Introducer: ... John Holt's work.
I'm sure that you have read "How Children Learn,"
"How Children Fail," "Teach Your Own."
You may have had an opportunity to see,
lots of times on tour, him talking on television or on the radio,
John Holt, who's probably the best-known, most vocal commentator on unschooling,
and particularly home-based education, in the country right now.
Also, I understand he's a magnificent cello player.
So maybe some germane questions about that would be refreshing and useful, as well.
Here's John Holt.
[Applause]
John Holt: Well, thanks very much.
First of all, we have to delete that "magnificent" part. [Laughter]
Someday maybe, but not yet.
How many people still remember those instructions about how to get to this – ?
[Laughter]
We'll have a run through again after the meeting, I think.
[Laughter]
We were talking about parking, and something popped into my head.
I was tempted to interrupt and say it, but I didn't, but I'll say it now.
What popped in was, "Parking is such sweet sorrow."
[Laughter]
Well, thank you for coming. Thank you for inviting me.
It's nice to be here.
I said I was surprised to see, among a number of good friends of mine,
a friend that I really didn't expect to see here.
And I think he probably wins the long-distance attendance record for this meeting.
Now, I'm John Holt from Boston,
but I'd like you to see John Boston from Escondido,
which happens to be near San Diego.
I couldn't believe he was here for this meeting.
Just wave your hand or say hi. [Laughter]
John Boston: Hi. [Applause]
John Holt: I want to talk about a number of things tonight.
And first of all though, I'm probably saying things
that you've heard me say before or read.
This young man has the right idea about how to dress for this meeting.
[Laughter]
Oh, but I guess, even before I get into what you might call the body of this formal address,
I want to ask just a few questions to locate the audience.
And perhaps one way to start would be by saying,
how many of you – I'm asking here for a "show of hands" response.
I wonder if we could remove that rattle.
John Holt: Thank you.
Experience has taught me the good things to bring with little kids,
and I love to bring bags of it – get it all out. [Laughter]
This young man is
divesting himself of his coveralls.
I think, very smart.
Now, how many of you are working with,
in one capacity or another, alternative schools?
All right.
Thank you very much.
And another question.
How many of you are now parents of school-aged kids?
Good.
All right.
How many of those of you
who are parents of school-aged kids are sending them to alternative schools?
All right.
How many of you are teaching them at home?
Big crowd.
This next one will be for those of you
who are parents of children who are not yet of school age
or expect soon to be parents of very young children.
How many of you are seriously considering
the idea of, I'd say, teaching them at home?
All right.
And how many of you are seriously considering
sending them to an alternative school
if there was one near you that was within reach?
Okay, good.
How many of you are teaching or otherwise
working with public schools or colleges or universities,
let's say, in one capacity or another?
Okay, thank you very much.
The grandparent question.
How many of you are grandparents of homeschooled or –
Good! – alternative school children?
Okay.
Grandparents are a very important ingredient in this situation.
There are homeschoolers who are having just about as much trouble with –
Small child: Hi. John Holt: Hi. How are you?
Child: Hi. Hi. John Holt: Hi.
A famous Jimmy Durante storyline:
"Everybody's trying to get into the act!" [Laughter]
There are folks who are having about as much trouble with grandparents
as they are with superintendents. [Laughter]
So, it's extremely important to have friendly and supportive grandparents
in this alternative-education movement.
Well, let me sum up in a very few words
what I have been saying and writing
about children and learning now for going on 25 years or more.
As a result of my experiences,
first of all as a classroom teacher working in just about every grade,
sometimes, say, K through G.
I did a little college and graduate school teaching,
not very much.
K through 12 might be a little more accurate.
But as a result of, on the one hand,
working with children in more or less conventional classrooms,
and on the other hand, spending a lot of time
with babies, infants, little children –
first my sisters',
then the children of other people, little children in nursery schools,
and since then, many children of homeschooling parents –
I came to understand something – certainly to believe something
about young human beings of which I am more certain
than I am, I think, about anything in the world –
and that is that children are,
by nature and from birth, or perhaps before birth –
though I have no testimony to offer about that –
natural learning creatures.
There is nothing that they want more.
They have a desire – more than a desire, a passion –
to find out as much as they can,
to make as much sense as they can of the world around them,
or as much of that world as they experience,
to become competent and skillful in it,
to do things in it, to play a useful part in it.
This is a truly biological instinct or drive.
It is as strong as or stronger –
at least for children who are not in famine condition –
it is stronger than the desire to eat.
Those of you who are mothers
or attentive and observant fathers of very young children
will have seen this happen many times,
that a tiny infant, babe in arms,
hungry with his little stomach hurting –
which is what happens when they are hungry –
and eating, feeding, nursing, will stop eating if something interesting happens.
If somebody comes into the room, if there's a noise,
if there's some kind of a change in the situation,
this hungry little teeny creature
will stop eating and look around to see what's going on.
There is probably not a mother in the world who hasn't seen this happen.
And how we can persist in talking about children not being interested in learning
or needing to be taught to learn or whatever it is,
is just absolutely beyond me.
Anyway.
They are extremely good at this –
this learning, this making sense of the world.
They're much better at it than we are, or than all but some microscopic fraction.
If by some accident of who knows what – science fiction –
were all of us to be dropped into,
say, the interior of Japan or some exotic part of the world
where nobody spoke a word of English,
where everybody was speaking some language we had never heard of,
it's no mystery to us which of us here in the room
would be talking that language first –
the little guys would.
