Urban Confrontation; 52; What Do We Have and Where are We going? John Holt

From Northeastern University the National Information of workers and urban confrontations. You have to have many more losers than winners that's how races work. The trouble with. That is that we I mean we really have to put about 100 loser labels on in our schools for any winner label we put on the trouble with putting loser labels on people is that they begin to feel like losers and think like losers and act like losers. And human growth stops. This week on urban confrontations. John Holt author lecturer and educator. Program. What we have and where are we going. John Holt a respected authority on education and author of the books how children fail and how children learn. He states that good schooling is predominately for the middle and upper classes. This schooling

maintains the power structure continuing the small circle of the elite. One myth he cites is that schooling is a social equalizer. One of the things that I've learned in part from village but in part from other sources Paul Goodman and also did a great deal to influence my thinking here is that. Very recently in historical time mostly within the last century and mostly even within the last half century modern society this country with the possible exception of Tanzania every other country in the world has done the most remarkable thing. We have. Locked up learning in schools or to put it another way we have defined education or learning as schooling and we have decided as a matter of a social policy to measure people's education their learning their competence their job worthiness. Almost entirely in terms of the amount

on fanciness of schooling that they've been able to consume every country in the world as I say the possible exception of Tanzania and they only maybe because they're too poor to do it has taken this step and it's a disaster. Here I'm paraphrasing Ilitch are really urge you to get to know his stuff better at first hand. He operates as some of you may know out of a place called Sea doxie IDEO sea in Cuernavaca Mexico and if you right there you can get his writings in various forms. I think a lot of them are coming out fairly soon in a book which will be called the schooling society. He points out that. Defining education as schooling has a number of very harmful consequences. One is that we make it so expensive that most people in the world cannot now. Afford it and will at no time in the foreseeable future be able to afford it.

We have created a permanent shortage he first came on this awareness so to speak thinking about the underdeveloped countries his own interest has been very much. Latin America. So he did a lot of in investigating of educational policies in Latin American countries underdeveloped countries he discovered that they were spending an enormous part of their national budgets on education but that since this was all being funneled into schools when it had the effect I mentioned that it made education enormously expensive but it had this second effect. That whatever public money that that country decided to invest in education was almost entirely invested in the schooling of the children who could stay longest in school and naturally those were the children of the rich. So we have this situation in these poor countries that the as I say the children of the rich have

very much more public money not just their own daddy's money but public money. Invested in their schooling then the average child of the poor. Now the difference or the discrepancy is absolutely staggering. In most South American countries this discrepancy between the amount of public money. That gets invested in the kid who comes up so to speak at the top of the educational machine and the average of the kids at the bottom. Of his on the order of about three hundred fifty to one in one country Bolivia. It's fifteen hundred to one. So that's another consequence of defining education as schooling. You put it out of the reach of most people and the people whose reach you put it into are the people who are most privileged anyway. There's no greater myth then the one that increasing schooling is some kind of a great social equalizer or leveler.

There probably has never been a more powerful instrument for maintaining a class system or a power structure in any country than the schools. John hold marvels how schooling is used as an instrument which separates the classes. Schooling he says is used to teach the superiority of the school over the unschooled. I quote electric again. It is the one thing schools really teach all over the world and they teach it to everybody. Is the superiority of the school over the UN school and so all of these people who in their own eyes are dropouts. All these people who have failed to take advantage as they see it now have not only an illegal opportunity but a legal obligation can then blame themselves. So as you can see we have here an instrument which can separate a society and have chiefs and Indians or sheep and goats or high and low can.

Can in effect condemn. The vast majority of a society to a kind of permanent inferiority and convince them that it's their own fault. It's a soup per diffuser of political or revolutionary change making potential. Marvelous if you can get people to say as you can get them plenty of people to say in this country if I'd been smarter I'd have gotten a college if I'd been smarter if I'd done more work in school I'd have. I have had a chance for a good job. Now what what he points out of not defining education as schooling making it so expensive that no country can afford as much of it as its citizens want or think they need or are trained to think they need. He's not only true of poor countries it's also it's true of every country including the richest country which happens to be our country.

