John Holt, Secretary of Education? In Memory of George McGovern

There are some moments in history when hindsight allows to see that if other things had occurred history would be different. For instance, learning that George McGovern died this week, I was thinking about his legacy and how different America would be if McGovern had defeated Richard Nixon, who characterized McGovern as a radical and whose use of dirty tricks during the election eventually cost him the presidency. The New York Times obituary noted:

The Republicans portrayed Mr. McGovern as a cowardly left-winger, a threat to the military and the free-market economy and someone outside the mainstream of American thought. Whether those charges were fair or not, Mr. McGovern never lived down the image of a liberal loser, and many Democrats long accused him of leading the party astray.

Mr. McGovern resented that characterization mightily. “I always thought of myself as a good old South Dakota boy who grew up here on the prairie,” he said in an interview for this obituary in 2005 in his home in Mitchell. “My dad was a Methodist minister. I went off to war. I have been married to the same woman forever. I’m what a normal, healthy, ideal American should be like.

“But we probably didn’t work enough on cultivating that image,” he added, referring to his presidential campaign organization. “We were more interested in ending the war in Vietnam and getting people out of poverty and being fair to women and minorities and saving the environment. It was an issue-oriented campaign, and we should have paid more attention to image.”

But another issue dear to McGovern is overlooked in all the discussion of his liberal politics: before he entered politics he was a college history teacher with a strong interest in education. I knew from speaking with John Holt that McGovern was very interested in Holt’s work and ideas, so I asked him to write an introduction to the 1988 edition of How Children Fail. Here’s what he wrote, in part:

As a member of Congress especially interested in the issues of education, I exchanged correspondence with John Holt when the first edition of How Children Fail was shaking the educational world in the mid-1960s. He exerted a strong influence on my thinking about educational matters. Indeed, as a presidential nominee in 1972, I carried John Holt’s book in my briefcase on the campaign trail. I knew the book well, and my familiarity with its insights gave me the capacity and confidence to speak forcefully and meaningfully on educational concerns. I remember drawing on John Holt’s wisdom in a major campaign speech in New Jersey before a huge convention of the National Education Association.

It is sad to note that children continue to fail in America’s schools—perhaps on an even larger scale than when John Holt first wrote of these matters. But a visit to schools in any part of the national will reveal the same uninspired children and lack of attention to what is being taught of which John Holt wrote a quarter century ago . . . (PF: McGovern is writing this in 1988.)

. . . Obviously failure on such a large scale is not to be laid solely at the feet of our teachers. Rather, such a failure embraces the home, the neighborhood, and the whole community. The finest of all teachers are not able to compensate entirely for the failings of home and community.

. . . The author believes that one of the basic needs of children is to be in the company of adults who are willing and able to listen to the individual child revealing and discussing his or her own concerns, hopes, anxieties, and fears. Too many teachers dislike and distrust children and are themselves fearful of an honest and free-ranging dialogue with their students. Too many teachers are comfortable only with dull and routine ways of conducting their classrooms and ignore the interests and questions of children.

“It is not the subject matter that makes some learning more valuable than others, but the spirit in which the work is done. If a child is doing the kind of learning that most children do in school, when they learn at all—swallowing words, to spit back at the teacher on demand—he is wasting his time, or, rather, we are wasting it for him. This learning will not be permanent or relevant or useful. But a child who is learning naturally, following his curiosity where it leads him, adding to his mental model of reality whatever he needs and can find a place for, and rejecting without fear or guilt what he does not need, is growing in knowledge, in the love of learning, and in the ability to learn.”

These convictions of John Holt form the centerpiece of this book and they are worthy of our careful reading and consideration today.

George McGovern understood what John was attempting to do in his work as a teacher and with his writing; I wonder what would have happened to the course of American education with a leader who grasped these concepts and acted upon them? However, after McGovern lost the election John Holt began to stop hoping political leaders and big institutions would help make his ideas about education happen. Instead, he appealed to citizens and parents to support and enact the changes he sought and the ever-growing homeschooling movement proves that this was a path worth blazing.