All of them would be talking it.
Most of them talking it fairly soon.
Most of us – some of us – big ones –
would be struggling along in a kind of a halting way.
And a lot of us would never learn any of it.
Many of us would never know it.
Just the problems of learning something totally new without any assistance with it.
No, they get it first.
But we all know that when we think about it.
They're extremely good at it.
Well, another way of saying what I've come to believe
is that learning is not the product of teaching.
Very difficult for me as a paid teacher over a number of years to get that into my thick head.
I was very good at that whatever you call that thing that goes on in classrooms.
I was probably a good example of what's called a gifted teacher –
motivating, clever at devices, good at explaining,
all that stuff you're supposed to do.
It took me a long time to figure out that this was not doing anybody any good,
and most people harm.
Very hard for us to give up the picture of learning
that it's like pouring something out of a full container into an empty one.
It's this assumption which lies at the root of absolutely everything
that's done in schools and under the name of education.
And it's a hundred percent wrong.
I mean, not even 98% wrong – a hundred percent wrong.
That is not what happens.
Learning is the product of the curiosity, the interest, the enthusiasm, the activity,
the ingenuity, the imagination, the thinking power of the learner.
Now, there are things that outsiders, whether grown-up or whatever,
can do to assist this process, and I'll talk about them in just a few minutes.
But the work is done by the learner.
These little people are not empty receptacles into which knowledge is poured.
They are not sponges soaking up knowledge.
They are not little lamps to be lighted, as somebody else likes to say.
They are not any of these metaphors.
They are, in the most strict and literal sense of the word, scientists.
The things that they do to create knowledge out of experience, which is what learning is,
are exactly the same as the things that the people we think of as scientists
do in their laboratories.
When they do them, perhaps, there are some differences.
They are probably a good deal less self-conscious.
A scientist will probably have a pretty clear idea of what she or he is looking for,
whereas little kids are not doing it in that way.
Nevertheless, they do the same things.
The first is they observe, they take in data.
And the second is that they wonder about it.
And the third is that they ask themselves questions about it.
The second and third are pretty close.
And then, they begin to make up theories, invent theories, maybe that the wind blows
because the trees are moving their branches, which, on the face of it, is not a bad theory.
And then, they test these theories with observation, maybe with questions,
maybe with experiments, some of which we may welcome and others of which we may not.
In this connection, I think of the most recent visit to my house of Anna van Doren,
of whom you may have read in "Growing Without Schooling."
Anna's going to be four in June.
We were in the apartment.
Her mother and I were doing various kinds of work.
Her little guy seemed not to be getting in any physical trouble.
And when the time came to leave, I have a door with one of those push-button locks on it.
And as I was leaving, I reached in to push the lock, and my thumb fell into a hole.
Well, this feels kind of funny.
And I looked, and the push lock wasn't there, and it was sitting on the floor.
I said, "Anna, you've taken the lock out of my doorknob!"
It took me about four or five minutes to figure out how to get it back in.
Children tend to like to do experiments right up into the point where no further
experimenting is possible, I guess you could say, up to the disaster limit.
And it's very good on learning, but it's sometimes tough on the lab. [Laughter]
So these experiments are not always welcome, but nevertheless, they do them.
And then, as a result of what they find out, they give up their theories, modify them, change them.
Let's see.
Has the GWS gone out which talks about my little friend Helen saying, "gocks?"
Or is that 44?
Maybe you haven't received it yet. Woman: Yeah.
Woman: It just arrived. John Holt: All right.
So here's Helen Vandoren.
Actually, her full name is Helen Maria-Holt Vandoren.
I had two schools and one baby named after me.
One of the schools is defunct, but the baby is fine. [Chuckles]
[Laughter] At any rate.
Helen has been, for some time, using the word "gocks" to say socks.
And this is a mystery to us because she knows how
to say the sound "sss," and says it in lots of other connections.
Indeed, it was one of the first sounds she said,
and it had multiple meanings, including that she wanted to nurse.
We simply could not imagine where she got the idea of saying gocks.
She never heard anybody say it, obviously.
No imitation.
Her sister had never said it.
If you think of the way sounds are produced in the mouth and throat, S and G are not at all alike.
It's not a small difference.
At any rate, she must have had some kind of theory about why she wanted
to do it this way and not some other way, and it was a theory.
Just the other day, oh, I think maybe not more than about three or four days ago,
we were all in the office, and it was time for the Vandoren family to go home, which means rounding
up the kids' clothes, shoes, socks, putting them on them – an operation you know well.
And we had Helen sitting on the floor getting ready to put her socks on.
And she looked at them thoughtfully, and said, "Zzzzocks.
Zzzzocks."
I said to Mary, "Have you ever heard her say that before?"
Mary said, "No, first time."
Well, I saw Mary just a couple of days ago and said, "How is the 'zocks' going?"
Has she said "gocks" since?
"No," she said.
In fact, she's very quickly converted the "zocks" to "socks," and that's what it is now.
Now, why that difference, which didn't make any difference to her before,
all of a sudden did make a difference, I don't know,
you don't know, she doesn't know, we'll never know – except everybody does it.
All of a sudden, whatever theory of language it was that caused her to say "gocks," suddenly
seemed unsatisfactory, didn't work, didn't fit – so now she says "socks."
