CAN WE SAVE THE SCHOOLS? (No, and they're not worth saving)
Holt, John
Can We Save the Schools? ? No, and they're not worth saving. A COMMENT BY JOHN HOLT I have to decline your kind invitation to submit a companion article to John Egerton's. I am finishing a book...
...The government schools have long been bad for most children, but they have always been worst for poor children...
...What we have in these government schools — and many of the private schools are just as bad—is not a preparation for freedom and democracy but a preparation for slavery and fascism...
...But I can't get into that now...
...The public schools were never formed for a "public" purpose, and John Egerton half admits that...
...Nonetheless, I want to respond briefly in letter form to some of the points Egerton raises...
...I don't know why he says "unconsciously...
...It would be wonderful to invent a new and better approach to education, if only we had the time, ft...
...They are about as public as the Pentagon...
...It was almost certainly the broadest and most intensive survey of our schools ever made...
...fail to appreciate what grim, joyless places most American schools are, how oppressive and petty are the rules by which they are governed, how intellectually sterile and barren the atmosphere, what an appalling lack of civility obtains on the part of teachers and principals, what contempt they unconsciously display for children as children...
...Beyond that, Silberman says nothing at all about the extraordinary amount of physical violence to which children, above all poor children, are subjected in schools...
...Samuel Johnson said, "Patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel...
...I have stated my objections to such schemes...
...Indeed, in thousands of communities effective local schools have been closed over the furious protests of the citizens...
...Sometime in bsi the near future, I expect to begin a book about what kinds of changes in structure, function, philosophy, and methods might lift the "public" schools out of their downward spiral and into the beginnings of an upward one...
...Rich people should be able, as they are, to send their children to school wherever they want, but poor people should not have that right, because it might hurt the government schools...
...In my new book, Teach Your Own, I assert that with very few exceptions, the social life of schools and classrooms is mean-spirited, competitive, snobbish, status-oriented, cruel, and violent...
...Only a tiny minority of Americans really understand what political and constitutional liberties mean and why they are worth defending...
...many of them do it explicitly and repeatedly...
...With the other work I have to do here, that keeps me busy seven days a week...
...In fact, I suspect that the only thing many Americans hate more than freedom is children themselves, perhaps because they are such a living embodiment of it...
...Well, enough...
...And frightening...
...In the late 1960s Charles Silberman and a large team of researchers spent four years examining the government schools all over the United States...
...When Charlie Wilson said, "What's good for General Motors is good for the country," liberals were smart enough to give him the horselaugh...
...But when the $100 billion per year government school monopoly, crammed to bursting with featherbedding administrators, says the same thing, liberals nod in agreement...
...The logic is astonishing...
...If you had talked as much as I have to Middle American audiences, you would know that there is nothing in the world they distrust, fear, and even hate as much as the idea of freedom, the idea that people—above all children—should have some real choices in their lives, should have the right to say No to Authority...
...No one can dispute this...
...The shortcomings of this people's school system must surely be familiar to all of us by now, thanks to the well-aimed critical lights of Holt and others...
...In many cities, including my own, the day-to-day operations of the schools are controlled by judges who are completely outside the political process...
...So what do we do next...
...In no communities do the citizens and voters exercise any effective control over choice of teachers, curricula (which are more and more determined at the state level), methods, or materials...
...I doubt that any of this will seem very convincing to you...
...We could equally say that it is the last refuge of the incompetent...
...Should we expect otherwise...
...It is past time for John Holt and all the rest of us to figure out what we're going to do when the school bell rings Monday morning...
...I suspect this was not true fifty years ago, when many teachers thought part of their mission was to prepare children to make a better world...
...He says that "sometime in the near future" he intends to "begin a book about what kinds of changes in structure, function, philosophy, and methods might lift the 'public' schools out of their downward spiral and into the beginnings of an upward one...
