John Caldwell Holt — Challenging Conventional Paradigms of Learning (1960–1970)
The late 1970s saw an influx of opinions ranging from disavowal to recognition of ideas that perpetuated from the release of Pink Floyd’s three-part series ‘Another Brick in the Wall’, the primary focus generated towards the number ‘We Don’t Need No Education’ which was the creator’s individual stance on defying conventional American education models. This decade saw institutions and influencers like the Inner London Education Authority and Margaret Thatcher (who advocated for ‘Curriculum improvement’ in classroom education) describe the song as ‘scandalous’, having nothing to do with the education system. But it’s important to attribute the genesis of this idea to John Caldwell Holt, an educationist whose ideas on ‘unschooling’ and later ‘homeschooling’ emerging a decade earlier, pave way for alternate models of school education in the later decades.
Holt, not coming from a background in education himself, was a proponent of ‘homeschooling’, specifically, the ‘unschooling’ approach, a pioneer in youth rights theory, and could look through the pitfalls of mass education objectively, referring to it as ‘enslaving’ and ‘self-defeating’. He wrote many books with an overarching theme of ‘growing without schooling, freedom and doing things better’. At the same time, supporters of traditional models like Richard Feynman opposed ‘rote learning’ or unthinking memorization, and advocated for ‘contextual, self-directed learning’, Jerome Bruner who spoke for ‘discovery learning’ and creating a ‘problem solving’ environment for the student, while Nathaniel Gage, an educational psychologist was researching ways for improving and understanding the processes involved in teaching. So, it’s safe to say that there was indeed a commonality amongst these thought processes, together critiquing the established norms in education and a need for reforms was hence felt unanimously.
Following the paradigm of unconventional learning models, in 1968, The Sudbury Valley School in Massachusetts, US was established where the emphasis was on creating a psychologically comfortable and self-governing institute, the real life being the primary source of learning. Parallelly, in the UK, the first Open University (abbreviated as OU,1969) for undergraduate programmes was established. There was a sense of indignation perceived towards rote-learning and ‘nurturing’ the child- ‘providing’ for the child was an idea that found itself many takers, even if it was radical in the beginning. The introduction of calculators and OMR sheets in the decade that followed, concurrently generating ‘assistance’ to students and teachers alike is one example of how technology in education supported the fundamental motivation of the decade.
In India, J. Krishnamurti saw education as a religious activity- the ‘fullest development’ of the human being, educating them as a whole, and not a part, whether it was the whole of an individual or the whole of society, humanity and nature. 1960s also saw the establishment of CBSE, Kendriya Vidyalaya Sangathan, followed by the directives set out by Kothari Commission that examined all aspects of education in India, ranging from ‘equalisation of education’, work experience, research, extracurricular learning and access to minorities, resulting in the first National Policy of Education in 1968. Alongside, the Apprentices Act, 1961 formulated objectives for experimental training to individuals specialised in craft as well as diploma holders for progressive advancement of industries, initiating reforms for vocational training in the country.
In conclusion, it’s interesting to examine the trajectory of education philosophy to education psychology, the occurrence of figures like Joseph Lancaster, Maria Montessori, John Dewey, Richard Feynman or John Holt symbolising rote-learning, pragmatic learning, self-learning and other models of learning to understand how the present structure has come about and who we should attribute the origin of these ideas to. Only when we do this, will we have a better ground to begin assessing the present day complexities related to education structures.