John Holtz sees American schools as an escape for children by keeping them off the streets. We spend thousands of dollars and years of time on each child just to make him functionally literate. But Mr Holt cites an example where successful teaching has been shown to work with much less time and tremendous cutbacks in cost. There are very large numbers of people in our society who do not want young people hanging around. The mothers want him out of the house the merchants want him off the streets and out of their stores the workers want to offer the job market. And so we need a place to put them. And so we put them in places called schools up to a certain point. We do this with compulsory school attendance laws and we hope that by that time they will all be so hooked on the superiority of the school over the UN school that after that sheer greed or fear or anxiety will keep them in a little longer and there they stay in the cell even after we unlock the door.

This is another one of the functions of. Schools and the third function of schools is one that following the language of that infamous selective service directive a few years ago we might call channelling or you might call it grading and labeling or you might call it soaring at any rate. The schools have become. The principal mechanism for deciding who goes where in society and who gets what. Now. This is a recent development. I don't say that anything like any society we now have in the world can avoid such mechanisms. But the point was that until fairly recently they were not in the schools. As Paul Goodman has pointed out many times at the turn of the century only about 6 percent of our young people finished high school and about a quarter of one percent went to college which means that this country which was in a very scientific

technical industrial society even then hard as that may be to believe was largely run by what we now call dropouts. There were other ways of learning all the things that people had to know in order to make a society like that go. And there were other ways by which that society decided who was going to do this who was going to do that who was going to get good jobs are not such good jobs or make a lot of money or make very little money. But this function this channeling sorting grading and labeling function has been dropped into the schools. Now the point that I'm coming to here is that the first of these two functions which a very large majority of people involved in schools really do believe in education. Human Growth human development is absolutely opposed incompatible irreconcilable with these other two. You cannot do the first

and the second and the third in the same place. You cannot make schools into jails and expect them to be places for much human growth and development. And he cannot get very much in the way of human growth and development in places where you're constantly sticking winner labels and loser labels on people. Let me say in passing that. It's enormously important that we understand how expensive and inefficient schools are. And that if we define the problem this is what's wrong with community control. This is what would be wrong if we stopped there. As long as we say how do we get better schools we've hardly scratched the surface of the problem. Amending pala fruited for example a Latin American educator spent some time in Brazil in the northeastern section of the country which is the drought area poverty stricken and

landlord ridden. And he went into village after village. And the economic and social level of these villages can be judged by the fact that the well usually belong to the landlord and the villagers had to pay for the water they got from the well which was usually contaminated in these villages. As I say poor demoralized without any supporting literate culture with no signs no posters no store windows no packages with letters on and no books no magazines no TV in other words in an on letter culture. He taught wholly illiterate adults to read and write at the level of their speech. This would be conservatively seventh eighth grade level. What we would call in our schools he did this in a period of months. I mean depended a little on circumstances but less than a year very often just a couple of months and generally spending

about $25 per person $25 to make a person functionally literate. Now by I don't know an Israeli scholar I came to this country to Cendant by his reckoning half of the people in our population aren't functionally literate now at least not in that definition. Now we spend thousands and thousands of dollars trying to teach literacy in schools with what results you know. What I'm saying is that there is the possibility of inventing new kinds of educational arrangements which would operate at one tenth one one hundredth the cost of the ones we've got and this is where I think that poor people should be spending some of their thought and energy and they're not going to do it as long as they're hooked in the idea that if we could only get control of our schools then we've got this problem licked at best school for most of the kinds of learning that take place is a very poor invention. It can be

improved. You know there are very much better possibilities. There is something wrong with competition in education where people are turned into losers psychologically through testing. John Holt questions the importance of differences between what we learn and what we actually know. When you turn our education into a race which is what essentially we do you have to have many more losers than winners that's how races work. The trouble with. That is that we I mean we really have to put about 100 loser labels on in our schools for any winner label we put on the trouble with putting loser labels on people is that they begin to feel like losers and think like losers and act like losers and human growth stops. There's no way to change that. Except to get out of the labeling business. So you see that remark about standards really did have a point. It wasn't just a

