Learning Foreign Languages or Just Learning to Play the School Game?

One of my current projects is to redo the HoltGWS.com website and to scan all the issues of Growing Without Schooling magazine and put them online; I'm about halfway through this project as I write this. It is now ten years since we stopped publishing GWS and I'm only now able to look at all these papers, audio and video recordings, books, and back issues with fresh eyes. I've had to organize these materials several times since 2001 as we downsized the company, put many of Holt's papers in a research archive at the Boston Public Library, and sorted and moved boxes from different colleagues' homes to mine. To be honest, it was often emotionally difficult for me to go through these materials in the past—so many memories, friends who've died, children who've grown up—but recently I've been invigorated by engaging with this material. I'm struck by how relevant all the writing in GWS remains—so many issues are the same for homeschoolers in 2011 compared to 1977: Are my kids really learning if I'm not teaching? How will they get into college if they want to go? How do I deal with skeptical school officials and relatives? Further, many of the comments John Holt made about learning at home seem even more important today, and I'll be highlighting some of those in later entries. But what really excited me this week is the discovery of a cassette of John being interviewed on a Boston radio station about the "A Nation At Risk" report in 1983. John spends nearly an hour talking about school and school reform, with just a few mentions of homeschooling. I'm in the process of digitizing this interview but I discovered this transcription of a section from that interview that ran in Growing Without Schooling 51. Donna Richoux, the editor of GWS then, followed John's radio comments with earlier writing by John about learning foreign languages in school.

First, from the WBOS interview in 1983:

Q. Does it alarm you that the report ("A Nation At Risk) described that not one state has any kind of requirements for foreign language?

JH: Not at all. The whole foreign language thing in schools is a big shuck from the word go. If you want kids to learn foreign languages, send them to places where they speak those Languages. I taught for a while at a private school here in Boston, a private secondary school, very good one, small, lots of money, very, very bright kids, very capable teachers. We had a French teacher there, a native-born Frenchwoman, an extremely competent woman. She liked the kids, the kids liked her, she had all the latest jazz: language labs, audio-visual materials, all the latest techniques. She wrote a report to the head of the school. She said. "Children take French in this school for four years, and these are very bright kids with all the best, and they don't learn as much French as they’d learn if they spent three months in the country.”

Q: How are they going to do that? I mean, in a rich private school I can understand. But what about in a public school in the United States?

JH: What's the point of teaching it? If you're living in a part of the country where there are—this is true in many parts of the country—let us say Spanish-speaking groups, or here Italian, you know you've got Iots of people in Boston who speak Italian - if you want kids to learn Italian, send them down to the North End and let them talk to people who speak Italian. But generally speaking, human beings learn what they have a need for, what they feel a need for. We‘re not good at learning stuff because somebody says, "Hey, someday you may need it, someday it may come in handy.” When we see a connection between real life and this stuff that we need to learn, then we're good at learning. 

And from a 1968 paper based on questions asked by teachers:

Q. If learning is best when one needs it, why has foreign language learning been emphasized at the early primary stage for total contact with the foreign tongue?

JH: For two reasons. The first is the assumption that since children learn their own language best when young, they will learn foreign languages in school best when young. The assumption is false. The child learning his own language has a hundred practical reasons for learning; a child learning a foreign language in school has no practical reason for learning it. The second reason is, quite frankly, that the modern language lobby is powerful in education these days. It has been able to create a situation in which schools and teachers feel they have to teach foreign languages early, whether they want to or not, and whether or not this leads to any useful or lasting results . . .

Don’t Let the Shadow of the Future Cloud Children’s Lives

One of the many gifts I received from my attendance at the Radical Nemesis: Ivan Illich conference on April 1 was getting together with old friends and colleagues, many of whom I hadn’t seen in some time. Though the conference was quite good, the conversations we had after the event, during dinner and breakfast, were, to me, even more interesting. Indeed, Dan Grego, the director of the TransCenter for Youth in Milwaukee, had many sharp things to say, particularly when our conversation moved to education.

