Just Finished Reading: How Children Fail by John Holt (FP: 1964)

When I did my first BA degree (1983-86) my Major was Social Ethics but my Minor was Educational Studies. I’d studied Education in a sociological context in College so I’m not 100% certain if I heard of the author then or later or when exactly I bought this and two other of his books. What I do know is that, apart from dipping into them possibly for essay reasons, I hadn’t read any of them until now.

I’ve been aware since the mid 80’s that Holt was a radical in educational terms. This slim volume, covering some of his experiences as a maths teacher in the later 1950’s and early 1960’s provides some of the basis for his radicalism. Told in a series of ‘diary’ entries it shows how he tried to teach his students basic mathematics and what he learnt about both teaching techniques and how children themselves see schooling and how they fundamentally changed his ideas of education and, to address the subject at hand, why children fail – or at least don’t learn as much or as deeply as they could if teaching/schooling/education was different. One of the early things he brought up, and something that confused me for some time, was the obvious difference in attitude between pre-school and post-school children to learning. Pre-schoolers never leave you alone until they received an answer they can understand or at least accept. Anyone with experience of children – their own or others – dread it when they learn to ask ‘Why’ about EVERYTHING. Why is fire hot? Why is water wet? Why is the sky blue? And my particular favourite: Why does the wind blow? Pre-school kids are absolute learning/questing machines. They want to know everything and they want to know it, to actually understand it, NOW. To be honest it’s one of the things I LOVE about children – they are VORACIOUS world explorers. But once they go to school and start formal education that seems to get lost – at least in most kids. Even I lost interest for a while. I quickly found that not that much was expected of me and expended only as much energy as required to get through the day. Anything extra that I wanted to know I either found out in other ways or just forgot about. Learning in school was most definitely NOT about getting questions asked. It was about working through lesson plans along with the 80% of the rest of the class – the bottom 20% were either left to catch up or sent to a remedial class for ‘control’ rather than education. Luckily I had no issues keeping up although I admit that my handwriting early on as well as my spelling was frankly appalling. My handwriting improved immeasurably once I stopped trying to write ‘their’ way and my spelling improved through bloody hard work on my part as well as starting to read so much and simply learning for myself (and remembering) rather than learning any rules. To this day I still don’t understand the basics of grammar and punctuation – at least not on a theoretical level. In my school it wasn’t something we spent a great deal of time on.

The author was told more than once that he didn’t have the time and his school didn’t have the resources to actually teach his students properly – they never actually said this in so many words (obviously) but that’s what they meant. They had set lessons, set timetables and set criteria to meet. So they had a testing programme and a regime to ensure that as many pupils as possible made it through the tests – no matter if they actually UNDERSTOOD what they were regurgitating on command. The descriptions of his teaching experiences definitely resonated with me. Not only the fact that the teacher didn’t have to time or the energy to teach a subject adequately to a group of 20-30 children of (often) very different abilities but that children often helped each other to understand or took the heat from a floundering child to get things moving again. One thing that REALLY stuck out in the narrative was something that probably wouldn’t make it into a similar text today as it’s very non-politically correct. At one point in his teaching career he was trying to work out why the children in his school behaved as they did – seemingly at odds to their own best interests. It then hit him: the children were behaving exactly like concentration camp inmates or slaves on a plantation. They craved anonymity, hated being focused on, gave answers they knew the teachers wanted (often without any understanding of what the answers meant) and, when pushed, defaulted to uncooperative silence. The child’s one thought was to get out of school as quickly as possible and as painlessly as possible once their sentence was over (without even time off for good behaviour!).

I do wish I’d read this years – indeed decades – ago. Of course by the time I knew about it and had it to read it was far too late for it to inform me about the educational regime I was going through. But I was one of the lucky ones. Mostly I ‘got’ what the teacher wanted to impart pretty easily or could adequately fake it. I did find that if you had a reputation for knowing things that you were must less likely to be asked them as long as you put your hand up and looked smug. Then the teaching would ask someone who looked doubtful. Another lesson I learnt early one was never to be first to enter a classroom or the first to leave. Oh, and never sit at the back. Sitting at the front is far safer as the teacher tends to look over your head a lot of the time. People try to ‘hide’ at the back which is why teachers ‘look’ there! The trick, ultimately, is to appear smart enough but not too smart. Being too smart gets you picked on both by some of the other kids and the teachers. In any pack try, as much as possible, to be in the middle. Overall this was an interesting if rather unusual (for me) read. More than once I’ve been asked about going into teaching and I’ve always declined. Teaching is HARD – as no doubt a lot of parents are finding out right now – and has WAY too much responsibility. I imagine that it’s really easy to teach badly and so, so, hard to teach well. Personally I just wouldn’t want the stress. Recommended for anyone interested in education.