Well, okay.
A very small example which we could multiply by the billions,
and it's what these little people do.
They are observers, makers, testers, changers of theories.
They are, in the strictest sense of the word, scientists.
And, at least as far as learning goes, all they ask is to be allowed to continue to do this.
Now, what we can do – I come back to the point about what can adults
do to help? – because we are, in many ways, an essential part of this process.
I don't claim children would ever learn to figure out how
to talk if they were surrounded by deaf-mutes.
It wouldn't happen.
What we can do, what we do in our normal daily lives before we start thinking about education
or coerced learning is we provide children with – as much as we can – access to the world around
them – by which I mean not just places, places that we go, places at the house, the kitchen,
the yard, the neighborhood, the stores, wherever we go, but also the world of people, the world
of experience, actions, talk, materials, books, records, tools, people doing things, human life.
Now, what we can do for these little guys is to provide them with as much
as we reasonably can – I say reasonably – I'm not saying you have to make your whole
life into a field trip – as we reasonably can with access to our own lives as we lead them.
If you live in the woods, that means the woods.
If you live in downtown city, that means downtown.
I mean, wherever we live, whatever we do, as far as we can, we open up that world to children –
let them see it, let them be part of it – and we answer their questions
when they have them – and they have lots of them.
Some of you will have discovered that when your children are getting on --
Small child: Hi.
John Holt: Oh, hi again.
Child: Hi, hi.
John: Mm-hmm. John: Well, when they're getting on to a year
and a half, when they're beginning to sneak up under – into speech –
It will be a place where they'll point to
all kinds of things and make some kind of insistent noise: "Mmm mmm."
The tendency for a lot of people is to think that they're saying that they want that.
They point to the clock, they point to this, and they go,
"Mmm mmm," and people say, "No, you can't have it."
They don't want it.
They want to know what it's called.
They want to hear the name of it.
Simple as that.
I say simple.
It took me quite a number of years to figure it out. [Laughter]
So they ask questions – and we can answer their questions when they
ask them – give help if and when it is asked for, and not too much at a time,
and give a kind of demonstration just by our being there and our doing things – give
the kind of demonstration of various sorts of adult skill and competence,
and pay a kind of affectionate, respectful attention to what they're doing, without making
some huge, big deal of it, and give them a kind of moral support in this adventure of trying to make
sense of the world – and the best way to give this moral support is, in fact, to trust them,
to understand that they are, indeed, passionately eager to learn about the world, extremely good
at doing it, and will, in fact, do it – in their own way, in their own time.
Not to say they're going to know everything about everything,
but nobody does – and that's how we can help.
But ours is a very minor role, and theirs is the major one.
Okay, well, I'm preaching to the converted, I know. [Chuckles]
If you weren't already half convinced of this, you wouldn't be here.
But I want to say it anyway.
All right, now, the next part of my talk is about something different.
Much of this conference has to do with the future,
and I want to talk a little bit about the future of homeschooling and the near-run future – the
next 10 years or so – and by extension, to some degree, of alternative schools.
We are – from a legislative –
[A woman comes forward.] Yes?
Woman: Is it possible to ask you questions before you go on to the next –?
John: Yeah, yeah, sure.
Woman: I see. Okay.
John: Now, you don't have all these electronics at your disposal,
so you've got to speak up – and not too fast.
Woman: Okay, I don't have a loud voice, I don't know whether it carries.
You certainly are convincing.
I agree with what you say that we are not going to convince.
On that part, that I'm going to disagree in terms of people connected with you.
But I wonder what you have to say or how you feel about what I believe is
a necessity to transmute this imperative.
And this is perhaps something that can be picked up.
I agree children aren't all the same, God knows.
But we also need, I think, some input in terms of direction, guidance and exposure,
and input in regard to the heritage that is [inaudible].
John: All right, that's a good question.
Woman: Okay. John: I'm familiar with it.
I've heard it.
I'd love to answer it, perhaps just take out very,
very briefly now, and we can go back to it later and spend more time on it.
It's extremely important, in the first place,
in thinking about these things, to use language accurately.
And we really have to understand the difference between exposure and coercion.
Now, there's a big difference between putting –
I mean, we just went out to dinner.
The Baskins, and I and Heather, we just had dinner together.
And there was the menu, and there were things on different people's plates,
and we would say, "Here are some capers in front of my veal."
And so we said to Heather, "Would you like to try caper?"
Heather did not want to try a caper.
Well, that's exposure.
There are different kinds of food there, and we say, "Would you like to try some?"
"No."
"Okay."
"No."
That's not at all the same thing as putting some capers in front of Heather and saying, "You can't
leave the table until you've eaten them," or, "You can't have any dessert," or holding
her by the nose and pushing one in, which is exposure as it is practiced in formal education.
There's no exposure unless you can't say no to it.
If you can't say no, it's coercion.
Really very, very, very important to understand that difference,
and it's difficult, apparently.
Now, I'm just going to assert for the moment that I am opposed to all forms
of coerced – or all attempts to coerce learning.
I meant to say after I had said that learning is not the product of teaching,
I meant to say that teaching which has not been asked for by the learner –
virtually without exception – impedes and prevents learning,
and before very long will kill most of the desire for learning itself.
I will say that forced learning is faked learning.
I had the great traditions of culture, etc., etc., etc., etc., etc., etc. –
by which I suppose we mean Shakespeare or whatever – thrust at me.
