Read free. Instead of Education: Ways to Help People Do Better, by John Holt, 2013.
Excerpt
This is a book in favor of doing—self-directed, purposeful, meaningful life and work—and against “education”—learning cut off from active life and done under pressure of bribe or threat, greed and fear.
It is a book about people doing things, and doing them better; about the conditions under which we may be able to do things better; about some of the ways in which, given those conditions, other people may be able to help us (or we them) to do things better; and about the reasons why these conditions do not exist and cannot be made to exist within compulsory, coercive, competitive schools.
Not all persons will give the word “education” the meaning I give it here. Some may think of it, as 1 once described it, as “something a person gets for himself, not that which someone else gives or does to him.” But I choose to define it here as most people do, something that some people do to others for their own good, molding and shaping them, and trying to make them learn what they think they ought to know. Today, everywhere in the world, that is what “education” has become, and I am wholly against it. People still spend a great deal of time—as for years I did myself—talking about how to make “education” more effective- and efficient, or how to do it or give it to more people, or how to reform or humanize it.
But to make it more effective and efficient will only be to make it worse, and to help it do even more harm. It cannot be reformed, cannot be carried out wisely or humanely, because its purpose is neither wise nor humane.
Next to the right to life itself, the most fundamental of all human rights is the right to control our own minds and thoughts. That means, the right to decide for ourselves how we will explore the world around us, think about our own and other persons’ experiences, and find and make the meaning of our own lives. Whoever takes that right away from us, as the educators do, attacks the very center of our being and does us a most profound and lasting injury. He tells us, in effect, that we cannot be trusted even to think, that for all our lives we must depend on others to tell us the meaning of our world and our lives, and that any meaning we may make for ourselves, out of our own experience, has no value.
Education, with its supporting system of compulsory and competitive schooling, all its carrots and sticks, its grades, diplomas, and credentials, now seems to me perhaps the most authoritarian and dangerous of all the social inventions of mankind’ It is the deepest foundation of the modern and worldwide slave state, in which most people feel themselves to be nothing but producers, consumers, spectators, and “fans,” driven more and more, in all parts of their lives, by greed, envy, and fear. My concern is not to improve “education” but to do away with it, to end the ugly and antihuman business of people-shaping and let people shape them selves.
This does not mean that no one should ever influence or try to influence what others think and feel. We all touch and change (and are changed by) those we live and work with. We are by instinct talkative and social creatures, and naturally share with those around us our view of reality. Both in my work as writer and lecturer, and among my friends, I do this all the time. But I refuse to put these others in a position where they feel they have no choice but to agree with me, or seem to agree. I want them to have the right, if they wish, to reject absolutely any and all of my ideas, as I would want and demand for myself the right to reject theirs. Also, I have learned that no one can truly say Yes to an idea, mine or anyone else’s, unless he can freely say No to it. This is why, except as an occasional visitor, I will no longer do my teaching in compulsory and competitive schools.
I do not mean to say, either, that no one should ever have the right to ask another to show what he knows or can do. Clearly, if someone wants to drive a car, fly a plane, or do something that might directly affect the lives or health of other people, then society, through some agent, has the right to demand that he show that he is able to do what he wants to be allowed to do. Indeed, even where health and safety are not involved, a person can often rightly be asked to show his competence. If he wants to play in an orchestra, sing in a chorus, act in a play, or join other people in any work they are doing, whether for money, pleasure, or other reasons, they have a right to ask him to show that he can do it well enough to help and not hinder them. But these demands are specific in time and place. They are not at all the same thing as saying to someone that just to be allowed to live in the world at all he must be able to show that he knows this or that.
By “doing” I do not mean only things done with the body, the muscles, with hands and tools, rather than with the mind alone. I am not trying to separate or put in opposition what many might call the “physical” and the “intellectual.” Such distinctions are unreal and harmful. Only in words can the mind and body be separated. In reality they are one; they act together. So by “doing” I include such actions as talking, listening, writing, reading, thinking, even dreaming.
The point is that it is the do-er, not someone else, who has decided what he will say, hear, read, write, or think or dream about. He is at the center of his own actions. He plans, directs, controls, and judges them. He does them for his own purposes — which may of course include a common purpose with others. His actions are not ordered and controlled from outside. They belong to him and are a part of him.
Introductory Page
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