On this subject, I probably have a better sense of the point at which
John Holt is driving at in this chapter than in most other ones. In the prehistory
article, I wrote that I had grown up on a homestead type operation. I
came from a large family and much of the work we did, we did by hand. I
can remember the first tractor arriving, when I was nine. Because I was
the smallest person who was big enough to do so, I can remember driving
it when I was nine.
“We constantly ask ourselves, in anxiety and pain, ‘What is
best for the children, what is right for the children, what should we
do for the children?’ The question is an effect as well as a cause of
modern childhood. Until the institution was invented, it would hardly
have occurred to anyone to ask the question or, if they had, to suppose
that what was good for children was any different from what was good
for everyone else.” (P. 39)
Given the society we live on, it would be difficult for a caring parent
to not consider these questions. However, I expect most home educators
have already come up with different answers for these questions than
most parents in our society do. The question that I had never really
given much thought to is, why would the answers for children be
different for them from the answers for adults. I believe that the only
fundamental difference between children and adults in this area is that
the child has less experience to work from. And from that perspective,
focusing on ‘book learning’ is going to be more of a hindrance to them
than a help.
“Throughout most of the life of man, much of his work has
been hard, arduous, even exhausting, and often dangerous. But much of
it required strength, skill, and judgement; much of it was work he was
proud to do, and to do well; and hardly any of it seemed pointless. …
But with increasing specialization, industrialization, and
centralization, work became more remote and more meaningless and
hateful. … More and more adults did not want children to do the work
they did and, indeed, often did not want to do it themselves.” (P. 40)
This is the subject from this book which I understand best. I grew up
doing the ‘hard’ work. Although I made the choice for different
reasons, choosing programming as a career enabled me to produce work
which I could be proud of. Even though the industry has tried to turn
programming into a mechanical process due to pressure from the
bureaucracies it serves, there are still places where you can be both
creative and elegant in your programming. Open Source has survived
decades for that very reason. Contributors can build what they want,
how they want.
“Much of the meaning of man’s world was destroyed, at least
for most men, when his philosophers invented causality. For this
invention put the meaning of the present reality into the past, a past
which itself became increasingly unknowable and meaningless as human
life changed ever more rapidly. The principle of causality tells us
that everything that happens is a result of, and therefore caused by
and determined by, something that happened before.” (P. 42)
At first, I wondered why the changing topic throughout the chapter. In
hindsight, I saw that everything he spoke of related to a child
understanding the world he lived in.
One term in college, I had an eccentric communications teacher. On our
final exam she gave us the choice of writing an essay on 1 of 3
Murphy’s Laws. The one I chose was, ‘If any man examine his problem long enough, he will see himself as part of the problem.’
My essay explained that so long as there was something he could do
about the problem that he wasn’t doing, that made him part of the problem.
Alternatively, if there really was nothing he could do about the
situation, then it ceased to be a problem because he could not solve
it. He would have to accept it as a fact of life and move on.
Causality allows people to be up to their neck in problems without them
giving a moment’s thought to how they contributed to creating the
situation. Abusive spouses/parents blame the stress at work, alcohol,
drugs, financial stress or the abused themselves. Their behaviour does
not change because they have identified an external cause and turned
the examination of the problem away from themselves.
“A child asks, why is the fire burning? Because someone lit
it with a match. … The child wanted to know the point of what he
could see around him, but could get no answer. For if everything is a
result of something in the past, nothing has any point.” (P. 42-43)
Every small child I have had the opportunity to watch is intensely
interested in determining the purpose of things. Often they come up
with their own purpose and may use it for a while to do a number of
things. Eventually though, if it is something they don’t see bigger
people using, they usually ask what it is and what it is for. From an
educational perspective, I believe that this is the biggest pitfall of
traditional schooling. When I went to school, eventually we had all
decided that what we were learning had no point except as a means of
getting to something else.
“People used to see the meaning of life in terms of purpose. … (Things happened) so that something else could happen.” (P. 43)
There are two things that come to mind. First, the hard work necessary
in earlier generations pushed children to learn to plan, to create
purposes and to carry them out. To a significant degree, having modern
tools and conveniences eliminate this inherent lesson. Second,
schooling methods which rely on curriculum significantly reduce the
opportunities for the child to plan and create purposes because that
has already been done for them. And that is what I believe is the primary flaw in the current public education model.
Recent Comments