Teaching: The Fear of Being Wrong

A shy, balding, 44-year-old private-school teacher who shuns educational jargon and rejects the notion that either life or learning can be forced into nifty patterns is quietly emerging as one of U.S. education’s most damning critics. In his 1964 book, How Children Fail, Teacher John Holt unreeled a series of classroom anecdotes to show that children—beset by teacher-imposed fear, confusion and boredom—merely grope for right answers, rather than understand. In a sequel, How Children Learn, to be published next month, he illustrates the spontaneous ways in which kids embrace knowledge before they enter schools, where they “learn to be stupid.”

Holt’s charge that “most children in school fail” is not the lament of an outside reformer concerned about the obvious failure of the nation’s ghetto schools. It is based on Holt’s minute note taking and sharp observation in 14 years of teaching above-average students in such selective sanctuaries as Aspen’s Colorado Rocky Mountain School, Cambridge’s Shady Hill and Boston’s Commonwealth. The son of an affluent Manhattan insurance broker, Holt’s own education included Switzerland’s elite Le Rosey, Phillips Exeter and Yale (’44). Once fascinated by physics as “a way of getting at the truth of things,” Holt’s confidence in schooling was first shaken when the atom was split. His Exeter teacher simply asked his class to pencil out of their textbooks the basic law, “Matter is neither created nor destroyed”—and all blithely did so without quiver or question. To Holt, this was clear evidence that his fellow students had no genuine interest in physics at all.

Lost Love. Holt’s basic complaint ever since has been that schools test, drill and grade children so often that they lose interest in the meaning of what is being taught, and schooling becomes a charade in which the students’ real aim is to escape embarrassment and pain. By contrast, before he gets to school, Holt argues, a child has “a love affair with life.” In fact, his attitude toward everything in the world about him is to “taste it, touch it, heft it, bend it, break it—and he is not afraid of making mistakes.”

Holt considers much of present schooling a degrading experience for both teachers and students. Children are compelled to work for “petty and contemptible rewards—gold stars, or papers marked 100, or A’s on report cards —for the ignoble satisfaction of feeling that they are better than someone else.” They fear a teacher’s displeasure, the scorn of their peers, the pain of being wrong. “Even in the kindest and gentlest of schools, children are afraid, many of them a great deal of the time, some of them almost all the time.”

The “tell-’em-and-test-’em” process, Holt claims, not only induces fear and discourages experimentation but leads to a concentration on answers rather than problems—and it is “dishonest and the students know it.” Teachers coach the kids for the tests and care more about “the appearance” of knowledge than for real understanding. “What would happen,” Holt asks, “at Harvard or Yale if a prof gave a surprise test in March on work covered in October? Everyone knows what would happen; that’s why they don’t do it.” In this “temple of worship for right answers, the way to get ahead is to lay plenty of them on the altar.” The whole system, insists Holt, convinces most students that “school is mainly a place where you follow meaningless procedures to get meaningless answers to meaningless questions.”

Beating the System. Holt has noticed that children react by employing clever stratagems to beat the system and find that right answer. They detect the way a teacher unconsciously leans toward the correct answer of several on the blackboard; a student looks confused or stays silent until the teacher keeps asking leading questions and almost answers himself; other students mumble answers, aware that the teacher is attuned to the right answer, and will assume it was given. They fence-straddle, avoid commitment, live for the teacher’s approving “yes.” It becomes so automatic, Holt writes, that when he selects a number between 1 and 10,000 and asks his students to pin it down by quizzing him, his own “no” to the student who asks if it is “be tween 5,000 and 10,000” brings groans, even though the no is as informative as a yes.

Holt argues that most testing should be dropped, since “the only answer that really sticks in a child’s mind is the answer to a question that he asked or might ask of himself.” Students should have to learn only those things that really interest them. This would not be much of a hazard, Holt suggests, since for most people, “the things we most need to learn are the things we most want to learn.” He thinks schools “could well afford to throw out most of what we teach, because the children throw out almost all of it anyway.” Holt would bring objects that interest kids into the classroom, take students out often to visit places that fascinate them. He would place older children in the same classes with younger ones, on the theory that “children are much better instructors of other children and are less threatening.” Holt’s system would be to avoid any system at all. A teacher’s role, he contends, is to “give children as much help and guidance as they need and ask for, listen respectfully when they feel like talking, and then get out of the way.”