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 Future of Education Interview

Tomorrow, September 11, 2012, I'll be interviewed at 8PM by Steve Hargadon at The Future of Education. This is a free online event, and listeners will be able to send questions via text to Steve to ask me. A recording of the show will be available for free download after the show.

Steve and I plan to discuss John Holt's work as an educator and how John came to be one of homeschooling's earliest and most important advocates. I hope you'll join us and contribute to the conversation!

How School Colonizes Minds and Cultures

John Holt was deeply influenced by Ivan Illich and as I study both I am deeply struck by their vision of what education had become by the early 1970s and where they thought it was likely to go given its trajectory. Sadly, their worst predictions about schooling have come true, and the loopholes that allow individuals to learn and grow outside of institutionalized education are being closed in some countries and tightened in others in order to ensure that everyone receives the same professional treatment from school.

I’m also struck by how few homeschoolers, unschoolers, and alternative educators seem to grasp the insidious concept behind the seemingly innocuous statement that so horrified Holt and Illich, “The world is my classroom.” Indeed, I’ve seen tee shirts and homeschooling/unschooling books and articles that make this proclamation verbatim. As Holt wrote in his 1976 book Instead of Education: Ways to Help People do Things Better (reprinted in 2004 by Sentient Publishing):

I understand now, as I did not understand at all at first, why Illich reacted with such horror when I suggested that we should push the walls of the school building out further and further. This seemed to me a perfectly good metaphorical way to describe what I wanted to do in abolishing the distinction between learning and the rest of life. Only later did I see the danger that he saw almost immediately. Think again about the global schoolhouse, madhouse, prison. What are madhouses and prisons? They are compulsory treatment insitutions. They are places in which one group of people, A, do things to another group of people,B, without consent because still a third group, C, has decided that this is the right thing to do. Prisons, at least those dedicated to some notion of rehabilitation, which by the way a recent study shows that most prisoners hate and fear, are places in which one group says to another, “We are going to keep control of your life, keep on doing things to you until we think you measure up.” In the same way the doctors in the mental hospital say to the patients, “We are going to treat you, keep doing things to you until we think that you measure up, i.e., have recovered, are ‘sane’.” From here we see that school is exactly this kind of compulsory treatment institution. Society has decided that one group of people, the educators, shall be entitled to treat, to do all sorts of things to another group of people, the students, whether they want it or not, until the educators think that the students measure up, are ready to go out into the world and live. At no point is the student allowed to say, that’s enough. It’s for the educator to decide what’s enough.

And so a global schoolhouse would be a world in which certain people would have a constant and unlimited right to subject the rest of us to various sorts of tests, and if we did not measure up, to require that we submit ourselves to various sorts of treatment until we did. Seen in this light it is indeed a most horrifying prospect.

Illich, a priest, viewed the situation in a similar way but with a different lens:

Arnold Toynbee has pointed out that the decadence of a great culture is usually accompanied by the rise of a new World Church which extends hope to the domestic proletariat while serving the needs of a new warrior class. School seems eminently suited to be the World Church of our decaying culture . . .

. . . School serves as an effective creator and sustainer of social myth because of its structure as a ritual of graded promotions. Introduction into this gambling ritual is much more important than what or how something is taught. It is the game itself that schools, that gets into the blood and becomes a habit. A whole society is initiated into the Myth of Unending Consumption of services. This happens to the degree that token participation in the open-ended ritual is made compulsory and compulsive everywhere. School directs ritual rivalry into an international game which obliges competitors to blame the world’s ills on those who cannot or will not play. (From Deschooling: A Reader, edited by Ian Lister.)

