help children learn things. When, as often happened, they did not learn what I was teaching, I could not and did not blame it on them, but had to keep trying new ways of teaching it until I found something that worked. As How Children Fail makes clear, this often took a long time, and I failed more than I succeeded. Another book about serious teaching is James Herndon’s first book, The Way It Spozed To Be (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1968), a very funny, truthful, and in the end sad story about his first year’s painful but successful struggles — for which he was then fired — to help students that the rest of his inner-city school had long since given up on.
One reason that so few schools are any good at their work is that they are not serious. “Good” schools and “bad,” private and public, with only a few exceptions they have always run under the rule that when learning happens, the school takes the credit, and when it doesn’t, the students get the blame. Where in earlier times the schools might have said that some kids were bad, stupid, lazy, or crazy, now they say they have mysterious diseases like “minimal brain dysfunction” or “learning disabilities.” Under whatever name, these remain what they always were — excuses for the schools and teachers not doing their job.
For further evidence of the incompetence of schools, we have this quote from the Chicago Tribune (1977):
It has been ten years in the making, but Chicago school officials now believe they have in place a complete sweeping program to teach children to read — a program that may be the pacesetter for the nation . . . For some years, a Board of Eductation reading expert, Bernard Gallegos, has been putting together a package of the reading skills children need to learn in elementary school. At one point, Gallegos’ list topped 500 elements. It has since been reduced to 273 over grades 1 through 8.
This might be rather comic if it were not so horrifying. Five hundred skills! What in the world could they be? When I taught myself to read, I didn’t learn 500 skills, or even 273; I looked at printed words, on signs, in books, wherever I might see them, and puzzled them out, because I wanted to know they said. Each one I learned made it easier for me to figure out the next. I could read before I went to school, but insofar as that school taught reading, they did it by what we might call the Spell-and-Say method — “c,a,t, cat.” Most people who read, above all those who read well, were never taught 273 separate skills. And by what process was that list of 500 cut down to 273?
It’s worth noting that the first of these skills is to repeat two- and three-syllable words. In practice, this is probably going to mean that all children, including black, Hispanic, Asian, or from other non-WASP groups, are going to have to pronounce these words “correctly,” i.e., the way the teacher pronounces them. Children who can’t, don’t, or won’t talk like middle-class North American white people will almost certainly be branded as not being “ready” to move to the next of the 273 steps. We can expect the schools to spend years trying to teach many of these children to talk “right,” so that they can then begin teaching them to read. This, in spite of the fact that the world is full of people who read English fluently, though they speak it in a dialect or with an accent that few Chicago teachers (or few Americans) could understand.
As I write, it is about three years since that story was printed. I don’t know whether the Chicago schools ever put that scheme into practice, or if they did, whether they are still using it. One thing is sure — if Chicago children are learning to read better than children anywhere else, it has been a well-kept secret.
Some years ago I heard from a teacher in another large city who, being serious, had over the years found a way to help children who had never read before become good readers. She had just been fired, because when the school board adopted some new reading program and ordered all teachers in the city to use it, she sensibly and responsibly refused to scrap her reading program that worked. This no doubt happened in Chicago; the best reading teachers were probably asked to change their methods or be fired. The children must be so busy trying to learn how to pass 273 reading tests that they have no time to read, and what’s worse will soon not even want to. Indeed, as in many other schools, quite a few children who can read are probably held back because they can’t pass some of the 273 tests. Then, ten years or so from now, we will read in the papers about some great new plan.
A teacher who had been doing some substitute teaching in a private elementary school, wrote to GWS:
I found myself . . . in third grade for four days. The two teachers team teach and so I had to team teach. Both are old-fashioned types who push math and reading workbooks. I almost went wild. I couldn’t figure out the questions and answers (I refuse to use the teacher’s answer book) and the kids were frustrated and in pain sitting still. By the second day I could see these kids never had time to think, let alone read as a pleasure — just word-grabbing, mind-reading workbooks. In their room were paperbacks, Charlotte’s Web and many more goodies not yet touched, because apparently the kids “can’t read well enough yet.” I went to the principal and said I couldn’t continue unless the reading times while I was there became silent reading. She agreed to it but was not very happy about me, I could easily sense. I told the kids new rules, “If you don’t know a word and are really bothered by it, signal and I’ll come whisper in your ear. No sounding it out, no vowels, no syllables, no questions, just the word.” Very few asked after the first few minutes. But they asked for silent reading twice a day.