I often note, as others of like-mind do too, that we should live with and enjoy our children now, in the moment, and that it is okay to ignore what the state curriculum says we need to be making our children learn now and instead focus on what the children are actually interested in and are motivated to do, no matter how far removed from conventional schooling it appears to be to us.

During this conversation Dan referred to Ivan’s idea of “the shadow the future throws” on our present thoughts and actions. Dan told me the following story, which is part of a longer work in progress that he shared with me following the conference. Dan plans to publish the complete article soon, but he gave me permission to use these excerpts.

The Educator’s Folly

Back in 2004, the National Council of La Raza received grants to support the creation of Early College High Schools across the country and determined that some of them would be in Wisconsin.  A press conference was held at the Milwaukee Area Technical College to announce the initiative.  I was invited to attend.

When I arrived, crews from several local television stations were setting up their cameras and microphones.  A group of young people enrolled in the alternative high schools that had been selected to participate in the project were sitting in the back of the room waiting for the dignitaries to show up and the press conference to begin. 

I mingled with the students and chatted with some of them.  I got to know a young man named Ben who was seventeen.  After talking with him for a while, I made a prediction: 

In a few minutes, you and your friends will be asked to stand behind the podium and listen to the speakers.  At some point, one of them will say something like: “This is a great day for Milwaukee because our children are our future.”  When that happens, go over and grab the microphone away from whoever is speaking and tell him: “I’m here right now.”

The press conference began.  The students were herded behind the podium.  The president of the technical college welcomed everyone and introduced a representative from the National Council of La Raza who described the initiative.  Then, he invited the superintendent of the Milwaukee Public Schools up to the microphones.  The superintendent said: “This is a great day for Milwaukee because our children are our future.” 

Standing behind the cameras, I made eye contact with Ben and gestured to him to do what I had suggested.  He smiled shyly, looked down at his shoes, and shook his head.  The press conference droned on to its conclusion.  When it was over and the media people were packing up their equipment, Ben found me in the crowd. 

“How did you know someone would say that?” he asked.

“Because,” I answered, “most of the people in the adult world don’t believe you’re here.  They think you are somewhere else they call The Future.”

 2.

There are some practical reasons why educators should abandon their “obsessive speculations about the future.”  My conversation with Ben points to one of them.

For too long, in modern, industrial societies, adolescents have been given mixed messages.  Fashion designers and advertisers treat them as mini-adults and bombard them with seductive images intended to persuade them that they can be sexy at thirteen; while in schools, they are often infantilized.  They are told over and over again in subtle, and sometimes in not so subtle, ways that they cannot be expected to make real, useful contributions to their communities until some nebulous “future.”  No wonder so many young people feel they are “growing up absurd.”[1]

. . .  A second drawback of educators’ obsession with the future is that it is actually a hindrance to parental involvement in the education of their children.  Parents, of necessity, must live in the present.  They have mortgages to pay, homes to care for, neighbors they are obliged to love as they love themselves, communities to which to contribute.  If children are being educated for The Future, then schools are separating, in a fundamental way, children from their parents.  And Wendell Berry has pointed out this separation inevitably leads to the undermining of communities:

Neither teachers nor students feel themselves answerable to the community, for the school does not exist to serve the community.  It exists to aid and abet the student’s escape from the community into ‘tomorrow’s world,’ in which community standards, it goes without saying, will not apply.[2]

This obsession with The Future is, by definition, irresponsible.  To be responsible is “to be able to respond” to someone or something.  Since the future has yet to happen, one cannot possibly respond to it.  The consequences of the obsession, both for individuals and for communities, are almost entirely negative.

. . . I think our future-obsessed educators misunderstand the true purpose of education.  Education is the process by which people become responsibly mature members of their communities.  If young people develop character, become familiar with their cultural inheritance and the wisdom of the past, and acquire the habits of mind that will help them think critically, they will find their way to productive adulthood. 