I was clever about playing the school game.
I could do that trick.
And so I got my A's and B's,
and went to high-powered schools and colleges, and so forth.
Most of the people who are told to play this trick cannot play it,
don't play it well, fail to play it altogether.
We have to understand,
we're going to probably have to agree to disagree about this,
because nobody is going to be –
nobody who walks into a room believing in some kind of forced learning
is going to walk out of the room not believing in it
because they've heard me preach this little mini-sermon about it.
But I want you to be very clear about –
And I should say, by the way,
that I suspect that the number of homeschoolers or alternative school people
who really agree with me is probably well under 50%.
I mean, I think this is a minority view, even among homeschoolers.
You don't have to believe what I just said to be a homeschooler or run an alternative school.
But I'm the one who's sitting up here and that's what I think. [Laughter]
{I think - you see}
If it is part of the cultural tradition, it is there.
Children are very interested in what is there,
and they're extremely interested in what is most interesting to us.
And Shakespeare is not interesting to adults,
except a handful of English teachers who make a specialty of teaching,
and a fairly small handful of actors
who every so often take a shot at producing one of his plays.
It usually loses money.
But other than that, people don't read it.
All right, I don't want to go on too long [inaudible].
But what people really care about – a good example is music.
There are not very many households in the United States
where people read Shakespeare just for the sheer, solid pleasure of doing it.
They get this.
I've just been reading some of the plays.
So, some of the tragedies are lovely.
But I don't know anything in the world less funny than Shakespeare trying to be funny.
Mmm!
Maybe someday, some really bold soul will cut out those ponderous exchanges of puns.
It will be a great day for the Bard when that happens.
I mean, they rolled in the aisles when he wrote this stuff, and he knew that.
He was a practical man in the theater.
He put it in because he knew it would make people laugh.
It doesn't make people laugh anymore, it just makes you turn the page.
But there are hundreds and hundreds of thousands of families
where music is a central part of their lives,
as it's a central part of mine, and in those families,
very, very few children are indifferent to music.
Or let's say gardening if gardening is your passion – or whatever it may be.
Children can tell from what we do what sorts of things make the most difference to us.
And those are the things, generally speaking, that interest them most,
unless they've gotten into some rebellion kick,
and that doesn't happen much in homeschooling.
So I'll ask you to let me leave it at that for the time being.
No, I do not think this body of whatever it is,
or this cultural tradition, or whatever it is, needs to be,
or indeed can be, forced into people under pressure by coercion.
If you really love Shakespeare,
go see Shakespeare plays where they're performed,
and take your kids with you,
or even get a bunch of people together in your neighborhood and town,
and put on an amateur production, and let your kids be part of the operation.
In fact, if you really love Shakespeare, you ought to be doing it anyway –
or whatever it is.
If you love music, make music.
If you love gardening, grow a garden.
If you love camping in the woods, go camping in the woods.
If you love – I don't care what it is.
But children sense that the world they get from the things that we care most about.
All right.
{Let me - } I don't mean by what I say to imply that I've been sort of diverted or something.
{That's very -}
It's a very central issue, and I'm glad you asked -
I'm glad you raised that point.
The homeschooling movement is in the middle of
an extremely interesting and important period
of political and legislative change – and judicial, too, I would say.
Ten years ago, five years ago, I think you could have said accurately
that the great majority of people who were teaching their own kids,
and not just underground, not just hiding out, were doing it -
were making use of what you would have to call
loopholes in the law of one kind or another.
Things which had been put in the law not with homeschooling in mind,
but with something quite different.
In many places, in many states around the country,
the compulsory school attendance laws had some kind of a clause in them
about kids have to go to school or get some equivalent kind of instruction or education.
Now, this clause was not put into the law to make things easy for homeschoolers,
but to take care of children who,
for mostly medical reasons, were not able to go to school.
And they were probably thinking of retarded or emotionally disturbed children
who couldn't go to school because
the schools didn't want them, or couldn't handle them.
So they wanted to make some kind of legal alternative.
The farthest thing they could have had from their minds,
the legislatures, when they put these clauses in,
was that people who had the choice of sending their kids to school,
people whose kids were, as they say, normal,
would decide that they didn't want to send them to school
so they could teach them themselves.
Nevertheless, there was that loophole.
And for a while, in lots of places, people were slipping through.
The other great loophole was the private school loophole
where many states in the country in which private schools were not regulated by law
or not regulated by the compulsory school attendance law –
Now, that was not done to make homeschooling possible.
It was done for quite other sorts of reasons.
When legislators decided that private schools would not be regulated,
it was to a large degree because private schools had their own police mechanisms,
they - what you would call a non-alternative independent or private schools.
The rich folks' private schools have
their own National Association of Independent Schools,
Midwestern Association of Independent Schools –
New England –
I mean, they have their own inspectors, and their own checkers-uppers-on,
and so forth, and so forth.
So, they were not sort of flying free in the air.
Also, legislators, I think, tend to operate on the assumption
that rich people know what they're doing – you know?
They say, "Private schools are expensive,"
or at least they used to be thought of that way,
and that's what legislators were thinking when they decided not to try to regulate them.
And they said, "If you've got 50 or a hundred fairly wealthy families,
and they're all satisfied with the school,
chances are something has got to be going on there.".
Rich people are not terribly innovative, as a general rule. [Laughter]
John: "And in any case, since they're rich, even if their kids goof up,
they'll always be able to take care of them,
so we don't have to worry about their being on welfare.