James Herndon makes much the same kind of report in his book How to Survive in Your Native Land (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1971). When he and one or two other teachers stopped asking the children questions about their reading, stopped grading them, stopped tracking them, and just let them read, they very soon read much better, even those who had been very poor readers. But his school and fellow-teachers refused to learn anything from this experience.
Compulsory school attendance laws, in and of themselves, seem to me a very serious infringement on the civil liberties of children and their parents.
The Civil Liberties Of Children
I don’t want to and am not going to make this just a collection of bad stories about schools. The arguments against compulsory schools go much deeper. Some of them I expressed in a letter to the American Civil Liberties Union:
Though the courts have not yet agreed, compulsory school attendance laws, in and of themselves, seem to me a very serious infringement of the civil liberties of children and their parents, and would be so no matter what schools were like, how they were organized, or how they treated children, in other words, even if they were far more humane and effective than in fact they are.
Beyond that, there are a number of practices, by now very common in schools all over the country, which in and of themselves seriously violate the civil liberties of children, including:
- Keeping permanent records of children’s school performance. This would be inexcusable even if there were nothing in the records but academic grades. It is nobody’s proper business that a certain child got a certain mark in a certain course when she or he was eight years old.
- Keeping school records secret from children and/or their parents, a practice that continues in many places even where the law expressly forbids it.
- Making these records available, without the permission of the children or their parents, to whoever may ask for them — employers, the police, the military, or other branches of government.
- Filling these records, as experience has shown they are filled, with many kinds of malicious and derogatory information and misinformation. These may include not just unconfirmed teacher’s reports of children’s misbehavior but also all kinds of pseudopsychological opinions, judgments, and diagnoses about the children and even their families. For examples, see The Myth Of The Hyperactive Child by Peter Schrag and Diane Divoky (New York: Pantheon Books, 1975).
- Compulsory psychological testing of children, and including the results of these tests in children’s records.
- Labeling children as having such imaginary and supposedly incurable diseases as “minimal brain dysfunction,” “hyperactivity,” “specific learning disabilities,” etc.
- Compulsory dosing of children with very powerful and dangerous psychoactive drugs, such as Ritalin.
- Using corporal punishment in school, which in practice often means the brutal beating of young children for very minor or imagined offenses.
- Lowering students’ academic grades, or even giving failing grades, solely for disciplinary and/or attendance reasons. Not only is this practice widespread, but school administrators openly boast of it, though what it amounts to in fact is the deliberate falsification of an official record, a kind of printed perjury.
- In all of these matters, and indeed in almost any conflict between the child and the school, denying anything that could fairly be called “due process.”
To return once more to compulsory school attendance in its barest form, you will surely agree that if the government told you that on one hundred and eighty days of the year, for six or more hours a day, you had to be at a particular place, and there do whatever people told you to do, you would feel that this was a gross violation of your civil liberties. The State, of course, justifies doing this to children as a matter of public policy, saying that only thus can it keep them from being ignorant and a burden on the State. But even if it were true that children were learning important things in schools and that they could not learn them anywhere else, neither of which I admit, I would still remind the ACLU that since in other and often more difficult cases, i.e., the Nazi rally in Skokie, Ill., it does not allow the needs of public policy to become an excuse for violating the basic liberties of citizens, it ought not to in this case.
Over the years the ACLU has tended to see as a civil liberties matter the right of children to go to school, but not their right not to go. I have been told that a committee of the ACLU is now discussing when and in what circumstances compulsory schooling may be an infringement of civil liberties. In some cases local branches of the ACLU, or ACLU attorneys, have given support to unschooling families. But it would surely be helpful if someday the national organization took a strong position on some of the issues I have mentioned.
A New Sense Of Responsibility
Even though many and perhaps most adults today dislike and distrust children, there is at the same time a growing minority of people who like, understand, trust, respect, and value children in a way rarely known until now. Many of these people are choosing to have children as few people before ever did. They don’t have children just because that is what married people are supposed to do, or because they don’t know how not to have them. On the contrary, knowing well what it may mean in time, energy, money, thought, and worry, they undertake the heavy responsibility of having and bringing up children because they deeply want to spend a part of their life living with them. Having chosen to have children, they feel very strongly that it is their responsibility to help these children grow into good, smart, capable, loving, trustworthy, and responsible human beings. They do not think it right to turn that responsibility over to institutions, state or private, schools or otherwise, and would not do so even if they liked and trusted these institutions, which on the whole they do not.