By placing the use of the energy and talents of our youth in abeyance, by separating children from their parents and thereby undermining communities, and by irresponsibly presuming to know the future, educators participate in folly, the proportions of which resemble a modern form of idolatry . . .

. . . C. Douglas Lummis, a former professor of International and Cultural Studies who taught in Japan, once asked Ivan Illich in an interview to speculate about a “possible future.”  Illich responded sharply: “To hell with the future!  It’s a man-eating idol.  Institutions have a future…but people have no future.  People have only hope.”[3] 

It has not always been this way.  In the past, in most cultures, people had the sense to know that the future was in the hands of the gods.  The classics scholar, Bernard Knox, wrote:

The early Greek imagination envisaged the past and the present as in front of us – we can see them.  The future, invisible, is behind us.  Only a few very wise men can see what is behind them; some of these men, like the blind prophet Tiresias, have been given this privilege by the gods.  The rest of us, though we have our eyes, are walking blind, backward into the future.[4]

The story of how human beings abandoned this understanding and began to believe that the future was ours to design and control is long and has been told a number of times . . . [5]

---

[1] Paul Goodman. 1960. Growing Up Absurd. New York, NY: Random House.

[2] Wendell Berry. 2002. The Art of the Commonplace. Washington, D.C.: Counterpoint, p. 63.

[3] Ivan Illich and David Cayley. 2005. The Rivers North of the Future. Toronto: House of Anansi Press, p. xix.

[4] Bernard Knox. 1994. Backing into the Future. New York, NY: W.W. Norton & Company, pp. 11-12.

[5] See, for example: Robert Nisbet. 1980. History of the Idea of Progress. New York, NY: Basic Books; Morris Berman. 1981. The Reenchantment of the World. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press; Christopher Lasch. 1991. The True and Only Heaven: Progress and its Critics. New York, NY: W.W. Norton & Company.  The story was also the theme of a novel that won (ironically?) the Turner Tomorrow Fellowship.  Daniel Quinn. 1992. Ishmael. New York, NY: Bantam Books.

Free Range Learning

Free Range Learning: How Homeschooling Changes Everything by Laura Grace Weldon is a welcome addition to homeschooling literature. Starting from the point of view that “Natural learning happens all the time,” Weldon cites many familiar, and some new, books, research, and data to support that claim. This information can be useful to present to skeptics, if they are open-minded, but it is probably most useful to any parent wondering how much teaching they need to do with their child at home. In short—don’t teach unless the child asks a question. If you create a relaxed, open atmosphere at home the questions will flow from the kids, as the families in this book show and the parents of healthy, pre-school-age children can attest. Dr. Raymond Moore used to say that he could determine a good learning situation by who was asking the questions: if the teacher is asking the questions, it isn’t good; if the children are asking the questions, it’s a good learning situation.

Most important, Weldon fills this book with first-hand accounts by homeschooling parents and children that not only add much meat to the research bones presented, but also add much humanity. Rather than issuing lists of “do this but don’t do that” to fit your homeschooling into, Weldon lays out a full palette of options that families use, often stories told in their own words, and asks the reader to mix and match them to develop their own homeschooling palette.

The first half of this book is an overview not just of natural learning, but also of many related philosophies and theories about learning, such as Flow, authenticity, play, technology, interpersonal relationships, and community building. Her last chapter in this half of the book summarizes her idea that “homeschooling changes everything” and she does a very good job of showing the reader why that is so. I particularly enjoyed her section on “Homeschooling as a right,” because she steers clear of calling for laws or professional groups to protect homeschooling (both laws and professional groups are constantly subject to revision based on who is in power and their agenda) and instead calls for us, the citizens and parents, to protect our rights ourselves by not giving that power up to others. We currently, and always have had, the right to homeschool in the United States, subject to local laws and regulations if they are present. But Weldon is sharp in noting that corporations seeking to make money from homeschooling often help shape legislation or regulations that allow state funds to flow to their companies in exchange for “homeschooling” children enrolled in their programs (typically computer-based, distance learning programs). She writes:

We cannot permit entrepreneurs selling education as a product through our school districts to co-opt our hard won freedoms or use the term “homeschooling.” We must continue to define homeschooling ourselves.

