Learning the Ropes
How Children Fail.
by John Holt.
Pitman. 181 pp. $4.50.
For several months now a public-spirited poster has been displayed in the New York City subway trains, simply a line of type: “I quit school when I were in the sixth grade.” Many rebuttals have been scrawled on the poster, expressing by and large a much finer sense of the dilemma. “You was a smart boy, I staid on thru collidge.”—obviously the work of a teacher; and “I was pregnant”—the work of a student.
This brief dialogue states the leading positions. Officialdom is appalled at the dropouts and urges the students to stay; the earnest teachers are appalled because those who stay learn nothing; and the crisis-ridden students say simply, “Life itself makes very little sense, and least of all in school.”
The first fruits of the present widespread concern have been either propagandistic or methodological, an enormous pile-up of professionalism and blind expediency: teaching machines, television, tape-recorders, and fantastically refined curricula, as if sheer quantity could make up for what is missing. But in the meantime several excellent books have appeared, asking deeper questions and treating the problems of school as being intrinsically continuous with the problems of society. The tendency among educators is to label these radical diagnoses utopian. Sometimes this means nothing more than “hard to achieve.” Frequently it means that the Libertarian-Utopian tradition is visible in the far background. But to categorize like this in terms of the tradition is to ignore two crucial things, both pragmatic. The first is the modern evidence of psychoanalysis, which in effect has converted certain of the 19th-century Utopian ideas into fields of scientific inquiry. This great mass of evidence, relating growth and behavior to environmental causes, passes unnoticed when we construct the chilling environments of our schools. The second reservoir of evidence—not yet so large as that of psychoanalysis, but directly to the point—is the brief history of libertarian education: the remarkable experiences of Tolstoy at Yasnaya Polyana, the free school communities of A. S. Neill and Homer Lane, the “organic” teaching methods of Sylvia Ash ton-Warner.
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Such experiments seem Utopian if we measure them against the present disposition of vested interests—i.e., “hard to achieve”—but the fact remains that every word written by these authors refers to accomplished facts. From the point of view of pedagogy itself, the record is impressively one of success. John Holt's recent book, How Children Fail, speaks largely in support of this tradition, though for the most part it is a finely observed record of just the opposite, that is, of the dreadful failure of our conventional procedures. Holt's material, like Ashton-Warner's, is drawn entirely from classroom events, and he stresses the fact that the schools involved are “good” schools, not poor ones, which is an important point, for he takes pains to show that many successful students, by any serious standard, must be considered failures. Just as the familiar dropouts have collapsed into failure and isolation, many honor winners have collapsed into success. Their expertise consists of the passing of tests, and they are separated, as by a veil, from the reality behind the symbols they have learned to manipulate.
At the heart of Holt's book is an estimation of the ordinary powers with which each child begins his life:
These quiet summer days I spend many hours watching this baby. What comes across most vividly is that she is a kind of scientist. She is always observing and experimenting . . . soaking up experience and trying to make sense out of it, trying to find how things around her behave, and trying to make them behave as she wants them to. . . . In the face of what looks like unbroken failure, she is so persistent [that] it is hard to credit the popular notion that without outside rewards and penalties children will not learn. . . . Her learning gives her great satisfaction, whether anyone else notices it or not.
Holt proceeds, then, to analyze the events of the classroom, showing step by step, with persuasively concrete detail, how our present methods defeat and finally eradicate the curiosity, delight, and patience observable in infants. This is a valuable record for parents and is indispensable to teachers. Holt's way of observing might be taken as a pattern by everyone who faces a room full of students. What does he look for ? And what does he look at ? The student, of course—faces, gestures, wiggling (or the lack of it), eyes, breathing—so that patterns emerge and the teacher is in touch with a whole process, either of failure or of understanding. This is tantamount to rescuing the person hidden behind the artifact called “student.” And this person, Holt points out, is reacting first of all to the coercion, ultimately physical, which causes him to be present in the room, the seat, the order, on the hour and the day determined by distant administrators; he must listen when told to listen, and leave when told to leave; secondly, he is responding to the pressures of a company of peers, not under conditions of peerage, but of artificially induced competition, artificial threats, rewards, and punishments; and finally, he is brought into relation with a teacher whose words he cannot help but interpret according to the real power structure of the school. These are words which, unlike those heard anywhere else, have only an ulterior meaning: forthcoming tests, grades, comparisons with one's neighbors, threats, bribes. The result is confusion, boredom, fear, apathy—or a docility which in defeat of the spirit settles for the letter. It is not hard to see that under these conditions there is a genuine survival value in the strategy of failure.