We may think of these views as very old-fashioned or very modern. They are probably some of both. Not long ago, Dr. Frank Merrill of Riverton, Utah, expressed them in a letter to us in these eloquent words:
. . . I am a retired physician with a large family (I personally delivered 14 of my own children and 2 of my 8 grandchildren to date). I have 9+ years of “higher” education above and beyond “high” school, one college degree in the physical sciences and two professional degrees (most of which has not fit me for a practical avocation nor to teach my children the same — I had to come to that by another route).
To begin with, I do not register nor allow the registration of the births of my children with any state or federal governmental agency, electing rather to make and keep my own family records and to utilize the services of a private international genealogical organization for deposition of copies thereof for historical and reference purposes.
- Although in the past, in my nescience concerning the issues involved, I have allowed my older children to attend public schools, I have come not to see fit to send the younger ones to any school whatsoever for their basic education, electing rather to train them myself in basic communicational skills (I have not yet found a tutor with whom I have been satisfied in this area) and in habits of simple honest and responsible personal conduct, etc., and otherwise encourage them to observe, to search, and to think for themselves.
- I have elected not to concern myself whether or not my children or any one of them do well at Stanford’s or any other’s achievement testing program as being only other means and methods for ranking and filing them; rather, to concern myself with encouraging them in the development of a sense of self-satisfaction derived from achieving functional adequacy (if not excellence) in avocations of their own unhampered selection thereby ranking and filing themselves in a realistic manner and order.
- I have come not to feel any obligation to account, with reference to the birthing, the rearing, and the training of my children to any agency other than my God who authorized their inception to begin with, especially and in particular not to those, be they public administrators, “highly educated,” or otherwise, who may not have any children of their own issue (or perhaps one or two) and who may be my juniors by a whole generation or more.
- I have come not to feel obligated to rear and teach my children after any pattern or program devised, prescribed (i.e., written beforehand), or presented (i.e., sent ahead) by someone else or in such a manner as to meet any “standards” set for them by any arbitrary political system. (After all, what “standards” can be set or presumed to be enforced or enforceable by any state or other political agency external to the family itself which will not ultimately be swallowed up by those of the school of life itself when honestly attended?)
My children are well mannered, respectful to their parents, to their elders, to their peers, and to one another, are interested in life in general; they ask many questions which serve as the basis for their instruction one by one, day by day, and they appear articulate beyond their peers without their own family.
The fact that my children exist and that I am their father confers upon me (and likewise upon every man so situated), by natural law, an eminent domain, and with that the inescapable original obligation, and, with that, the sole natural right (and authority) to rear and to train them according to the dictates of my own conscience before God; therefore, by what law of justice (if any) can I be required or compelled to allow that obligation to be fulfilled by (or that right to be exercised by) another (which, indeed is not possible — it may only be relinquished and/or abandoned if not deliberately delegated) or to cast the minds of my children into the molds of other men or to rear and instruct them according to the dictates of other men’s consciences if I elect not to do so? It is written somewhere: “Render unto Caesar (or the Governor) that which is Caesar’s . . . etc.,” but I am not Caesar’s, neither is my mind, nor are my children, nor are their minds, and for me, and for them, God sets the standards and arranges the program in all things and unfolds it day by day, season by season.
Protecting Children From Harm
Most people, however, take their children out of schools not so much for philosophical or political reasons as . . . to prevent the schools from hurting their children, or hurting them any more than they already have. Many parents write to tell a story like this: Their child has taught himself to read, or somehow learned, before he went to school. He finds himself, perhaps in the pre-school, perhaps in one of the early elementary grades, reading from one to three years ahead of his class. Naturally he does not want to do the reading readiness exercises or other workbook tasks that the other children are doing, to “teach” them to do what he already knows how to do. He wants to read the kind of books he is able to read. But when he tries to do this, he gets in trouble. The teacher orders him to do the work the other children are doing, and when he naturally and sensibly says he doesn’t want to, or simply doesn’t, the teacher punishes him. She may bawl him out in front of other children, take his books away from him, stand him in a corner, shut him in a closet, strike him, give him a failing grade, call him “hyperactive.” Quite often such teachers tell the parents of such children that unless the child does the work the other children are doing, he will fail and will have to repeat the grade, in spite of reading a year or more ahead of the grade level.
Naturally the amazed parents point out that since the child is reading far ahead of the class, it makes no sense to have him do the work the other children are doing or to fail him for not doing it. This seldom does any good. The teacher says stubbornly that the child has to do what the others are doing. If the parents then go to the principal, the principal usually backs up the teacher. This experience makes unschoolers out of many people who might otherwise had been content to send their children to school.
