Teach Your Own
Teach Your Own by John Holt, 2003.
My journey into homeschooling started in India when I was introduced to the Montessori method for the first time. One thing I really enjoyed about that philosophy was the respect it taught parents for their children. That led me on a path down several other authors and eventually led me to consider homeschooling and unschooling as my preferred method of education (though my son has decided he wanted to try public school this year).
One of the leaders in this modern movement was John Holt, who published a journal for a long time called Growing Without Schooling. Several years after he started writing, Pat Farenga, a colleague of Holt’s, took his works and published them in a book called Teach Your Own.
Here are a few of the gems I picked up from this book.
Do even we like kids?
I’ll start with one of the best summaries I’ve come across to my own motivation for wanting to pursue homeschooling.
“Why do people take or keep their children out of school? Mostly for three reasons: they think that raising their children is their business not the government’s; they enjoy being with their children and watching and helping them learn, and don’t want to give that up to others; they want to keep them from being hurt, mentally, physically, and spiritually.”
I’m not a big fan of outsourcing my kids education, so point 1 appeals to me a lot. Point 2 is true and I really would envy teachers who get the chance to be with my kids all day long. And Point 3, I’m already seeing now as my son starts his third week of first grade at public school.
Holt talks about the bias that people have against children and that many people don’t actually like or respect children. Somehow, children have become a nuisance in our society. I’m as much for a quiet place to work and some breathing room as the next person, but I’ve grown to have a lot more respect for kids and enjoying interacting with them.
School isn’t supposed to be fun
At one point he gives a quote from a man in Iowa in an area where full-time farmers must do extra work in meat packing plants to make ends meet:
“The work ethic has been ground into these folks so thoroughly that they think anyone who doesn’t hold down, continually, a full-time painful job is a bum.”
In this case (and across many parts of the rural midwest, I think), school becomes a place to teach children about life as pain, as a place to Shut Up and Do What You’re Told. Because that is the life the parents are going through. “Everyone has to do things they don’t like,” and school is just the first lesson in that. You may win the lottery and end up with a high paying job, but it’s not likely, so you need to get ready for it.
But it’s not just the poor and rural. Here’s another quote from a wealthy family who was worried that their son was having too much fun in class:
“After all, he is going to have to spend the rest of his life doing things he doesn’t like, and he may as well get used to it now.”
This attitude that school is supposed to be horrible seems wretched. Why would I want to send my kids to a place where the biggest lesson they learn is that life isn’t fair and is full of things you have to do that you don’t want to do?
In the book, Holt says, “Many people who quite like and enjoy children still seem to be in the grip of the old idea that in civilizing them we have to give up or destroy some important part of them.” Something is satisfying to us when we see our kids having to struggle and stop having fun and get back to work.
Fun Quotes
We’ll start with some of my favorites: “Any kids truly free to run their own school exactly as they see fit, will immediately declare a permanent vacation, and that will be the end of it. They may get together as before, and do the same things, but they won’t call it school unless you make them.”
Holt said some parents wonder how they will be able to teach their children six hours a day? The response? “Who’s teaching him six hours a day right now?” Teacher’s jobs are filled with documentation, organizing papers, dealing with interpersonal issues, etc. If they get one hour of pure instructional teaching, it’s been a good day.
“If you learn, the schools get the credit; if you don’t the student gets the blame. In short, you can’t sue a school for educational malpractice.”
“The only difference between a good student and a bad student is that a good student is careful not to forget what he has studied until after the test.”
“Adults continually demand that children learn facts and information that they themselves do not use or know.” Why do we keep testing kids and forcing them to learn things we know are irrelevant?
“It is a mistake to think that learning is an activity separate from the rest of life…When we lock learning and teaching in the school box, as we do, we do not get more effective teaching and learning in society, but much less.” Schools have tried to corner the market on knowledge.
“The needs of the children have little to do with the needs of the school curriculum.” The curriculum was made by people trying to teach to averages and continue social structures.
Many people argue that we need to send children to public school to ‘socialize’ them. Holt says, “If there were no other reason for wanting to keep kids out of school, the social life would be reason enough.”
Much of our day is spent telling children, “no”. “As parents, we can simply SHUT UP! If we can sit back and listen to ourselves, we can hear how much negative harassment we throw at our kids.”
Kids by nature want to learn and want to do things well. But when we artificially introduce inappropriate praise and reward, their intrinsic motivation is warped.
One thing schools do really well is to teach kids to memorize and not look up information, and also not to share information they’ve found with others. (Both of these are called cheating.) Yet, those are the two ways you succeed the most in life outside of school.
On language learning:
“…all over the world many poor people in nonindustrial countries speak more than one language…and that on the whole it is only in nation-states that have had several generations of compulsory schooling that we find most people speaking only one language…people no longer learn their languages from people who talk to them…but from professional speakers who are trained and paid to say what others have prepared for them.”
On reading to kids
(I’ve been guilty of this one and had to unlearn it): “Some years ago I was reading aloud to a small child, as yet a non-reader, perhaps three or four years old. As I read aloud I had the bright idea that by moving a finder along under the words as I read them I might make more clear the connections between the written and the spoken words. A chance to get in a little subtle teaching. Without saying anything about it, and as casually as possible, I began to do this.
It didn’t take the child very long to figure out that what had begun as a nice, friendly, cozy sharing of a story had turned into something else, that her project had by some magic turned into my project. After a while, and without saying a word, she reached up a hand, took hold of my hand, and very gently moved it off the page and down by my side–where it belonged. I gave up teaching and went back to doing what I had been asked to do, which was to read the story.
Comparing children to circus animals:
“It must continually be made clear to the animal that, when he knows what is the right thing to do in a given context, that is the only thing he can do, and no nonsense about it. In other words, it is a primary condition of circus success that the animal shall abrogate the use of certain higher levels of his intelligence….I happened to make a remark about horses being intelligent. “Goodness no” [the trainer] laughed, “They’re not intelligent. If they were, they’d never let us ride them.”
“School is a place where children learn to be stupid.” …others had taken control of their minds. It was being taught, in the sense of being trained like circus animals to do tricks on demand, that had made them stupid.”
“…The elephant in the jungle is smarter than the elephant waltzing in the circus. The rat eating garbage in the slums is smarter than the rat running mazes in the psychology lab.
