Our Mission Can’t Simply Be “Children”

I apologize for not updating the Holt site and my blog for the past few weeks, but I have had a series of unfortunate events, including a bad bout with the flu, that made writing and social outreach difficult for me. When Susannah Sheffer mentioned to me that Sept. 16 was the 40th anniversary of John Holt’s death I started to work on this post, but then other issues needed my attention and I got derailed from my unschooling work again. I’m glad to be back thinking and writing about how we can help people learn and grow in other ways than containing them in school buildings and following instructions from authorities.

John was an avid correspondent with many different people, not just educators, and the book Susannah edited (sadly out of print), A Life Worth Living: Selected Letters of John Holt (Ohio State University Press, 1990) is a fascinating look into John’s thinking about many topics. The letter below is one of the most revealing and interesting one’s to me—I read it aloud for the celebration of John’s 100th birthday two years ago (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BDKuZ1v6z3E&t=13s_)—and I want to share it with you now.

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After meeting him at Ivan Illich’s CIDOC, Holt kept in touch with Helmut Von Hentig, who had started an experimental lab school in Germany. This is an excerpt from a lengthy letter to Von Hentig, 8/25/1980, in the book A Life Worth Living: Selected Letters of John Holt (Ohio State University Press, 1990).

What keeps me sane (though some might disagree), busy, and mostly happy in spite of all this is that I never did, and do not define myself exclusively or primarily as an “educator.” I am interested in human growth and learning, but only as part of a larger interest in society. Perhaps my deepest interest could be described as “How can we adults work to create a more decent humane, conserving, peaceful, just, etc. community, nation, world, and how can we make it possible for children to join us in this work, how can we take down the many barriers we have put up between the young and their elders?” Except insofar as we may find answers to those questions, there is very little we can do under the name of "education" to help young people grow up into whole, intelligent, sensitive, resourceful, competent, etc. human beings. This is not the old argument that we must reform society before we can do anything about education. It is to say that the only way young people can grow up well is by having constant and free access to adults who are working to make a decent society. Unless we have a sense of mission, the children will not have one—but our mission can't be simply “children."

At least, mine can't. To spend all of one’s time and energy thinking about how to best deal with children does not seem to me like serious work for a grown-up.

Which is to say that the presence of an army of child specialists will probably be bad for children, no matter what this particular army believed.

I think that children need to live a considerable part of their lives free of the influence of adults, and out from under their eyes, and then in another large part of their lives, they should have as much access as they want to adults who are busy about their adult affairs. I have seen over and over again how children love to hang about at the edges of serious adult talk, perhaps only understanding a little of it, but intuiting that it is serious and stands for the world that they themselves are entering into.

They get none of this in school, and almost by definition, they can’t. A school is a place that exists only to take care of kids, and as such is more likely than not to be more bad than good for kids, no matter who is running it, and even if you or I were running it.

This thread, of helping young people find work worth doing in the world, and helping them to find and enjoying with adults were doing that sort of work, is something that will run more and more through Growing Without Schooling as time goes on.

I was enormously encouraged to read in the New York Times only a few days ago, but in the last year or two the number of small farms in New England, which had been declining for years, had risen sharply. We are learning once again to produce our own food and this can only be a good sign and many of these small farms would and do welcome young people as workers and apprentices.

The big picture in the US is discouraging. There are large invisible signs everywhere of a society in a state of collapse. For thirty years or so, ever since I first understood more or less what Fascism was about, I have felt that we are ready for it, that it would only take the right combination of circumstances and leadership to tip us in that direction. This seems to be truer now than ever.

At the same time, there are 100s of very encouraging small pictures. On a small and local scale Americans are doing a great many interesting, constructive, significant things—building a new and very different society under the shadow of the old. It is with this work and these people that I identify myself. Do we have time? Useless to ask the question. All we can do is work, hope for the best, and take care not to neglect our pleasures enjoys and joys—in my case, mostly music. …

Later in the letter John writes:

… But even in our inner cities there are signs of a new kind of leadership. … people who are saying, in effect, if our communities are going to be decent places to live, we are going to have to make them that way, no one else is going to do it for us.

We are beginning to give up here, at some cost, and with some pain, the destructive notion that the federal government, if we just passed the right laws and spent enough money, would solve all our problems for us. I wish there could be political expression of this idea under a more humane man than Reagan, who also expresses and perhaps mainly expresses nothing more than callous greed. But some people here are trying to shape a new politics, and I feel myself involved somewhat in this work.