So generally speaking, we can let them alone."
But the farthest thing in the world they had in mind
was that this would be used in the way that homeschoolers started to use it.
Well, that's where we were roughly five or six years ago,
we were all happily crawling under this fence, as it were,
pulling up the barbed wire, and slipping under the bottom strand
[chuckles] – and it was very nice while it lasted.
I mean, there was no regulation, and no tests, and no papers to fill out.
Some states built a one-page something or other
about "my home is a private school," and it was very nice,
but it perfectly obviously wasn't going to last.
It was obvious to me that it wasn't going to last.
It could not be made to last – that as we got bigger and stronger,
and got to be heard more of in one thing or another,
that people, the courts, the public schools themselves,
the legislatures were going to begin to pay attention and say,
"Hey, what about this?
Well, roughly about two or three years ago, we began to see – I say roughly –
it differs rom state to state – but we began to see the beginnings of attempts –
in some cases in the form of laws,
and in some cases in the form of administrative regulations –
attempts to make homeschooling illegal or virtually impossible –
in Maryland, and Georgia, and in other states – for a while in California,
which had been one of our chief homeschooling states –
the authorities began to try to think of ways of making this very difficult.
And a couple of years ago, we at Growing Without Schooling
certainly felt that the homeschooling movement was in a kind of fight for its life.
Well, I don't mean to say that the fight isn't over,
but in fact, none of those attempts to rule out homeschooling, stamp it out,
make it impossible, none of them succeeded.
In no place has a legislature written a kind of anti-homeschooling law in that sense.
We've been under lots of pressure, lots of pressure to do so.
{What they did start doing is}
I should say a similar thing was happening in the courts in a number of states
in which people had been homeschooling through the private school option.
The courts began to say a home all by itself can't be a private school.
That was our situation in Virginia before the law was passed there.
So the loopholes were being closed up.
The fence was being repaired so that animals couldn't get up through the bottom.
But at the same time, the legislatures began to put some kind of a gate in the fence.
One way or another, they began to try to legitimize
homeschooling, to make it explicitly legal, and say,
"Yes, people can teach their own kids if they do this, that, or the other."
Since then, there've been a considerable number of these kinds of laws passed.
I lose track.
In GWS 44, I think – in fact, when we sent it to press,
we said there were 14 states considering such laws.
I believe that since then, at least three of them, maybe four –
Arkansas, Wyoming, New Mexico, state of Washington –
we had a very tough time in the state of Washington –
have passed one or another kinds of legislation
making homeschooling explicitly legal with this, that, or the other condition.
And we expect many more states to do that.
We'll probably see more even before the end of this legislative session.
And I would hazard a rough guess
that we'll continue to see half a dozen or a dozen states a year doing this,
and dozens, perhaps, to many a year.
And I would say that, oh, within five years, we will probably see very few states
in which there is not some explicit reference to homeschooling in the law.
Now, I consider this an extraordinarily important move forward, even though,
in many cases, I'm not happy with the qualifying restrictions.
Many of them talk about the use of standardized achievement tests.
Though that is not a problem for probably 80% of homeschoolers,
it can be a very serious problem
for people whose children are late starters in reading, or in whatever else it may be,
or happen not to like arithmetic, or be a little afraid of it, or something.
And I think it's a very important step forward
that legislators are beginning to see homeschooling as a legitimate activity,
rather than some kind of weird, strange, outlaw idea.
Now, what I think we have to do, along with getting more of these kinds of laws passed –
and we'll probably be 10 or 15 years at it – is educating the legislatures,
and particularly the individual legislators –
away from rigid curriculums, standardized achievement tests,
all kinds of attempts to reduce human beings to numbers.
I think a lot of them are ready to say now, in fact,
"Well, yeah, people can teach their own kids
if they do it just the way the schools do it."
But that's obviously not satisfactory.
But we have to get them to see – in one way or another,
to get into law at least some of the spirit
in which I talked to you at the beginning of this meeting –
some feeling that there are other ways besides the rigid curriculums of schools,
and the endless little numerical tests.
There are other ways of observing and taking note of learning,
of observing children's growth in the world, and so forth.
Now, this is already being done, of course, in some places.
But I would like to see, for example, something in the law,
some kind of amendment somewhere down the line
saying that parents and educational authorities, in evaluating the learning of children,
may use, but shall not be required to use or restricted to using,
standardized and other numerical tests.
I don't think very many legislatures would pass such a resolution if we introduced it tomorrow.
But I think if we do the right sorts of things,
that it's very possible that a great many of them
will do so by, let's say, a decade from now.
I speak of educating legislators, and I'm not at all thinking of lobbying groups.
What I have in mind is that homeschoolers –
and also, again, insofar as they are encumbered by the law –
alternative schoolers must get to know their own legislators personally,
individually, meet them, go see them,
take their children, become a kind of pen pal,
write them occasional letters saying,
"Thought you might be interested to hear what my kids are up to recently.
The other day we went,
and my eight-year-old child took 25 books out of the library,
which is more books than most school kids read in a year, or two, or five."
We have got to begin to get into a kind of continuing communication with these people,
so they begin to understand, as we understand,
how this organic, natural learning takes place.
And of course, if bad bills get introduced, of course,
we all have to hustle down to the state capitol and do that number –
and obviously, we've been very good at it.
