“Free Choice Is Not Random”
“Schools should be a place where children learn what they most want to know, instead of what we think they ought to know.”
—John Holt in How Children Fail
Ron Miller, in his book Free Schools, Free People, describes this oft-cited but little-examined claim well:
The key to Holt’s perspective, I suggest, lies in Paul Goodman’s statement that “free choice is not random.” Like Goodman and the other radical education critics, Holt did not view freedom solely as the opportunity for spontaneous release of blind impulses, but as a necessary condition for the individual to actively seek and construct meaning through deliberate engagement with the world. He insisted that the growing child is deeply and inherently motivated to build a structured understanding of reality, but could only do so—could only learn effectively—in an environment that nourishes and supports the purposeful construction of meaning. By limiting the child’s opportunities to explore and inquire, authoritarian social forms, such as modern schooling, severely limit the ability to learn.
This is an important aspect of education that gets lost in our debates about how people learn. Authoritarianism is deliberately embedded in our education system. Horace Mann, a major advocate for universal public education in the 19th century, wrote:
After a child has arrived at the legal age for attending school—whether he be the child of noble or of peasant—the only two absolute grounds of exemption from attendance are sickness and death. —(Life and Works of Horace Mann: Vol. III)
Until the Industrial Revolution, children were part of adult society, learning from the people and world around them. But once enough children were maimed and killed in the factories, mines, and mills of industry, it was decided to create factories of learning, Common Schools, where children would be made into good citizens through an education system. Our political and educational leadership has taken Mann’s words seriously and created a school system that now encompasses nearly all the years of childhood and allows government and business to determine the contents of the curriculum more and more. Teachers now have very little input into how and what they want to do in school today compared to the recent past, and now children are put in school at younger ages and kept there longer to learn what school most wants them to know. The fact that today more children than ever are truant and teachers are quitting the profession at rates not seen before should make schools want to try new ways of learning in and out of school, instead of trying to corral the runaways back into school.
This makes it hard to see how schools can become the type of place John Holt describes above, one where teachers work with students and not on them, and it’s becoming more and more evident that parents and other concerned adults need to create such spaces through their own actions. Watching unschooling grow, slowly but surely, over the past 40 years gives me hope.
