#john holt

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Escape from Childhood by John Holt

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On The Beach - The Paragons

1967

Sun-soaked rocksteady bliss

Before Blondie took "The Tide Is High" to the top of the charts, John Holt and the crew were already defining the sound of Treasure Isle with gems like this.

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« The very natural mistake that Bill and I made was to think that the differences between the children in our class had to do with techniques of thinking, that the successful kids had good techniques of thinking while the unsuccessful. . . had bad, and therefore that our task was to teach better techniques. But the unsuccessful kids were not trying, however badly, to do the same things as the successful. They were doing something altogether different. They saw the school and their task in it differently. It was a place of danger, and their task was, as far as they could, to stay out of danger. Their business was not learning, but escaping.

Bill Hull and I, in our early work together in the fifth grade, saw correctly enough that the reason so many children in our classes learned so little was that they used such bad thinking and problem-solving strategies. What I did not see until later was that we, our classroom, our position as teachers, which is to say, givers of orders, judges, graders, were the source of these children's strategies. We, and not math, or reading, or spelling, or history, were the problem that the children had designed their strategies to cope with.

It was only later, in another school, that I began to wonder, more intuitively than consciously, how I might help make a class in which children, free of danger from me and each other, might once again, as when they were little, reach out hungrily to reality. This is the most important task of a teacher, certainly of younger children—to make or make accessible a part of the world or of human experience which is as interesting, exciting, meaningful, transparent, and emotionally safe as possible. »

— John Holt, How Children Fail

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John Holt  *July 11, 1945

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John Holt

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alton ellis & john holt -- live & love

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Once when substituting in a first-grade class I thought that the children, who were just beginning to read and write, might enjoy some of the kind of free, non-stop writing that my fifth graders had done. About 40 minutes before lunch one day, I asked them all to take pencil and paper and start writing about anything they wanted. They seemed to like the idea, but right away one child said anxiously, "Suppose we can't spell a word?" "Don't worry about it," I said. "Just spell it the best way you can." A heavy silence settled on the room. All I could see were still pencils and anxious faces. This was clearly not the right approach. So I said, "All right, I'll tell you wat to do. Any time you want to know how to spell a word, tell me and I'll write it on the board." They breathed a sigh of relief and went to work. Soon requests for words were coming fast; as soon as I wrote one, someone asked me another. By lunchtime, when most of the children were still busily writing, the board was full. What was interesting was that most of the words they had asked for were much longer and more complicated than anything in their reading books or workbooks. Freed from worry about spelling, they were willing to use the most difficult and interesting words that they knew.

What Do I Do Monday? by John Holt (©1970) Chapter 24: Writing For Ourselves