Can There Be Good Education In A Bad Society?
John Holt wrote about a lot more than education as he realized that separating living from learning is a tragic error we made when we based schooling on the industrial, factory model. My colleague Susannah Sheffer explored this in-depth in Growing Without Schooling 69, Focus: Making Communities More Welcoming Of and Accessible to Children—A Collection of Wishes. Here is part of Susannah’s introduction:
A few words about why we spend so much time talking about community in a magazine that’s ostensibly about education. John Holt wrote in 1971: “l do not think we can treat as separate the quality of education and the quality of life in general. . . I am saying that truly good education in a bad society is a contradiction in terms. In short, in a society that is absurd, unworkable, wasteful, destructive, secretive, coercive, monopolistic, and generally anti-human, we could never have good education, no matter what kind of schools the powers that be permit, because it is not the educators or the schools but the whole society and the quality of life in it that really educate. This means that whatever we do to improve the quality of life, for anyone, and in whatever part of his life, to that degree improves education. . . The best and perhaps only way to prepare the young to work for a better world is to invite them, right now, to join us in working for it. We cannot say, ‘We will concentrate our efforts on making nice schools for you, and after you get out you can tackle the tough job of remaking the world.’ . . .What people need above all else is a society in which they are to the greatest possible degree free and encouraged to look, ask, think, choose and act; and. . . making this society is both the chief social or political and educational task of our time.”
If society as a whole is what educates, we cannot think about working for better education without thinking about working for better communities in which to live, work, play, teach, and learn. In a way, this makes the task seem bigger, more imposing. But defining it this way also gives us a great range of possible courses of action, a great many things we can actually do. Of the many possible ways to work “in the field of education,” I suspect that working for stronger communities will be not only the most effective but also the most satisfying. —Susannah Sheffer, Growing Without Schooling 69
