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.

Do you ask real questions or do you just quiz kids?

First, I want to share some homeschooling humor that was shared with me earlier today. This is from the Onion:

"WASHINGTON—According to a report released Monday by the U.S. Department of Education, an increasing number of American parents are choosing to have their children raised at school rather than at home."

Next, I want to thank everyone who helped put on the OHEN conference in Tigard, OR on March 20. What a great time I had at the Oregon Home Education Network conference. It was a packed day for me – a keynote plus three workshops – but the camaraderie and energy that were present on-site made it an exciting day. Plus, the event ended with a professional magic show for all ages that left us amazed and upbeat, making it a unique experience for me because I especially enjoy magic performances. I had to get back to Boston to be at work on Monday, but I hope to visit Portland in a more leisurely manner some day. The “underground” tour of the city sounds pretty interesting.

My first two talks ran over their allotted time due to me departing from my written comments and technical difficulties. Arden, a tech-savvy teenager, and Pat Nystrom, a homeschooling dad, helped me keep the audio-visual aspects working throughout the day, but neither they, nor I, could figure out why all but one video played correctly in my presentations. Of course, that one video made the whole program crash and quit each time! I summarized the videos in my own words at the conference, but I’ve uploaded the Holt video here so you can hear John Holt himself talk about the differences between a question and a quiz.



“I beseech you: leave your child’s learning alone.”

Over the past few weeks I’ve been preparing for four talks I’ll be giving in Portland, OR on March 20 (click the sidebar if you want more information about this engagement). I wanted to include some new videos and perspectives for these talks and I started rummaging through my files from my days with John Holt and found a bunch of video and cassette tapes of talks by John. I’ve started watching one, a four-hour VHS tape of John speaking to homeschoolers in Spokane, WA. I’m not sure of the date, I think it is 1983 or 1984, given references John makes to some of the kids who came into the office then. I hope someone who views this, or some of the other segments that will be posted, will remember at least the year. Let me know if you have any guesses or ideas that would help date this video.

I am about two hours into this video and I’ll certainly post more of it as I watch it and become more adept at extracting video from tape and then uploading it to the web. However, there are so many classic John Holt lines, and some surprising comments John makes, that I couldn’t wait any more to start sharing it with people. I think for much of the public there is a perception of John Holt as a wide-eyed radical who romanticized childhood. I hope this, and future clips, will show John as the quiet, plainspoken but deeply thoughtful man he was. This short segment also shows Holt’s deep empathy with children, a quality that is sorely lacking in all our discussions of education today. John’s analysis of how children struggle with pronouns is radical when you consider how few current day teachers would recommend, as John does, to leave the children alone and let them figure it out for themselves. Indeed, in my mind I hear a chorus of educators clamoring as to why they must intervene instead of following Holt’s advice:

“They will develop learning delays!”

“They’ll fall behind their class!”

“You are guilty of educational neglect because you should be making your children learn how to correctly use pronouns!”

Of course—and I see this in this particular clip—John could be quite passionate about certain things, in particular about how children learn and what parents and other concerned adults can do to help them learn. As you will hear John say, “I beseech you: leave your child’s learning alone.”

This particular lecture is in a setting John enjoyed being at: speaking with a group of parents and children in a comfortable setting. In much of the tape I’ve seen so far you can hear lots of babies babbling and children playing in the background and, often, John will stop speaking and comment on what he sees or hears from the children in the audience.  I also found cassettes of radio interviews John did with NPR and the BBC, as well as tapes John made of himself playing the cello or speaking in foreign countries. The cassette tapes are usually very good quality recordings, either professionally done or recorded by John himself, who was quite an audiophile. However, the video tapes aren't the greatest quality. Nonetheless, I decided to work with them to get them online because there just isn't much video of John and I hope people can look beyond the grainy images and scratchy sound to experience, or re-experience, John Holt and his observations about children. I look forward to sharing these with you as I move more of these recordings into digital formats.