kind of topical wisecrack. I would really like to see schools and universities get out of the diploma credential granting business altogether. I mean if society has needs tests of competence and skill let them have them at the place where the skill or competence is to be used. The difference I think can be put very simply this way we require that people pass a driver's test in order to get a driver's license. Fair enough. We have not yet got to the point where we say you can't have a driver's license or you can't take a driver's test unless you're a certified graduate of a certified driver's training school. If you can learn to drive a car out in a pasture somewhere or get you're second cousins brother in law or some guy down the street to show you how to drive a car how he cares how you learned to do it long as you learn to do it. And this in a nutshell is the situation

that people like illiterate Goodman or I are interested in recreating one in which it's what you know that's important not where or how you learned it. John Holt proceeds to tell his audience an alternative route in college education. Very good example of a truly open university or school I think of two examples that I've been associated with one of them is quite far away it's See Doc in Cuernavaca which is a kind of mini university run by election of some close colleagues of his and displace has a resident faculty of people who live around Mexico City in Cuernavaca and visiting faculty come in I'm going down there for two weeks in February and they put out a catalog with all sorts of their course offerings and a little description. Paul Goodman has a nice one he is offering a course called simplification and then the descriptive paragraph underneath reads. Simplification. Will get this catalog and if they want to go down there to be there for two weeks while somebody is teaching a particular course

how they apply and if there's enough. Nobody says what credentials have you or what were your college board scores if you want to go there you go. At least as long as there's room and if you want to be there for two weeks that's OK if you want to stay for three months. All right if you want to stay there for 20 years I guess you could do that. And when you've heard what you wanted to hear I had as much talk as you want to talk. You don't get an exam you don't get a mark you don't get a credential you don't get a ticket. You say Thank you everybody goodbye and you take off well. The other very similar institution is much closer to home there may be more than than I know about the one I know of is the Beacon Hill free school and it has a kind of administrative base maybe a little bit in my office at least that's where the day phone is plugged into a lot of it stuff happens in the Charles Street meeting house and people who got some kind of idea that they want to share skill knowledge language craft something they want to discuss music whatever it may be offer a course and people who want to take it. You know it's in the catalog people who want to take it sign

up. It's a very good example of one of the kinds of open networks that talks about when John Holt was questioned whether or not school destruction would help the people he proposes instead an opening up of the schools to the people. Would you advocate the overthrow of the school system by violent means. And. Was. It depends on what violent means you mean and where they haven't got some kind of ideological position about violence or against it that is. Personally I call myself a believer in nonviolence so I don't fool myself that I have. The kind of discipline that let us say AJ must be had. I don't fool myself that I could keep my cool in certain situations as well as he would've but

at any rate this is a goal toward which I struggle. I don't press in on people I do think tactically. Well again we have to make a distinction between the destruction of property and causing injury or death to other human beings and it's a very important distinction. Generally speaking I don't feel that causing injury death. Pain anguish etc etc to other human beings is productive as they say in Washington I think is counterproductive. If somebody could in deed come to me with a scheme and say here's my idea in the middle of the night every school in the country is blown up and everybody would be so demoralized and nobody will build another school you know will be no school buildings so no school so I don't know if somebody can present to me a kind of foolproof scheme. I think about it my mind would be open to. Run don't know what this means. Well the school system is among other things for quite a few

like a million or million and a half people who have defined themselves as teachers as educators whose hold on life is. And self-respect is there to do that thing because maybe they don't know any other thing to do or we can do with these guys. They're not going to disappear in a puff of smoke. So tactically The question isn't useful to me. The metaphor of dissolving the schools of getting rid of them not by shutting them down or blowing them up but by opening by spreading them out by punching holes in the walls by getting the people who are shot inside and letting them out and getting the people who are shut outside and letting them in. It horrified me when I was at Berkeley that see all the signs on this campus no trespassing I don't when the world is this this is a state universities tax money goes into really doing telling the citizens of Berkeley and indeed the state of California that they can't even walk on this place.