Last year I heard of a movie, Schooling the World, that deals with these issues from today’s point of view but I had not seen it nor did I know much about it. This month my friends at the CooperativeCatalyst.org posted this excellent essay, Occupy Your Brain by Carol Black, about the colonizing effects of mass education and the global schoolhouse and I learned that she is the creator of the movie and website, Schooling the World: The White Man’s Last Burden. Here is some of what she wrote:

Once learning is institutionalized under a central authority, both freedom for the individual and respect for the local are radically curtailed.  The child in a classroom generally finds herself in a situation where she may not move, speak, laugh, sing, eat, drink, read, think her own thoughts, or even  use the toilet without explicit permission from an authority figure.  Family and community are sidelined, their knowledge now seen as inferior to the school curriculum.  The teacher has control over the child, the school district has control over the teacher, the state has control over the district, and increasingly, systems of national standards and funding create national control over states. In what should be considered a chilling development, there are murmurings of the idea of creating global standards for education—in other words, the creation of a single centralized authority dictating what every child on the planet must learn.

The problem with this scenario should be obvious: who gets to decide what the world’s children will learn?  Who decides how and when and where they will learn it?  Who controls what’s on the test, or when it will be given, or how its results will be used?  And just as important, who decides what children will not learn?  The hierarchies of educational authority are theoretically justified by the superior “expertise” of those at the top of the institutional pyramid, which qualifies them to dictate these things to the rest of us.  But who gets to choose the experts?  And crucially, who profits from it?

I urge you to read this essay in its entirety and to consider arranging a showing of the film as a way to encourage people to challenge the idea that compulsory education is innately good and vital for all communities.

UPDATE:

In one of those great moments of synchronicity, I just learned that the film will have a free public screening at Harvard University on April 11 as part of a film series at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, from 5—7PM at Askwith Hall, 13 Appian Way, to be followed by a discussion with its director, Carol Black. If you're in the neighborhood, come and watch it with me!

HoltGWS.com update, Catholic Unschooling, and Illich Video

I’ve been overwhelmed with good wishes, support, and requests for help since I launched the new www.holtgws.com site, which is why I haven’t been able to do much of anything else since it officially went live on Sept. 14. I’m rather surprised at how emotional I get when I read the materials we produced at HoltGWS; this is even truer when I review the photos, audios, and videos of John and my friends and colleagues from years past. It has taken me nearly a year to get the site to the point it is today, and I’m still surprised by some thought or memory that comes back to me as I work with the materials. It’s been ten years since we officially ceased publication of GWS and the distance does help me from getting too blubbery about its demise, but I’m still surprised at the emotions that get stirred by an old photo or reading an old letter.

 It is especially nice to have so many old friends and subscribers get back in touch with me. It is very encouraging to hear from parents whose children are now adults in their 30s and 40s describe how GWS and unschooling made such a positive difference in their lives. Indeed, as I create the first newsletter for the site I plan to reprint some of those letters, and to create a section on the site for GWS veterans to share their stories with those who are just starting, or are in the process, of homeschooling/unschooling. As momentum and publicity build about the site I look forward to hearing from more old timers.

I’m also still trying to decide which platform to use for a discussion forum for the site: Facebook (so many people are on it already), Google Plus (the Hangout video chat feature could be a leg up on Facebook), Tumblr (blog comments on steroids), or a stand-alone BBS that is located on the site—all have their pros and cons and I’m befuddled. If anyone has thoughts or opinions on which platform would be best to use, I’d appreciate you getting in touch with me.

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Suzie Andres informed me of a book promotion her friend Sue Elvis is doing. Elvis will be giving away three copies of Suzie’s book A Little Way of Homeschooling: Thirteen Families Discover Catholic Unschooling. You can enter by going to her blog, Stories of an Unschooling Family.

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Another bittersweet moment for me occurred the weekend before I launched the HoltGWS site. I was in PA with a group of friends to attend a farewell symposium for Lee Hoinacki, a great person who is also a writer, thinker, farmer, and activist. One of Lee’s books, El Camino: Walking to Santiago de Compostela, is a moving philosophical and spiritual reflection about his pilgrimage and his thoughts about modern society that I find to be particularly powerful. Lee and Ivan Illich were close friends; indeed, many at the symposium felt Lee helped make Ivan’s work more understandable to them, including myself.

