John Holt on Children as Scientists, Spelling, and Observing Learning

I posted a new segment of the John Holt lecture today. This picks up where the previous one, about children learning pronouns, ended. The opening is a bit disjointed, so let me fill in the gap: John is referring to the girl he described earlier who correctly learned to use pronouns by making knowledge out of her experience of using words. John then compares this process to what scientists do in their work.

Besides some good insights into how and why children learn, you can also hear John offer some advice that might seem unlike Holt, namely if you use a quiz or curriculum because it makes you comfortable, then that’s okay because that benefit outweighs philosophical concerns. As John says, “If you worry less your kids will worry less…”

John earlier described how children often don’t know what they know, and how it takes a long time for some children to realize they actually know how to read or solve a math problem on their own. Change occurs gradually for adults too, and John’s empathy is born from his own experience: he was a superstar classroom teacher who gradually learned that great teaching techniques are not enough for helping people learn. So it is with us homeschoolers: we can eventually learn to trust our children to learn in their own ways, but we have to give ourselves time and permission to learn how to do that with each one of our children.

Learning is a natural process that can easily become muddled by unnecessary interventions, no matter how well intentioned. Being worried and uptight about children’s learning seems to be the default position for most parents and schools; this video clip shows an alternative. There’s John talking about all the clever things he did to help kids learn to spell in his fifth grade class, and then saying he doubted any of it was really necessary. In the video you can hear children playing and John observing and commenting about them, providing ample evidence that children are active, joyful learners who want to be part of adult activities but in their own ways. The ease John displays with this audience of children and adults shows us another way we can engage in helping people learn without making all parties feel uptight and worried that they aren’t learning enough or teaching properly. Here are the words that John uses to end this segment; I think they’re worth repeating.

“There is no way to meddle with or speed it up [i.e. the process of children learning—PF] without doing damage to them… I’ve been saying this to the schools for over twenty years and got absolutely nowhere. So I’m saying it to what I take to be a more serious audience, with a stronger commitment to success, namely homeschoolers. I don’t necessarily expect that everyone’s going to walk out of the room thinking that I’m right. But I want you to be sensitive to the kinds of experiences which will confirm this for you. So if you see your kids doing some of these things, you think, “Maybe John is right.” I don’t particularly ask you to take it on faith but I do ask you to do what I did, which is to observe your children learning with these ideas in mind.”



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.