Introduction to the foundations of American education Book

I'm not sure where to start about how short-sighted, bigoted, and damaging this book is.

Let me say two things first off: 1) I am not opposed to quality homeschooling. I came very, very close to pulling two of my kids out of school and teaching them at home. I fought hard to get a third one into a specialized school, and won. 2) I am not a fan of the current trends in public schools, and the Almighty Test curriculum, for it fails every student every time.

That said, this author is both right, and grossly wrong in his attitude toward education.

By the author's ideology, classical education demands are damaging to a child, that by "teaching" a child in a demanding process, he ceases to "learn" and is bored, turned off, and tuned out, and then fails to feel good about himself.

In some cases, yes, this is true, but is most often due to a variety of ills, from poor teachers, poor schools, social issues like poverty and lack of role models, and a poor, uninspiring curriculum.

Holt's idea is to abandon "teaching" and allow children to drift and explore whatever they want, however they want, for as long as they want, and that when the motivation to know and learn something strikes them, they will then sit down and learn it all on their own under their own motivation. If they wish to learn math, they will do it when they are ready and it makes sense to them. If they wish to take apart clocks all day for 3 years straight, then that's okay, because there are too many scholars in the world and the world needs more repairmen and factory workers and such, too (a frighteningly familiar political stance). There are only so many good schools and good jobs, and they should be reserved for those who will do best at them, and the rest of the students should just learn their place and be happy at what they do.

While what he basically touts is a Montessori approach, with a lot of Bettelheim and some Kanner thrown in, can you imagine an anarchical school approach? Without common societal norms, a society cannot function. If there is no standard level of reading, computation, and science, not only have you thus created a feudalistic peasant, but a stratified social ladder where upward mobility has become almost impossible.

I have no issue with his basic tenant: schools do not allow enough hands-on and experiential learning for students who do not do well in a straight-laced tied-to-the-desk read-and-spit-out curriculum. I'd love to see more of a Montessori method in public schools, but some group instruction needs to occur. Here is the lesson, now go forth and play while you process it. That is a method that requires very small classes, and very intensive teachers. Our schools are not willing to pay for that. My kids benefited tremendously from visiting every museum from Maine to Florida; they are amazed at kids who have never been to see anything.

But telling people to abandon traditional schooling because it's damaging children, to lie to school boards and send your children to relatives, anything to get them out of public schools, is wrong. Wrong to dump unwarrented guilt on parents, wrong to children, and wrong to society. Yes, public education is failing us, because we have ALLOWED it to fail us, replacing hands-on job training skills with computers as the answer to all our ills, but this guy is a nut job of highest caliber, and MY kid is not going to become a victim of anyone's social downscaling. Hands-on is what hobbies are for.

AVOID this jackass, and read someone worthy, such as Kozol, or Montessori.