When School Makes Freedom Just a Motivational Device

My friend and colleague, Susannah Sheffer, who edited GWS for 16 years, is also the editor of A Life Worth Living: Selected Letters of John Holt (Ohio State Univ. Press, 1990). Since this book has been out of print for many years and I think it is a great portrait of John’s life in his own words, and Susannah’s introduction puts his work in context so well, I want to share parts of it with you. Here is a trenchant bit about the decline of alternative schools in the 1970s, which I hope will give you food for thought.

Samuel Bowles and Herbert Gintis wrote in Schooling in Capitalist America in 1976, ‘“In less than a decade, liberal preeminence in the field of educational theory and policy has been shattered. . . . Today, much of the free school rhetoric has been absorbed into the mainstream of educational thinking as a new wrinkle on how to get kids to work harder.”

This was precisely how Holt saw it. He wrote later that he came to realize, “slowly and reluctantly,” that “very few people, inside the schools or out, were willing to support or even tolerate giving more freedom, choice, and self-direction to children. Of the very few who were, most were doing so not because they believed that children really wanted and could be trusted to find out about the world, but because they thought that giving children some of the appearances of freedom . . . was a clever way of getting them to do what the school had wanted all along—to learn those school subjects, get into a good college, etc. Freedom was not a serious way of living and working, but only a trick, a “motivational device.” When it did not quickly bring the wanted results, the educators gave it up without a thought and without regret.”