A Critical Swipe At Modern Education

Press, Volume CX, Issue 32394, 5 September 1970, Page 6

A Critical Swipe At Modern Education

(From LYNNE BELL in London)

The modern school is a prison, crammed with sheep-like slaves who do as they are told because they dare not buck the system.

Teachers are gaolers whose only interest is in ensuring that their highpressure learning factories continue to pour out assembly lines of docile teen-agers whose natural curiosity and enthusiasm have been destroyed by a subtle form of torture.

The child who starts school with a yearning for knowledge leaves it as a dulleyed bored teenager who has learned only that to get anywhere in life he has to cheat

Every school room is a battleground in which the child’s enemy is the teacher, trying to discover not what the child knows but what he doesn’t know.

Every so pften, the West produces a shock-tactics educationist who delights in throwing bricks through educational glasshouses. The latest is 47-year-old John Holt, a teacher for more than 15 years, who claims that the educational system of the entire Western world is both useless and dangerous. “Bad Places” It should be destroyed, he argues, and replaced by a system, designed for the One Present Educational Methods Don’t Consider—The Chiiu “The Under Achieving School” (Pitman), this voluble teacher’s third book on education, is dedicated to the destruction of a system which the author claims teaches children nothing of value. “Schools,” he says, “are bad places for kids.” “It is a rare child indeed who can come through his schooling with much left of his curiosity, his independence, or his sense of his own dignity, competence and worth.

“It is time for our schools to get themselves, or us to get them, out of the gaol business.

“The public has, in effect, said to our schools, ‘lock-up our children for six or more hours a day for 100 or so days a year, so that they will be out of our hair and out of trouble—and, by the way, while you have them locked up, try to educate them’.”

Holt, who bases much of his criticism on education in the United States, says that the biggest stumbling block to a decent system is compulsory school attendance. “We should abolish it,” he says flatly. “To keep kids in school who would rather not be there costs the schools 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 whenever they get the chance. Factories “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 learning harder for anyone else.” Holt forestalls parental fears that the children would then be on the streets by insisting that if they were not forced to go to school they would want to go.

“I know many children who find school hateful and intolerable who might discover that it was not only bearable but interesting if they were not obliged to be there every day,” he writes. “Many who cannot stand five days a week might actually enjoy two or three and get more education and more satisfaction than they now get out of five.” Holt criticises schools and universities that load their students with work in the belief that children must work

all the time if they’re to find a place in the Brave New World. He says these high-pressure learning factories are, in fact, involved in a contest inspired by vanity aimed at winning money and prestige. “I do not think it is in any way an exaggeration to say that many students, particularly the ablest ones, are being as mercilessly exploited by ambitious schools as they are by business and commerce, which use them as consumers and subject them to heavy and destructive psychological pressures.” Holt claims that the modern schoolchild is working as hard as children during the early, brutal days of the industrial revolution. Tradition “Long before they reach college many children are putting in a 70-hour week—or more,” he says. Many businessmen would find their day’s work less difficult and demanding than the schoolwork and homework expected of their children. Holt claims that much of the trouble in modern education stems from the tradition of tests and examinations. He says: “Let’s get rid of all this nonsense of grades, exams and marks. We don’t know how, and we never will know, how to measure what another person knows or understands.” Rewards Testing, he argues, does more harm than good, and can hinder, distort and corrupt the learning process. “There are two main reasons that we test children: the first is to threaten them into doing what we want done, and the second is to give us a basis for handing out the rewards and penalties on which the educational system—like all coercive systems—must operate. “The threat of a test makes students do their assignment: the outcome of the test enables us to reward those who seem to do it best” The economy of the school, like that of most societies, operates on greed and fear, Holt says. “Tests arouse the fear and satisfy the greed,” he writes, and suggests that in place of tests and examinations, students should be encouraged to test themselves, to compare what they know with that of their fellow classmates. “In school, we never give a child a chance to detect his mistakes, let alone correct them. We do it all for him,” he said. This isolation of children from the real world, Holt says, encourages them to live in a daze, a state of tuning-out from which few recover.

“In most schools there is no contact, either with the real world, or real things, or real people,” he writes. “We need to get kids out of the school buildings and give them a chance to learn about the world at first hand. “We need to bring into the school, and into contact with the children, a lot more people who are not full-time teachers.” Sense Of Slavery Holt believes that the treadmill of work and constant tensions in all schools, colleges and universities may be one of the causes of unrest and drug-taking among students in many Western countries.

“We have given children a sense not of mission and vocation,” he says bitterly, “but of subjection and slavery.” Western education does not give the adolescent time discover anything about

himself or about the world he lives in, he says. All it’s doing is cramming him with information, constantly examining him to see if he remembers it, making him feel hounded, insecure and mistrustful and destroying his faith in his individuality. From the day they first enter a school building, children are taught that they need teachers to teach them. Holt says: “Almost every child, on the first day, is smarter, more 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 again be in his schooling or, unless he is very unusual and lucky, for the rest of his life.’’ As it stands, he suggests, our education system is contributing nothing to the future, when everyone will have increased leisure time on their hands. Huge Vacuum It is the responsibility ot the educational structure to ensure that the population knows how to use that time, but it has not accepted the challenge. “Very little of a child’s time in school today is spent in doing anything: most of the time he is, or is supposed to be taking in information or, to prove that he has taken it in, spewing it back out, he says. “We leave a huge vacuum in the minds and spirits of most children, and create a splendid market for mass entertainers and sensation peddlers of all kinds.” So far, Holt says, it has worked, but in the long run it won’t do. He asks a fundamental question of what education is supposed to do: “Are we trying to raise sheep—timid, docile, easily driven or led—or free men? t “If what we want is sheep, our schools are perfect as they are. “If what we want is free men, we’d better start making some big changes.”