...George Dennison wrote in his wonderful book, The Lives of Children, still must reading for anyone concerned about education and especially about the education of poor kids, that even if we had an ideal democracy (which we are far from having) it would not take much more than a generation of government schooling to destroy it...
...But the solutions will not be found in transferring the system from the reach of the people to the grasp of the capitalist moneychangers...
...I cannot understand why liberals should object to the idea that poor people, or people of moderate income, should have some of the kinds of choices in education that rich people have always had...
...That is the fundamental issue, as far as I am concerned...
...In Chicago, the schools are controlled by a small board of businessmen...
...They think, naively and wrongly, that authority and discipline can be made to rest entirely on force, fear, punishment, and the threat of punishment...
...If we put children, for a large part of their waking lives, into miniature fascist states, why should we expect that at the end of twelve years they will come out understanding or believing in human liberty...
...But What Are the Alternatives...
...I have been told over the years more times than I could count that the schools had to do this or that to get the children ready for "reality...
...In his book, Crisis in the Classroom, Silberman had this to say about the schools—and please note that this was at the height of the supposed "permissive" revolution: "Adults...
...But I am disappointed that my piece only provoked him to repeat the criticisms he has been offering now for a number of years, rather than to address the hard questions I have tried to raise...
...All large schools track or ability-group their students, and every study of these groups has shown that they correlate almost perfectly with social class—the poorer the kids, the lower the group...
...I can understand why the political Right should approve of this, but that the political Left, the "liberals" and "radicals," should do so surpasses belief...
...I cannot understand," he writes, "why liberals should object to the idea that poor people, or people of moderate income, should have some of the kinds of choices in education that rich people have always had...
...They were formed primarily to serve the interests of the rich and powerful—specifically, to make sure that the children of the great mass of Americans would turn into obedient and politically passive workers...
...I believe it is fair to say this has already happened...
...What they say, without exception, is, "That's what the real world is like...
...Indeed, this loss of any sense of humane or noble mission is one of the chief reasons why the schools are worse than they used to be and why their authority and discipline are breaking down so badly...
...What astonishes me is that people of the Left let them get away with this...
...Amazing...
...They have not increased but decreased the chances of upward mobility in this country...
...I am finishing a book against a tight deadline...
...I can only assume from Holt's comments that he considers public schools and the people who run them beyond redemption, since there is no hint in his letter of anything at all that might be tried to make them more effective or more equitable or more productive...
...I won't go further here, except to note what an irony is embedded in the notion that so-called free and competitive private enterprise—the folks who brought us Exxon, Ma Bell, Texaco— might bring salvation to a publicly owned and operated school system that has failed us...
...A REJOINDER FROM JOHN EGERTON I admire the clarity and quality of John Holt's criticism, and agree completely with most of it...
...the record is plain...
...Holt seems to suggest that some sort of tuition tax credit or voucher system would serve us well...
...Any half-smart Army sergeant knows better—and we learned in Vietnam that even an Army cannot maintain its discipline when it loses its sense of mission...
...In the first place, I can think of no meaningful sense in which the "public" schools are public...
...I only wish he would turn his mind to those crucial issues now, instead of giving us yet another analysis of what is wrong...
...The "public" schools—which I call government schools—never did help the poor...
...The "public" schools are, in fact, a government monopoly, rather like our nuclear monopolies, and about equally sensitive and responsive to public input...
...But Eger-ton's piece thrust these thoughts into my mind, and I had to get them down before I could go on to something else...
...Not one person who has ever said that to me has spoken of this reality, this "real world," as if it were a good place or could be made good, or even better...
...My authority for this is Fred Hechinger of The New York Times, who wrote in one of his columns that for seventy years and more it has been primarily the children of the poor whom the schools have failed, dropped out, pushed out...
...I have said exactly the same thing face-to-face to more than 5,000 educators...
...Not one has ever contradicted me, even after I point out that no one has ever contradicted me...
...Having failed dismally to do what they are supposed to do, the schools respond by wrapping themselves in the flag...
Vol. 46 • March 1982 • No. 3