No matter what changes are made to the educational systems in the wider culture, the right to homeschool must be protected. This is the oldest and most successful form of learning known to mankind. It’s also the most natural form of learning. Children playing, learning and growing up with close family ties in a community where they gain experience among people of all ages—this is how nearly every one of our ancestors learned. This works. Learning does not have to be regulated and legislated. It does not have to be a for-profit venture. If we don’t defend homeschooling, our right to define homeschooling for ourselves can be lost.

Most homeschoolers embrace the freedom to use whatever works for their children to learn and, as you’ll read in the second half of this book, there are many, many different ways to help children learn besides computer-based instruction. In this part, Weldon provides not just first-hand accounts of learning all the standard school subjects, and lists of resources and books to help you along the way, but also sound advice for getting children into the world by using adventure travel, field trips, volunteerism, spirituality, and current events not as secondary offerings—as they are so often in school, if they are there at all—but as the primary course for helping children grow and learn. If you are considering homeschooling, or are in the thick of it, this book will inspire and help you. If you are a teacher or a parent with children in school, this book will show you many new ways to think about learning and how you can help children.

John Holt Speaks to Swedish Teachers About How Children Learn

Though there aren't many videos of John Holt, there are numerous audio tapes of him speaking since John was an audiophile who recorded most of his own talks, as well as Boston Symphony Orchestra rehearsals (he had permission) and many other daily sonic events. This is my first effort at transferring an analog cassette tape to digital format; I had to further format it to fit into YouTube's 15 minute limit. I also added a few photos so you aren't staring at a blank screen for an hour while John talks.

This is a talk John Holt presented to Swedish teachers in Gothenberg, Sweden on March 22, 1982. As John notes here, he was revising How Children Learn during the time he was doing his Scandinavian tour, so these are pretty fresh thoughts and ideas that John was working with in light of his connection to homeschoolers (I didn't hear him say "unschooler" at all in this talk, FYI). What else is noteworthy is how Sweden, in 2010, banned homeschooling on the grounds that a professional education was available from the state and families therefore had no need for homeschooling. As Holt notes forcefully on this tape, unasked for teaching actually impedes learning, particularly for young children, a lesson confirmed by research that Holt notes in 1982 and quite recently confirmed again by new research cited in the Boston Globe (Front page, 3/29/11). However, a point often lost among today's unschoolers is that when a child of any age asks to be taught then "Go for it!" John provides an example of how a baby or toddler might ask for or invite teaching from an adult.

Like most of the audio tapes I have, this was recorded by John while he spoke, so the quality is a bit rough. I've removed as much hiss as I could, and the entire speech is here, though part 4 ends abruptly during the Q&A section. However, you are able to grasp John's final point, one he made often: schools should be more like public libraries, in spirit and in organization.

In Memory of Jean Liedloff and The Continuum Concept

I learned that Jean Liedloff, author of the groundbreaking book about her work with the Yequana Indians of the Amazon basin, The Continuum Concept, died on March 15, 2011. This book was championed by John Holt during his life, and we continued to sell and support it until we closed our bookstore in 2001. Holt wrote:

This seems to me as important a book as any I have ever read. In it Jean Liefloff says and shows that babies grow best in health, happiness, intelligence, independence, self-reliance, courage, and cooperativeness when they are born and reared in the "continuum" of the human biological experience, that is, as "primitive" mothers bear and rear their babies, and probably always have born and reared them through all the millions of years of human existence.

We interviewed Jean Liedloff in Growing Without Schooling 70. You can download a PDF of the two-page interview here. I hope you enjoy reading the interview.