John Holt - How Children Fail
John Holt wrote this book over a period of several years while teaching in an american private school. I think it had such an impact because of it's honesty. He takes a close look at his own teaching and that of other teachers in his school and is unflinching in the conclusions he reaches about the effect it has on his students.
The first section discusses at length the strategies that children
develop to deal with the demands that teachers make on them. He
uses examples of individual children and accounts details of events
that demonstrate the tactics used. In school children basically do
not find the world meaningful and become trapped by the fear of
doing something wrong. They actively resist understanding and
prefer to make wild guesses when asked questions. The children do
not pay attention to either the question or the answer, wanting
only to give an answer, any answer, so as to be able to get it over
with. They have no method of checking the answers they write
against any notion of common sense or logic because invariably the
questions they are asked have no meaning for them. They develop
techniques of watching the teacher for clues to the answer,
avoiding answering or pretending to know and hoping not to be
called on. For most children the process of being in class is a
guessing game; the teacher knows the answer to the question, and
they want the child to guess what it is they know. The children put
on a front of ignorance to get the teacher to give easier and
easier questions until they find one they feel safe to answer.
Quite early on in his observations Holt realises that the pressure
that is placed on the child to get a 'right answer' actually
distorts their ability to think about the question. Teachers have
in their head a view of the long term, what they are going to teach
the children, not just each lesson but for the whole term. Pupils
on the other hand are only interested in the immediate situation,
how to get to the end of the lesson or end of the day without
anything bad happening. The purpose of being at school for them is
a process of getting the allotted tasks out of the way as quickly
as possible, by any means possible. "School gives encouragement to
'producers', the kids whose idea it is to get 'right answers' by
any and all means. In a system that runs on right answers they can
hardly help it." (p.38) Teachers think they are encouraging pupils
to apply their intelligence to problems, but children are so afraid
of failure that their strategies are focused on avoiding failure
rather than thinking about the question. Holt regularly uses the
game of 20 Questions to get the children to try asking questions to
get information, but even in an informal non-threatening situation
they seem stuck in a fear of asking a 'stupid' question and being
laughed at. They are so worried about right and wrong that they do
not see that a 'no' answer (that they think of as wrong) often
gives as much real information as a 'yes'.
Fear of failure is the theme that runs through the book. Holt says
that what children need in their learning is the experience of
doing something well, and knowing it without having to be told or
congratulated. But in school children spend most of their time in
fear; of failure, of looking stupid, of feeling stupid. "Even in
the kindest and gentlest of schools children are afraid, many of
them a great deal of the time, some of them almost all the time."
(p. 50) Holt then describes how this fear creates a state of
tension, which can actually be released by just giving an answer,
even a wrong one. Another alternative is daydreaming, which is a
mechanism for avoiding the tension by not even engaging with what
is going on in the classroom. A person's sense of themselves comes
partly from the things they achieve, and being 'bad' at school
creates a sense of being a failure. Bright children expect the
world to make sense, check what they discover against reality and
can bear uncertainty and so think more about the problem presented
to them. But for many children in school all they feel is the
pressure to provide an answer, not even troubling to think about
the question, and their only strategy is to avoid "trouble,
embarrassment, punishment, disapproval or loss of status" (p.59)
Children can survive only by controlling their fears, living with
them and adjusting to them, but the consequence is that their
intelligence is crippled by them. For many children the option is
to stay as failures because it is safe and familiar, there are low
hopes and expectations from teachers and from themselves. If they
were to succeed at something all that happens is they are put under
the pressure of adult approval. School wants to control what
children learn and their behaviour, and it does this by keeping
them in afraid. Because the questions and answers have no meaning
for the children they do not trust the knowledge to be constant
from one day to the next. When children solve a problem in school
it has no sense of satisfaction for them, only a relief that it is
over with and no longer has to be thought about.
In the section entitled 'Real Learning' we get a slightly more
positive picture. Although it takes the same format of diary
entries detailing accounts of what happens in his classes Holt
includes some snippets that show the difference between how the
children normally react to problems, and the rare occasions when he
feels that a child has grasped something meaningful. Children often
fail because school and teachers present what they do as if it were
meaningful, when really it isn't. The world is full of crazy,
contradictory things, and this is rarely acknowledged to children.