So I think we've got to open up realists are generally more impressive in communication than idealists. Yet John Hall thinks that long range goals would be better thought off by the idealists than the realists who get hung up on today's problems. Now in our society people who talk about goals or ideals or visions or utopias are usually called idealists. And as you know it's not a complement. If you want to compliment somebody call a realist or better yet a hard headed or even hard nosed realist and the hard nosed realist says I don't mess around thing at all as vague Wiliam Stracke Di deal kind of stuff I got problems to solve and I got to take these problems as they come. You know I got to get things from the IN basket in the out basket. And indeed he does. But you can't be a realist unless you are also an idealist. You can't make sensible solutions to day to day problems unless you have some kind of vision or sense of what it is you really want. If I were to say to you

what's the best road out of Cambridge you'd say to me where do you want to go. If I said Oh I don't care where I go I just want the best road. You might think of a lot of things to call me you would call me a realist. Now our. Country our world wide society and it seems to me important to recognize that we have a world wide society and that with respect to what it seems to me important there is very little difference between one place and another whatever they may say about what they're doing. And this society is full of these so-called realists what C. Wright Mills once call crackpot realists who stagger and lurch from crisis to crisis. So I think we have to have. These kind of goals before we can think about tactics. John Holt concludes his talk proposing a children's liberation where children would have a choice as to when they enter the adult society. He states that

in today's society there is too much of an institution of childhood. Now the long run goal that I want to leave with what I've come to believe in is I will call children's citizenship. I have been calling it children's liberation but the word liberation seems to me to be being kicked around by too many people used in too many ways too many different reasons it's already loaded with different kinds of connotations many of them bad and it's not precise enough anyway so I like citizenship better. And what I am. Urging is that we abolish the institution of childhood. Now the fact of childhood the fact that some people are younger than others and that in the early years of our life we are smaller more ignorant more inexperienced or weaker. Many cases clumsier than we will be later. This fact is of course in biology it's as old as men but the institution of

childhood. The decision to divide human life into two quite separate hunks one called childhood and the other adult hood or something is historically a very recent one. Most cultures never did it Western culture seems to have done it. Roussel in fact seems to have gotten the thing going and I think this division that we may need between what we now call childhood and what we think of as the rest of life. This creation of a kind of artificial special supposedly protected but in fact exploited status called Childhood is socially and psychologically educationally a disaster. I think we have to admit that open the door so to speak to participation in society so the children can go through it if and when in proportion as they see feel ready. Very specifically Now I propose I urge

granting virtually all and I say that I only believe myself a little loophole if you were to say what exceptions can you think of I don't know that I really can think of any of the rights and privileges and the Parag of haves and the responsibilities and duties which we grant to adults. I favor pushing these down the age ladder as far as we can get. I want to make available to children available to choose if they wish any and all of the rights which we now think belong only to adults. And I mean the right to vote. I mean the right to own or to buy or sell property. I mean the right to work. I mean the right to privacy and the management of your own life. The right to travel in the right if you choose to live away from your own family or your blood family. If you need a guardian to choose on some basis of mutual

agreement one that seems right for you to direct your own learning. As I said it to manage your own life. Mind you I want this is a choice I'm not proposing that every 6 year old be fired out the front door of his house on his birthday and saying No never. You know like the old cartoon never darken this door again. I suspect that if this option was available what if. Children could enter adult society as they felt ready to. Not many children would stay on or not as long as they are now compelled to in a state of subservience dependence protection. And that's OK with me all I want is that they should have the choice I do not want to do what we now do which is to lock every child into a few relationships from which he has absolutely no escape. Northeastern University has brought. John Hope author lecturer and

educator. To aid program. What do we have. And where are we going. To views and opinions expressed on the preceding program are not necessarily those of Northeastern University or the stations. This week's program for you by Sheila Sylvester cooperation with the associates for human resources. Directed by Mark. Van Embry. With technical supervision by Bill. Decorative producer for urban conversation is Leonard. Urban confrontation has been brought to you by the Department of radio production at Northeastern University under the direction of Joseph R. thing. This program is one of the last in the series future productions have been suspended due to financial restrictions at Northeastern. We hope the past programs have been interesting and educational. And welcome your comments and opinions on the same. Address your remarks to urban confrontation Northeastern University Boston Massachusetts home to

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