Other parents tell an opposite story. In these cases the children are not ahead of the grade but a little behind it. Like the boy I tutored in Colorado, they are having trouble in reading or arithmetic, don’t understand something in the workbooks, and so on. They can’t do the homework, and are often punished, even beaten, for that. They tell their parents that they don’t understand, and that when they ask the teacher for help, the teacher won’t help them. The parents — many of whom, to judge from what they say or from the look of their letters, are poor — go to the teacher and ask her to please give their child a little extra help. The teacher then usually says, “I can’t be giving special help to your child, I have all the rest of the children to look after.” So the child falls further and further behind.
Of course, the parents themselves are in most cases perfectly capable of giving their children the help they need. But they have been told so often by the school not to interfere in the child’s learning, not to try to teach the children anything, that they have come to feel as helpless as if they were facing some rare disease. The teacher won’t help; the parents don’t think they can. The children, who along with their other problems are probably being teased and laughed at by other children for being behind, get more and more discouraged. Many of them drop out of school. Many of the parents tell me that when they were children the same thing happened to them.
Many of the letters we receive from parents give similar reasons for unschooling their children:
Once L turned five last summer, most adults she encountered in the community seemed to say to her a variation of this: “Oh, you’re five now. Aren’t you lucky? You can go to school in the fall!”
We, her parents, didn’t want her to go and said so. But we told her that it was her decision. We also told her we would never force her to go to school. Enchanted with the idea of riding the school bus, L happily decided to go.
She quit, the first time, the second day of school because the teacher (one to 32 children) took a book away from her that she was reading, presumably so she would do a mimeographed pre-reading exercise or other activity the teacher had chosen. I found out later that L disliked pre-reading work . . . I suspect she understand too well the ludicrousness of pre-reading when you’ve been reading for a year.
We gently convinced L to return since she had had only a glimpse of what she was quitting. A few days later, she quit for the second time. We asked for a conference with the teacher and principal. The teacher had by that time had a chance to observe L read. Despite her experience in a long career, where surely she had met five-year-olds who could read, she blurted out, “What am I going to do with you? You’ll have to go to the first grade!” L bounced back, “Don’t forget, I’m only five years old.”
Since L’s main complaint was the lack of reading opportunity, the school offered her the option of attending a reading class of “slow” first graders to give her more reading and them inspiration. She bit the bait and returned to school. After a time at school (late November or early December) I noticed that she was reading less at home and not only that, she exhibited nervous behavior and other signs of anxiety when she was reading. Could this be the same child who the previous summer had sat reading for long stretches of time totally absorbed and happy?
One day L came home from school with a book from the library. She was thrilled. I was never told that Thursday was library day and that the book must be returned the following Thursday. The day came and the book remained at home. L and several other children were punished by not being allowed to go to the library. They were also told to write a page of fives.
Shortly before the Christmas holidays L left school for good. Three months later she did some sight reading which we recorded just for the fun of it. As we listened to it replay, I observed with surprise that she was actually enjoying herself again and showed no signs of anxiety. We’re so very happy that she had the sense to get out when she did. Now she often has read several books before the rest of us wake up in the morning. She also reads off and on throughout the day — everything from Spider Man and Tintin to the wonderful picture books we get from the library.
A neighbor child several years older than L comes to play after school sometimes. She’s pleasant and cooperative but when she plays “school” with our children, she is “teacher” and changes into a nagging, demanding tyrant. It got so bad that L was refusing to play the game. I finally had to point out to this child that she was reflecting her teacher’s behavior and that L had left school to avoid that kind of human contact. This same child could read when she entered school two years ago. She is now “having problems” in reading. One day this same child started lecturing L about school. Wasn’t she coming back? And if she didn’t, she wouldn’t learn anything. L flashed back with, “That’s why I left. I wasn’t learning anything.” She still maintains that is her primary reason for leaving. The other thing she couldn’t tolerate was the violence among the children.
Many parents have written that their children’s physical health improved strikingly once they were out of school. Nancy Wallace wrote from New Hampshire:
The changes that have occurred in Ishmael since we took him out of school have been unbelievable. Gone are the fits of temper that erupted every day around 4 p.m., gone are the headaches, the lines of tension around his mouth, and gone is his depression. He used to complain bitterly that he had no time to read (schools don’t let you read these days until you’ve mastered the 1,000 “skills” deemed necessary to learn this “most difficult subject!”), and consequently he read every free second he had outside of school and rarely played. He didn’t eat his lunch because it got stale at school, he came home with wet, cold feet acquired at recess, and he barely spoke to us. We had thought, “Ishmael is going through a state, all kids are like this, etc.,” but boy were we wrong. These days Ishmael sleeps well, eats well, laughs, plays, and learns. He gets his (apparently psychologically necessary) reading done in the morning, does his “schoolwork” happily because we learn about the things he wants to learn about — Indians, dinosaurs, binary numbers — and then he has time to do woodworking, skiing, art, and playing. The school board was worried that he would become a social misfit, but just the opposite has happened.