what Holt also acknowledges is that when his pupils do really learn
something it is almost by accident, and that more often than not
school does not facilitate the type of thinking that allows it. A
person who is 'problem centred' concentrates on the problem and
uses the information there to work out an answer. But the school
system is 'answer centred' and as such the pressure is on pupils to
give right answers and the time is not allowed for them to find
their own route to the answer, so they fall back on guessing and
finding clues from the teacher. Or the teacher provides a 'method'
for answering the problem, and children use the method without ever
understanding either the question or the answer. He concentrates in
this section on maths and discusses use of cuisenaire rods and gives some wonderful stories of the way
having something tangible helps children grasp the abstract
concepts of number. He contrast these with the notion that maths is
so often a series of rote learnt 'number facts' none of which
relate to any other and are without meaning in the real world. He
discusses how lack of knowledge and hence failure to understand are
compounded by testing. Teachers are forced by the system to teach
to the test. To prove that their teaching has been effective they
must show that children have understood what they have been taught,
therefore they must succeed at the tests. So much effort is put in
to preparing for the test, the result being that children's results
in the test does not actually represent the true level of their
understanding. Consequently the teacher proceeds on the basis that
they know or understand things that they don't, leaving most pupils
further and further behind in their understanding of the basic
concepts.
Holt describes the world as being made up of words, and that you
cannot just present the words to be learned as a sequence, that it
cannot be real learning if all you do is absorb the words and then
spit them back out again. There has to be relationships between the
knowledge and each learner has to build their own mental model of
the world that is constantly changing and growing as they learn. He
talks about how important it is for a child to be allowed to use
their own methods to reach understanding. He refers again and again
to his own helpful 'explanations', which he knows do not help his
pupils (but as a teacher he cannot stop himself giving them). It is
very difficult for teachers not to impose their own structure on a
child's learning, but if you impose school methods of solving
problems you do not allow the child to come to their own
understanding of the answer. "The only answer that really sticks in
a child's mind is the answer to a question he asked or might ask
himself." (p. 122) He gives a story of a girl he is helping and how
he helps her to see that she can use the knowledge she already has
to compare with new answers to see if they make sense in the real
world. He emphasises the importance of children working towards
their own solution, even if it is at a very basic level of
understanding it will be far more significant to them. I think this
analogy is very appropriate so I will quote it in full:
"In other words, the invention of the wheel was as big a step
forward as the invention of the airplane - bigger, in fact. We
teachers will have to learn to recognise when our students are,
mathematically speaking, inventing wheels and when they are
inventing airplanes; and we have to learn to be as genuinely
excited and pleased by wheel-inventors as by airplane-inventors.
Above all, we will have to avoid the difficult temptation of
showing slow students the wheel so that they may more quickly get
to work on the airplanes. In mathematics certainly, and very
probably in all subjects, knowledge which is not genuinely
discovered by children will very likely prove useless and will be
soon forgotten." (p.127)
School fails because it demeans and patronises children and attacks
their self-esteem. Children react with fear, boredom and
resistance. School creates rules that are applied for their own
sake, not because they have any benefit. School's testing obsession
undermines intelligence. Children are forced into defensive
strategies. School refuses to listen to wrong answers, or
acknowledge the role they might play in learning. Children feel
that it is their failure if they do not understand what they have
been taught. School is interested in getting through the curriculum
and having the appearance of success. Children start out as active
intuitive learners, but after a few years in school all questioning
and curiosity stops. School thinks all learning is measurable, and
must be measured, and that the purpose of measuring is to compare
the result to other pupils and to other schools. Children fall into
the habit of acting stupid until they can no longer remember what
it is to engage with something that interests them. And because
school does all these things it forces both teachers and pupils to
be dishonest; about what is important, what is worth knowing, what
they know and how they feel about their learning. All in all quite
a damning indictment.
In conclusion Holt comes back to the significant fallacy of
schooling: firstly that of all human knowledge some is essential,
secondly that a person is considered educated by how much of this
essential knowledge he has, and thirdly that school has a duty to
get as much of this essential knowledge as possible into children.
As he says unequivocally, "These ideas are absurd and harmful
nonsense." (p. 171) But the crux of his conclusion is that school
tries to impose this agenda for learning, and to do this will
inevitably involve coercion, which will inevitably lead to the
crippling fear that characterises the rest of the book. He points
out that it makes no difference whether you have a traditional,
authoritarian type of school or a 'nice' liberal school, the effect
is the same: "Fear is the inseparable companion of coercion, and
its inescapable consequence. If you think it is your duty to make
children do what you want, whether they will or not, then it
follows inexorably that you must make them afraid of what will
happen to them if they don't do what you want." (p. 175) But there
is an alternative, and he describes to one of his pupils "a great
smorgasbord of intellectual, artistic, creative and athletic
activities, from which each child could take whatever he wanted,
and as much as he wanted, or as little", and her reaction, of
course, "it would be wonderful!" (p. 176)
John Holt - How children fail
Published by Pelican 1976 ISBN 0 14 021115 2
Now published by Penguin Books Ltd