Gene Burkart and I drove down together, as we have several times before, and we decided to take the scenic route instead of the more direct highway route. Despite the bad weather we had faced right up to the day before we left, we were assured that all roads were now clear. Nonetheless, we got more than we bargained for—severe flooding in New York and Pennsylvania from the Susquehanna River caused a couple of detours for us that opened our eyes. As we neared Binghamton, in particular, many homes, malls, and gas stations could be seen on the river-side of the road, engulfed by at least four feet of water. It was an eerie experience. The weather was gorgeous—clear sky, mid-seventies for temperature—yet there was all this devastation floating near us. The scenic route doubled our driving time due to these difficulties, but it also gave us more time to talk.

One thing Gene told me about was a blog he had recently discovered about Ivan Illich: New Scare City. He mentioned it again to the group in PA, and then again as we drove back to Boston a couple of days later. I have since gone to the blog many times and have enjoyed all the history and posts about Illich and his work that Winslow, the site’s author, creates. Most recently he put up a video of Illich that he found in the Internet Archive. The archive describes it: “Ivan Illich, in the 1984 Dallas Institute of Humanities and Culture conference titled "What Makes a City: Water and Dreams," explores the human conception of water through history, which leads to the inspiration of his book H2O and the Waters of Forgetfulness."

Ivan did not like to be filmed or photographed; he once described photographs to me as a modern version of collecting scalps. Winslow writes, “We're not aware of any other such video showing Illich speaking publicly. A good number of audio recordings of him are available, but not video, as far as we know, probably as a result of Illich's well-known aversion to being recorded. (‘Modern-day pornography,’ he testily described the recording of his ‘conversation’ about de-schooling with an evangelical audience in the 1970s.)”

It is quite ironic to me that after our drive through the flooded areas to say farewell to Lee, with Ivan in our hearts and minds the whole way, that a rare video of Ivan would appear on the subject of water: H2O and the Waters of Forgetfulness. It appears as two videos below.

John Holt: April 14, 1923 to September 14, 1985

Sept. 14 is the anniversary of John Holt’s death. He would have been 88 had he lived, but he died at the young age of 62 from cancer. In honor of his memory, and to support those who act upon John’s ideas and further them, I have revised the www.holtgws.com website. All the issues of Growing Without Schooling magazine are now online and available for free, as well as many articles, video and audio recordings, and photographs that have been out of the public eye since we closed HoltGWS. In the case of the video and audio recordings, some have never been available until now.

If you take the time to explore the site you will discover John’s thoughts about how schools could be better, how unschooling and homeschooling are self-selecting and self-correcting activities that do not need central authorities to dictate content and standards, and how his goal was not to create an insular education movement for children but rather “A life worth living and work worth doing—that is what I want for children (and all people), not just, or not even, something called ‘a better education.’”

At a time when education reform is about technocratic fixes and students are just test scores to be processed by the school machine (there are teachers in schools who resist or ameliorate these issues for their students but they are outnumbered) it can be disheartening for me to remember John. After all, things have gotten worse for students, not better, since John died. Sure, we can point to test scores that may have improved as a result of billions of dollars being spent and regulations that keep children in school longer, but what of their lives? Compared to 1985 when John died, more children live in poverty, have broken homes, do not have health care, and suffer from a lack of community and free play in their lives; children now read less and less for pleasure, are less civically inclined, and they face jobless recoveries while trying to pay usurious college-loan debt.

But John was not a pessimist, and he believed that if shown another way to help children learn and grow some people would choose it. You can read about John’s “Nickel and dime theory of social change” in the first issue of Growing Without Schooling. If you do so, I hope you will continue reading through the site and gain courage and ideas about how you and your children can forge lives worth living, not lives handed to you based on your school test scores.