But that's not all.
I mean, "I don't write my legislator except when some kind of legislation
is coming up that I'm worried about,"
this doesn't seem to me to be enough.
I really think we have to try – as far as we can –
we have to try to bring these people into the homeschooling family –
and it is a family – a collection of families.
So I see this as the main part
of the future of homeschooling in the next decade or so.
I think alternative schools can play a very important part in this –
as indeed the Clonlara School and the Santa Fe Community School
and a number of others already have –
by providing a kind of support for homeschooling families.
I don't know if Santa Fe was the first school to do that.
It was the first one I knew about that was doing it – but anyway.
And by now, we have a number of independent alternative schools around the country,
which not only have their own buildings and classes –
there's a physical school there in place –
but they also provide a kind of legal and educational support to homeschooling families.
Many of you might be on the other end of the country.
I would like to see a much larger network of these kinds of schools.
We now have – oh, I guess around the United States – several dozen.
But we'd be in a very much stronger position if we had many hundreds of them.
Let's see here.
Excuse me a sec here.
Amazing machines here.
I think these small tape recorders –
and they now have really quite astonishing sound quality –
are one of the great educational tools of our time.
And for all the talk about computers,
I think this is a gadget which has many other kinds of possibilities,
which I don't think we have done as much with as we might.
Like typewriters, this is a machine which is really fascinating to a lot of children –
the experience of saying things into it and then hearing them back –
very strange, very powerful.
All right. Now, let's see.
So, I was talking about a very large network –
hundreds, thousands – of alternative schools,
independent schools around the country – in some cases, public schools –
because there are public schools that also offer this kind of support.
The number is not very large, but it's also growing.
All right, now.
I want to switch to a different – in the last part of this talk,
to a look at the future in a quite different sense –
not the future of homeschooling, or the future of alternative schooling,
but the future of the world – particularly of this country.
First thing I have to say is that everybody who talks about the future is guessing.
Nobody knows.
There is no future.
It doesn't exist.
It isn't as if we're riding along on a train and 20 miles down the track
there was a station that we were going to pull into,
and it was just a matter of talking about what it was.
The future isn't there.
We make it as we live.
{Most of the people}
I'm extremely skeptical, I have to say,
of most of the people who are making a living –
and quite a lot of them are, and they're living a lot fancier than I am –
talking about this future.
And mostly what they do is they find some kind of a graph that goes up to 1985,
and then they just keep running it up the page.
Well If predicting the future were that easy, we'd all be billionaires,
because we'd just look at the stock market quotations,
and see what stock had been going up for the last week, and then buy it.
The problem is the graph doesn't always keep going up.
There are an awful lot of high-powered people in this country connected with the oil business,
connected with the government, connected with the defense industry
who made it their business to know what was going on in the world of oil.
And none – not one, not a single one of these people –
predicted what came to be called the "oil crisis – when was it, ten years ago?
Nobody predicted it.
And nobody, with a few possible exceptions –
maybe Amory Lovins, maybe a few conservationists –
once we were in the middle of that terrible crisis –
predicted that in five or less than 10 years we were going to be out of it,
because we would smarten up and start saving energy.
The oil crisis came by surprise and went by surprise.
So, it's not easy.
One of the big future books that's –
boy, I wish I had 10% of the money that it's made –
talks about the Sun Belt and the motion of industry,
the economic flight from the North to the Sun Belt,
and it says this is a major trend in American history,
and it's irreversible, and it's going to continue.
We can just see more and more of this happening.
Well, I get a certain wry amusement out of this.
I come from the old Frost Belt up there in New England,
and we are the most – as regions go at the moment –
probably the most economically prosperous region of the country.
We have the lowest unemployment rate.
My home state of Massachusetts has
the lowest unemployment rate in any industrial state.
My home city of Boston has what they call an office vacancy rate of 1%.
Of course, Houston has about 30%.
So, the old Frost Belt isn't doing too bad.
Right now what we're worried about is drought.
But that's going to be a big problem for the whole country.
Very, very hard.
But there are some indicators.
Nothing is certain.
There are some indicators that give us, I think,
a pretty strong indication of the way some things are likely to go.
There are really big, big, deep sort of trends,
and I want to talk about just one of them tonight.
[Coughs] Excuse me.
The Boston Globe, our local bladder, [laughter] is a kind of nice paper.
I don't know how much news is in it,
but it has a lot of good writers,
and they have quite a lot of fun.
So, it's an entertaining sheet, and not bad, as these things go.
It had an article a year and a half ago, maybe,
about wages in different parts of the world – industrial wages.
And there's a map, a nice big-page article.
And they were comparing a verage hourly industrial wages
in the world's manufacturing countries.
Now, economists, I guess, could spend the whole weekend
talking about how you achieve these figures,
and how you balance out this versus that,
how you figure out benign climates versus cold climates,
and what do you do about fringe benefits,
and this, that, and the other.
And I'm going to accept those figures more or less as they were given to me.
And what it said was that the United States had the highest average hourly industrial wage.
They didn't say what is industrial and what isn't –
not to get into that.
And it was something like $10.77 an hour.
And there was Canada pretty close behind,
and Switzerland, and then a bunch of the Western European nations –
$8.00 or so – $7.50.
And then, Japan, $5.50.
And then Mexico, Brazil, some down to the $2.00, $2.50 range.
