Whose Fault?

Whose Fault?

(From Growing Without Schooling 65)

Kathy Richardson of New York writes:

I spoke with a teacher–acquaintance last year about my homeschooling intentions. During the course of our conversation, she pointed out that if a child fails at homeschooling, it’s the parent’s fault. I countered with the notion that therefore it would be the teacher’s fault if the child fails at school. “No,” she said in all seriousness, “that would be the child’s fault!”

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PF: Why is it so important to assign fault to parents or teachers if a child doesn’t learn something in the assigned time? Isn’t the aim of the class to help children learn specific material, not, as John Holt put it so well, “to have a contest to see who learns it in the fewest number of tries. Anyone who learns it, however long it takes, however many times he fails along the way, should get a perfect mark for that part of the course.” Further, if a child decides they want to learn something but then decides to stop learning it, that’s not failing to learn but a signal they want to learn something else or take a break and return to the topic later. Being dedicated to a task is important, but if the task is meaningless to you it is unlikely you will stick with it for long.

There is too much emphasis on instruction and obedience to authority in many classrooms since the teacher must be the center of attention most of the time. John found that giving children in his classroom more socialization and discovery time helped them learn better. John Holt learned this lesson in the 1960s in his classroom, but it’s hard for most people to grasp when they’ve been educated in the conventional system and can’t understand how self-directed learning works because they had so little experience of it in their lives.

As a schoolteacher, John Holt decided to try new approaches to figure out why “I teach but they don’t learn.” Rather than wait for a national commission to decide the best way for all to teach reading, writing, and so on, John sought the answer in his own classroom. As he wrote in his first book, How Children Fail: “When, without any very great plan in mind, I began to allow more and more time during the school day for my students to talk to and do things with each other, I began to learn enough about them, their experiences and ideas and interests, so that I could see some ways to make the classroom a more useful place for them. They had to teach me before I could begin to teach them.”

John’s method takes time, observation, and empathy, all things that are lacking in most schools. This is largely due to institutional practices and schedules, but this obstacle is not necessary in one’s home, where time, observation, and empathy can be plentiful, if one is attuned to their children’s natural growth rather than a planned curriculum. If we didn’t view education as a zero-sum game, where students, teachers, and parents are all participants in a race where the top prizes go to the fastest, highest scorers, we could focus on the actual interests and abilities of individual students rather than focusing on the school race.