The Moral Argument Against Compulsory Education

Cevin Soling is a guest columnist on Forbes magazine's education blog today, and his essay is timely and provocative. The title of the piece is "Santorum and Harvard Anarchist Agree: Public Schools Must Be Abolished." Cevin is the director of the movie The War on Kids, and he pulls no punches in his moral stance against forcing children to attend a place that denies them their civil rights.

Mr. Crotty's introduction to Cevin's piece explains the headline Crotty gave to the piece:

A homophobic, global-warming-denying, Intelligent Design-believing conservative calling public schools “factories”? Santorum’s semi-Marxist rant is proof of my adage that if you push hard enough in one ideological direction you end up in the other camp. In the above quote and in other recent instances, Santorum has unwittingly outlined a case for creative, customized, progressive education.

John Holt often observed that the way to move past the school reform impasse is to create mixed allies, and homeschooling was the movement he worked with to embody this idea. I think this is the reality that is embedded in the paradox above.

Further, while working with Holt's unpublished writing I came across sections of a discarded manuscript of his from the early seventies entitled, "Living Free Among the Slaves: A Handbook for the Young." I am working to piece it together and Cevin's article inspires me to move even faster on it!

Taught Mother Tongue and the Rise of Compulsory Education

The colonizing effects of compulsory education have been understood for centuries. Ivan Illich often noted how, in 1492, when Antonio de Nebrija published the first grammar of the Spanish language, he also outlined the path for how the rich and powerful can dominate cultural change:

For him [PF: Illich], modern corporate culture begins when a people's vernacular speech, learned within the family and the community, is transformed into a standardized mother tongue taught in schools. The first person in Europe to begin this process was Antonio Nebrija. At the same time that Columbus sailed to America, Nebrija reduced the multiplicity of oral traditons on the Castillian peninsula into standard Spanish, first with a grammar and later a dicitonary.

It is also noted that Nebrija, “dedicated it [PF: his book on grammar] to Isabella I of Castille, the catholic queen. When the book was presented to her, she asked: "Why would I want a work like this, I already know the language?" he answered: "Majesty, the language is the instrument of the empire".

Ivan Illich taught that this lesson is emblematic for many issues modern society faces and it is one he and I often discussed regarding efforts to dismiss or regulate unschooling and other forms of vernacular learning. Manish Jain, a learning activist with Shikshantar Andolan and co-founder of Swaraj University, has written a stirring response to India’s attempt to implement systemic education reform through the Right to Education Act.

The sacred role of parents and community in the child’s learning process has been reduced to their becoming mere chowkidars of the school, as benevolent Big Brother aka the State aka India, Inc. takes monopoly control over the very meaning of education and development.

Thus, we as an extended family, have chosen unschooling as the best form of holistic education for our daughter, Kanku. There are many reasons behind this but after several years of research and experience, we have come to believe that schooling stifles creativity, curiousity, compassion, collaboration, self-initiative, activism, entrepreneurial spirit, wisdom, and self-discipline in children. It fills them with fear, stress, false inferiority/superiority, and vicious competition. Unschooling differs from homeschooling and other forms of alternative schooling in several ways. It does not follow any prescribed government curriculum, norms, or textbook. The topics of study come from life itself and from the naturally unfolding questions, interests and needs of each individual child. Exams are not limited to pieces of paper but rather come from everyday practical challenges that emerge in the community as well as one’s own honest self-assessment. The parents’ role is not as know-it-all teachers but as honest co-learners who are committed to continuously unlearning and uplearning with their children. There is a strong commitment to building healthy and sustainable communities and accessing diverse community knowledge systems. Rather than remaining wedded to an abstract notion of a unipolar, hyper-competitive ‘mainstream’ (driven by the values of the global industrial-military economy), unschooling seeks to validate the profound reality of many streams, many dreams and many alternatives.

When Sweden banned homeschooling earlier this summer, the government claimed homeschooling is unnecessary since the state provides a "comprehensive and objective" education. It isn’t hard to see how other governments seeking to outlaw diversity can implement this logic and India, the world’s largest democracy, now faces this challenge.

At the end of his article Jain outlines four policy concerns that any country could implement so a “dialog on widening the meaning of education and creating many more positive options for the diverse children around the country” can begin. I hope you will read Jain’s article by clicking on the quoted material above and consider his policy ideas.