And then we got down to what they call the Pacific Rim nations:
Taiwan, Hong Kong, South Korea, a couple of others maybe,
and these were running $1.25, $1.50 an hour.
And then India –
the figure they gave was $0.39 an hour –
and Sri Lanka – which us old cats used to call Ceylon –
near India – was $0.21 an hour.
Now, those are very,
very, very significant figures their legs will carry them –
At one point in the article, they quoted a young woman
who's working in one of these new electronic shops in Hong Kong
where the American computer manufacturers
are fleeing just as fast as their legs will carry them –
those that are still in business at all, I should add.
And that little future balloon went down in a big hurry,
and has yet further to go, I will add.
That revolution lasted about two or three years.
But someone was talking to this young woman
who's earning $1.22 an hour, making whatever it is,
and just happy as a clam to be enjoying this wage
which was probably ten times, five times higher
than anything they had seen a decade before.
And she said, "Of course, we know it's only going to be a matter of time
before the jobs all go to someplace like Sri Lanka,
where they only have to pay $0.21 an hour.
And the picture for me is of jobs as a kind of great flock of migratory birds,
which fly from one place to another
and settle down and deposit a certain amount of wealth there while they're there,
but soon they'll take off again
l ooking for some other place where the wages are even lower.
And that's not a bad figure of speech.
We saw that happen in this country when the northern industries –
this was certainly true of the mills in New England –
went down south where they could get non-union and cheaper labor.
With the modern mobility of capital in the multinational corporation,
jobs do in fact tend to – many of them anyway –
are pretty free to migrate to where the wages are lowest,
and that's where they're going to roost.
Now, one of the things that struck me about that article was that nothing was said about China.
And I found myself wondering,
"Hey, where do the Chinese fit into this picture?"
Why, they're probably under a dollar an hour, $0.50 an hour maybe, I thought.
At any rate, it had to be a pretty low figure.
Under a billion people in that country.
Recently, my question was answered more or less reliably by another article,
this time in the "Christian Science Monitor," and this wasn't about economics at all,
it was about a British rock group called "Wham,"
which has just gone to China and caused a great upheaval of various kinds there.
But like all things Western, it's very popular with the young people in the new China.
The article described a young Chinese workman standing in line for five or six hours –
just like his American counterparts – to buy a ticket to hear Wham.
And it said in passing that he had to pay – for this ticket –
he had to pay 5 yuan – parenthesis, $1.75 – or 2 days' wages.
Two days' wages.
If you figure an 8-hour day, we're talking about just a little bit more than $0.10 an hour.
And there are a billion people over there,
most of whom are ready and eager to work at that kind of wage.
Now, this is bound to have a lot to say about not only our future,
but the future of all of what we think of
as the highly-developed wealthy countries of the North Atlantic, let's say, community.
Given, again, the mobility of capital,
there is no possible way that the wealthy countries of the world
are going to be able to employ their populations at $10 or $9 or $8 or $7,
or for that matter Japan, $5.50 an hour.
They're not going to be able to do it.
In other words, as nearly as one can say anything about the future,
it is certain that the rich countries of the world
are going to get a lot less rich, as we have defined rich.
And what the consequences of that may be, we've talked for a long time –
there could be whole conferences –
I hope someday here will be if there are not any yet –
about what this really means.
None of the people who were running for election in the last campaign –
even those who talk glibly about new ideas –
none of them seem to have the faintest idea that this is going on,
or what this means, or what they might do with it.
This is going to call for a lot of hard thinking.
To say just a very short thing about us,
I'd say we're going to have to rediscover thrift in this country.
We're going to have to discover that efficiency is not the same thing as making a lot of stuff.
We're going to have to rediscover –
learn how to do the most with the least.
Old New England motto: "Wear it out –"
Let's see, no.
"Use it up, wear it out, make it do, do without" –
the old Yankee saying.
Or old Ben's, "A penny saved is a penny earned."
We're going to rediscover the truth of that.
We're going to start learning how to darn socks again.
I don't think that's a bad thing.
I think we'll be probably a very much better, more interesting, more equitable country
if we learn to revise our ideas about what is true wealth, what is true efficiency.
But that's a big topic, and it's not really the topic we've come here to discuss.{I just}
If we're going to be talking or thinking about the future,
I think this is an element in it that we can't afford to neglect.
Okay, well that's all for the big formal speech,
if it struck you that way.
So now we can move into some kind of questions, discussion,
comment on whatever you want to talk about.
I mean, we can talk about any of the things I've talked about,
or if you came here wanting to talk about something else,
we can talk about that too,
unless I don't know anything at all about it,
I will tell you.
I can tell you how to begin on the cello.
I can't tell you how to become a "magnificent" player.
Well, as soon as I learn, I will tell you that.
Sir.
Jerry Mintz: Hi.
Jerry Mintz from
Shaker Mountain School in Vermont. {We can't hear you.}
John: Oh, hi, Jerry. {I just hope}
Jerry:One thing I was thinking about is that you missed,
somewhere between Ceylon and India,
the wages of alternative school people.
[Laughter]
John: Yes. Yes.
Jerry Mintz: It may mean that the industry may flock to the free schools.
I'm not sure. [Laughter]
One thing I was wondering about is what you think the difference is
between parents who are exposing their kids to education
or to learning without coercion
and schools that are exposing their kids to learning without coercion.
And our school doesn't require kids to go to any particular classes.
