Helping Children Grow Into Peaceful Adults

I was pretty disappointed when the HoltGWS Facebook page recently got bombarded with a slew of hateful posts by people who do not believe that homeschooling can co-exist with public schooling. I wanted to respond by posting an article John Holt wrote for Phi Delta Kappan magazine, “Schools and Homeschoolers: A Fruitful Partnership,” but I can’t locate a copy in my files. (If anyone does have a copy of this article can you share it with me?) I also learned that Facebook will not help you with such bullying and harassment unless you pay them a monthly fee to protect your brand and gain access to their human support team, so I followed the advice of friends—“Don’t feed the trolls”—and have resigned myself to coping with a new wave of anti-homeschooling sentiment in our troubled times.

However, I did come across this unpublished piece John wrote that was printed in Growing Without Schooling 70 that explores how the experience of school shapes people and how it could be made better. The issue also contains several thoughtful responses from readers of this essay when it was published in 1989. I look forward to your comments in 2024.

John Holt wrote in the mid-1960s:

  …  Traditional education, sometimes inadvertently but quite often deliberately, denies children the kind of experiences that would help them grow up to be the kind of people who, being at peace with themselves, are ready and eager to live at peace with other human beings. 

Our efforts for peace are doomed to fail unless we understand that the root causes of war are not economic conflicts or language barriers or cultural differences but people—the kind of people who must have and will find scapegoats, legitimate targets for the disappointment, envy, fear, rage, and hatred that accumulates in their daily lives. The man who hates or despises his work, his boss, his neighbors, and above all himself, will find a way to make some other man suffer and die for the sense of freedom, competence, dignity, and worth that he himself lacks. There will always be others to help him, political leaders ready to appeal to and make use of his unconscious but inexhaustible and insatiable desire to do harm. 

The fundamental educational problem of our time is to find ways to help children grow into adults who have no wish to do harm. We must recognize that traditional education, far from having ever solved this problem, has never tried to solve it. Indeed, its efforts have, if anything, been in exactly the opposite direction. An important aim of traditional education has always been to make children into the kind of adults who were ready to hate and kill whoever their leaders might declare to be their enemies  …   

Human society has never until now had to come to grips with the source of human evildoing, which is the wish to do evil. It has been sufficient, until now, to control human behavior, to prevent most people from robbing, injuring, or killing their neighbors by threatening to punish them if they do, because if anyone wanted badly enough to hurt other people, legitimate victims could always be found. The moral codes worked, at least fairly well, within their limited frames of reference, precisely because there was always an escape, there always were people whom it was all right to hate and injure as much as you wished. And humanity was able to afford the escape clause, was able to survive the killing and destruction of enemies that our moral codes allowed us, because, after all, our means of destruction were so limited, and because it took most of our time and energy just to keep ourselves alive  …   

But no more  …   The means to kill tens and hundreds of millions of people, even to destroy all life on earth, lie ready at hand  …   The man who does not value his own life, and hence feels that no life has value, may not be able to make Doomsday machines in his own basement, but with the vote, or even without it, he can get his governments to make them, and eventually to use them  …   

Seen against this background and in this light, the argument of A.S. Neill of Summerhill, that the business of education is above all else to make happy people, must be acknowledged to be, not frivolous and sentimental, as its opponents claim, but in the highest degree serious, weighty, and to the point. For the sake of our survival we must indeed learn to make happy people, people who will want and will be able to live lives that are full, meaningful, and joyous. We may be able to do more than this (though Neill feels this is enough), and perhaps we should; but we must do at least this much. If we can get wisdom, skill, and intelligence along with the happiness, and we probably can, as they tend to go together, so much the better; but the happiness we can no longer do without. 

The word ‘happiness’ is so generally abused and so little understood that it may be well to try to put this objective into clearer and sharper terms. Happiness is not game to be trapped, or a bird to be caught in a net. It does not come when we beckon, or even when we pray. There is no formula for it, no sure recipe; we cannot bake it like a cake. The most we can say is that there are elements or ingredients of life, in the presence of which happiness may be found very often, and in the absence of which it is rarely found at all. 

There can be a great variety of happy persons, living in a great variety of circumstances, but about them a few things will almost always be true. The happy person has a strong sense of his own aliveness: his senses are keen, or at least he rejoices in them and makes full use of them. He is not dead to the world about him. He does not seek happiness for escape and forgetfulness; he is alive and aware, and moves toward life. Also, he has a strong sense of his own unique identity: he is himself, and not someone else, and not like anyone else: he has his own very particular ideas, and opinions, and tastes, and skills, and pleasures, that no change in his circumstances can take from him. He is not a mass man, who has to be told who he is; he knows. Most important of all, he has a strong sense of his own dignity, competence, and worth. He may value the good opinion of others, but he does not need it or depend on it. For he knows, despite his many faults and weaknesses, that he is a creature worthy of affection and respect and that, in however tiny a degree, the world is a different and probably better place for his being in it. 

Only a rare child could possibly survive conventional schooling feeling this way about himself. That it happens at all, as it occasionally does, proves how tough and resilient children can be  …   

[In their schooling] children are above all else demeaned and degraded by being subject for so long to the feeble, wavering, capricious, arbitrary, and aimless tyranny of their elders. Submission to authority is not always or necessarily degrading. We are not lessened in our own eyes by having to do the bidding of someone we know to be our superior; thus musicians, for example, felt it an honor to submit to the tyranny of Toscanini. We can even obey the orders of lesser men, and suffer indignities at their hands, when we know it is done in a good cause  … Children could very probably submit, without feeling resentment or suffering harm, to a strict and even harsh adult tyranny, if they could believe that the adults knew what they were doing, and that the grown-up world they were being prepared to enter made sense and had some stability and purpose. But what child of today can believe this, when twelve, ten, even six year olds talk, and think, and dream of the end of the world, when little children say, as I have heard them say, not “when I grow up,” but “if I grow up”? 

To have most of your life controlled by people who are so clearly not your superiors in anything except age, size, and power, and who are so far from being able to manage their own lives, is a continuing indignity that cannot but destroy, as it does, most of the self-respect of the children who undergo it. As it destroys their self-respect, it destroys their respect for other people, and forces them to try to find a sense of being and worth in one of the collective identities (be it teenage gang or nation state) that have throughout history been the great agents of human evildoing, and that today stand solidly in the way of peace and brotherhood  …