A mother wrote from Indiana:
Let me tell you what happened to our son after we removed him from a local public school’s first grade last November. He stopped wetting his bed, he stopped suffering from daily stomach upsets and headaches and he has not had a cold for six months, although he averaged one cold a month while attending school. He has gained five pounds and has grown almost two inches. And he is happy! . . .
My husband and I had become increasingly concerned about the lowered academic standards in the public schools and the increasing availability of drugs — even in the primary grades. We had also watched our older children lose their innate intellectual curiosity by fourth grade, sometimes never regaining this priceless enthusiasm . . .
We moved to Evansville three years ago. P attended kindergarten ’77-’78, in a class of 42 youngsters. He stuck it out because every morning he and five other kindergarteners attended a reading class for half an hour. During this time he was absent from the noise and general chaos of a large class which he so disliked. I began to look into other schools at this time . . .
[Reading GWS], added to our 25-year interest in Summerhill, convinced us that not only was it possible to raise a child without formal schooling, but it is the most probable way to insure that child’s lasting interest in all that surrounds him. I decided not to register P for first grade, reasoning that the public school would probably assume that we had put him in a private school and vice versa! My husband, however, was uneasy . . . he did not relish the idea of being hauled into court. (His attitude changed during the following weeks.) We decided to let P attend first grade. Maybe he would like it, etc., etc.
After the second week of school we knew that we would have to take him out. There were thirty children in his class. Each Monday morning the paddle, used freely in this southern Indiana city, was removed from the teacher’s desk drawer and prominently displayed. In some of the other classrooms in this school the paddle was hung on a nail next to the blackboard. P was so terrified of the possibility of his being paddled and humiliated in front of his friends that he could think of little else. He never would have been paddled, of course, being as frightened as he was of doing something to initiate the wrath of his teachers. [Author’s note: In such schools a small child does not necessarily have to do something in order to get paddled.] Nevertheless, he refused to be convinced that he had nothing to worry about and in four weeks he had dropped from the top reading group to the lowest.
Some other incidents: (1) He was backed up against the wall of the bathroom by a larger first grader who asked yet another first grade boy, “Want to see me beat up this kid?” P kicked him and escaped. (2) On the playground at lunch time P threw his arms around a boy from the other first-grade class whom he had known the year before in kindergarten and whom he had not seen all summer. Two fourth grade boys saw this display of affection and called P “gay” thereafter, taunting him at school and on the school bus. (3) P fell on the playground, hit his head and wandered back into the classroom to tell his teacher — who told him never to come back into the building until the bell rang. When P told her about his head she told him to report it to the playground supervisor. P did not know there was such a person on that crowded macadam square!
The children were not allowed to converse in the lunchroom and the “hostess” wielding the inevitable paddle reminded them what would happen to them if they did. P would come home from school exhausted, irritable, often crying and carrying his lunch — untouched. (This lunchroom situation has been going on for four years despite formal protests from various parents.)
Another mother writes:
J has been set free! He is enrolled at the Santa Fe Community School but is actually learning at home. As soon as the decision was made he seemed to be released from some terrible burden, he immediately began taking charge of his own life and learning, and began to approach everything with the zest and enthusiasm formerly reserved for his own nature study, sports and building projects. For example, he always hated math, and the necessity of doing math homework caused the most unhappy and miserable hours in our household. Now he has set himself the task of getting math and is proceeding to do so with none of the emotional overtones formerly present.
It’s not an easy task for a poor working-class family to attempt this kind of thing — in fact it’s a bit terrifying. Yet I feel strongly that working-class kids are most hurt by public schools and most in need of being set free.
We’re thankful to John Holt for permission to reprint these excerpts from chapter one of Teach Your Own (Delacorte Press/Seymour Lawrence, $13.95). A sample of Growing Without Schooling is available for $2.50 from GWS—Holt Associates, Inc., 729 Boylston St., Boston, MA 02116. A long, self-addressed, stamped envelope will bring you information on GWS, Teach Your Own, and a copy of the mail-order booklist Holt has compiled. A resource list of correspondence schools and home education organizations is $1.00.
©Copyright 1981 by Holt
