Are We Expecting Too Much?
Rereading this interesting letter by John Holt I’m struck by how much it echoes a point Ivan Illich makes in Deschooling Society. Illich notes how our increasing belief in the processing power of schooling and other modern institutions erodes our hope and trust in nature and one another, replacing hope with expectation. Illich defines expectation as being satisfied from a predictable process which will produce what we have the right to claim. Donna Richoux was the first editor of Growing Without Schooling after John’s death.
Donna Richoux writes in GWS 73
Here is a passage from the forthcoming book A Life Worth Living: Selected Letters of John Holt (edited by Susannah Sheffer; Ohio State University Press) that shook my complacency, as I suspect it will that of a few other GWS readers. It's from a letter John wrote in 1973 to his friend Peggy Hughes:
“...I have an odd feeling that whatever we do in environments we share with children, we ought to do because they seem like the most sensible, interesting, and humane things to do in the here and now, without hoping or expecting too much of this or that wlll cause the children to grow up to be this or that kind of person, or do this or that or the other thing. In other words, I think free schools make a great mistake if they think of themselves as incubators for later world changes. They may perhaps turn out to be such, or they may not; the experience of Summerhill has certainly been that the people who come out have not been politically active in any way, though I'm not offering Summerhill as an ideal and it is probably not as good an environment as the Llile Skole. But, llke George Dennison, I've been troubled by much of what has been written in the free school movement in Amerlca about the kinds of people these young people were going to be. They might turn out to be in many ways rather conventional people, we would perhaps hope easier in their skin than most. I know a lot of people, including my dear friend Jud Jerome, who are Iiving in rural communes of one kind or another, at least partly in the hope that this will help their children be very different kinds of people. I suspect that the time is going to come, and I suspect li will be a traumatic time for many of the adults, when a lot of the kids, having grown up happily in these places, will split for the big city and the wide world to see what it is like. No doubt they will find many things about it that they don't like, but I doubt whether the children of communards wlll necessarlly be communards, if you see what I mean…"
[DR.l I am sensitive to the criticism in this passage because I like to think that I am working to make the world a better place, in part by helping people to keep their children out of school and by keeping my own child out. Don't most homeschoolers feel that we are attempting to raise a generation of children who will be better equipped to deal with the future than if we turned them over to traditional schools? I don't see how one can take responsibility for educating anyone without such an underlying premise. The question becomes, where do we draw the line between “hoping or expecting” and "hoping or expecting too much”? Perhaps the distinction is between expecting certain basic traits and behaviors and expecting specific professions, political beliefs, interests, or abilities. There are certain qualities I would like to see in my child that I am certain can be fostered or extinguished depending on how she ls raised—such as being flexible, independent, concerned, courteous, observant, capable. If we succeed ln that much, it's hard to see what she could do with herself that would disappoint me. We'd be very interested to hear your thoughts on thls, especially from familes wlth grown-up children. Did they head in directions surprising to the parents? …