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The main body of Holt's book consists of entries from his teaching journal and is divided into four sections. The first, called “Strategy,” describes the crisis-behavior of the classroom, the various survival techniques of the children. Some behave like the good soldier Schweik, others adapt themselves to the unremitting answer-hunt, having come to see that answers, not understanding, receive the rewards. These children look for clues in the face, the voice, and the gestures of the teacher. Still others retreat so frequently to the world of daydreams that they themselves lose track of their condition and are under the impression that they are thinking. The behavior described in this section answers both the why and the how of the following question: “Why should a boy or girl, who under some circumstances is witty, observant, imaginative, analytical, in a word intelligent, come into the classroom and, as if by magic, turn into a complete dolt?”
The second part of the book is called “Fear and Failure.” “What is most surprising of all,” writes Holt, “is how much fear there is in school. Why is so little said about it? Perhaps most people do not recognize fear in children when they see it.” Here he shows how the strategies of the children are perforce self-protective, and are aimed at avoiding “trouble, embarrassment, punishment, disapproval, or loss of status.” The centers of pressure are threefold: teachers, classmates, parents. Every maneuver becomes a gamble, a “front,” or a dodge. “We have two problems, not one: to stop children from being afraid, and then to break them of the bad thinking habits into which their fears have driven them.” (My own experience as a teacher is that when fear is removed, the bad habits fall of themselves. Habits, even bad ones, are immediately functional, not remotely functional. They are elements in some present structure of experience and cannot survive of themselves once the total structure has been changed.)
In the next section, “Real Learning,” Holt gives a touching example of this important event. He observed an invited educator demonstrating the Cuisenaire rods to a class of severely retarded children. These rods—of various lengths and colors—can be manipulated in such a way as to exemplify the basic facts of arithmetic. There was no question here of testing, no need even to perform. The usual jollities of breaking the ice were dispensed with. The demonstrator manipulated the rods and invited the students to do the same. They were curious, and though they were confused they soon found that confusion was permissible, and that no one rushed them, or flooded them with explanations, or interfered by “encouraging” them. For these retarded children the experience of understanding (an increment of real power) is unthinkably difficult and precious. “Then as I watched,” writes Holt, “the dark-haired boy saw ! . . . for the first time, his hand visibly shaking with excitement, he reached without trial and error for the right rod. . . . The tongue going round in the mouth, and the hand clawing away at the leg under the table doubled their pace. When the time came to turn the rods over and fill the other empty space, he was almost too excited to pick up the rod he wanted but he got it in. ‘It fits! It fits!’ he said, and held up the rods for all of us to see. Many of us were moved to tears by his excitement and joy, and by our realization of the great leap of the mind he had just taken.”
“How Schools Fail”—the last section of the book—is a telling indictment of compulsion, and of grading, and of artificial divisions of subject matter, and of teaching methods which do more harm than good. But here, as elsewhere, the most rewarding thing is Holt's sensitive understanding of what the children themselves are experiencing. It is a rare teacher indeed who can intuit the whole structure of half-thoughts, guesses, errors, and emotions which block the natural flow of understanding. Holt's descriptions of these life-dilemmas are wonderfully clear. Most important, they constitute a usable and transmissible wisdom, badly needed today.
The fact that this book confines itself largely to the classroom, prompts me to suggest that two other books be read in conjunction with it. One of these is A. S. Neill's The Free Child (Herbert Jenkins: London), which gives a far better picture of the man, the ideas, and the Summerhill experiment than does the more recently published Summerhill, which is something of a pastiche, and which, though useful enough, omits too much of vital interest. The value of The Free Child, in relation to Holt's book, is that it describes an experiment undertaken to cure precisely the ills we are familiar with. The other book—and it cannot be too highly recommended—is Paul Goodman's Compulsory Mis-Education. Everyone who is concerned with educational reform knows that the problems of the classroom are profoundly interwoven with the political, economic, and cultural facts of our lives. Goodman spells these out as no one else has done.