And on the other side of the coin,
the difference between parents who are coercing their kids
and schools that are coercing their kids.
John: Well, the key difference for me is the difference
between coercion and non-coercion.
In other words, if I thought that the homeschooling movement
was made up largely or entirely
of people who wanted to coerce their kids
and just thought they could do a better job of it than schools could,
I wouldn't have spent two minutes on this activity.
My interest in homeschooling,
and, for that matter, alternative schooling –
and I was interested in alternative schools
before I became interested in homeschooling –
my interest in it is that it makes it at least possible –
for those people who want to give their children
a natural, organic, uncoerced learning experience – to do so.
Not everybody is going to use it that way.
People start schools which they hope will be
even more coercive than the schools that exist.
There are certainly some people who teach their children
thinking that they can pound in learning faster than
the local schools were doing it.
I don't think many of them stick it out very long
because they find out it doesn't work.
No, I mean, if I look far enough down the line,
I like to think of schools as learning-experiment activity centers,
somewhat analogous to public libraries,
although rather wider in scope,
places to which people can come if they feel like coming,
to do the things that they want to do
for as long as they want to do them.
And {I kind of – } I would hope that somewhere we would find a way
to call these places something other than schools
because they're really very fundamentally very different.
"Club" would be nice if we just kind of dared to do it. [Laughter]
We have a film that a friend of mine,
my friend Peggy Hughes,
made in Denmark of the preschool there.
The film was called "We Have to Call It School."
And the film begins with this young Danish teacher
there saying in English,
"We have to call it school because if we didn't,
they wouldn't let the children come here."
[Laughter]
But it would be nice if, in our minds,
we thought about these non-coercive gathering-and-activity places
as something other than a school.
I like "club."
I mean, club has a –
But you can pick what word you like,
or invent a brand new one.
Ultimately, I suppose I'd like to see all schools evolve this way.
I don't think, certainly not in my lifetime,
and not in any future that I can see,
can I imagine legislatures striking
compulsory attendance laws off the books.
But I can imagine more and more schools
defining attendance in just the way you define it,
so that the difference
between being in school and not being in school
gets so fuzzed over
that you can't tell any longer
when somebody is in or when somebody is out.{now I don't}
Have I spoken to your point,
or was there something other you'd like to get out?
Jerry: In other words, do you consider
that it would be advantageous for a parent
to homeschool their kid in a non-coercive way,
rather than let them go to a school that was non-coercive?
John: Well, if you're a homeschooling parent
and there was in your area
a non-coercive school that kids could go to,
I would be ready to leave it up to those children and those parents
to decide how much they wanted to make use of it.
Some families, the kids would be there a lot of the time,
and other families, they might not be there much of the time.
I think of my friends, the Wallaces in Ithaca,
their public school system, as a matter of fact, said to them,
"You're free to come and use us
anywhere you want or anytime you want to."
In fact, there's nothing in
the public school for them to do there.
These are, by now,
two extraordinarily accomplished musicians,
and they spent six, seven, eight, nine, ten hours a day working on music.
What in the world are they going to do?
What has school got to offer them?
But if you were very interested in the kinds of things
that are likely to be done at school, or something that needed more people –
let's say drama, which is a hard thing to do in small groups –
well, then it might be very interesting for you to.
So if these resources were there,
we'd say to people, children, their parents,
"Those of you who want to use them a lot, use them a lot.
Those of you who want to use them occasionally, use them occasionally.
I wouldn't try to make that decision for anybody.
I think most homeschoolers would be very glad
to have some kind of gathering resource.
One of the advantages of such a place
is that, of course,
a gang of people can get together and buy things
which none of them by themselves might be able to afford,
– make sufficient use of.
Well, they can do it now, but the question is then,
"Whose house is it at?"
There get to be problems like that.
If there is a central gathering and meeting place,
well that's all the handier.
Now, one of the reasons that I went from
thinking about alternative schools to thinking about homeschooling
is that most of the alternative schools, in the sense that we're using it here –
I mean, the word has gotten so fuzzed up
in the public-education system
that it no longer has any real meaning.
Most of the true alternative schools of the late '60s and the early '70s
have long since gone, mostly for lack of money.
You know how hard a struggle it is,
even with Sri Lankan wages. [inaudible]. [Laugha]
Even with those kinds of sacrifices,
very few schools were ingenious enough,
or resourceful, or lucky, or whatever to keep going.
We had a gang up in the Boston area.
I don't think one – maybe one, right? –
they've all disappeared.
A lot of them were doing wonderful work.
So I began thinking, what can people do
who are not able to get one of these places going
and keep it together?
I suppose one of the things we have to learn is
how can we do this in a way that costs less money
without starving and not going into Ethiopian wages,
or something like that. [Laughter]
We don't want to do that.
All right, now I'm going to do a little number thing with hands,
just so I don't forget, or so we keep some kind of order.
Is it one here?
Did you all –? I thought so.
Woman: I'm going to ask a question.
John: All right. You'll be number one.
And the second? All right, second here.
Third here.
Fourth? Lady in the red dress shirt.
Okay.
All right. Five.
Okay. Now, you have to remember.
Six? Okay.
You have to remember your numbers,
and you have to remember where I am in the numbers,
because I'm not going to remember either of those things! [Laughter]
Yes.
Woman: I'm number one.
If our children are most interested in
the things that we are most interested in –
John: They aren't hearing you.
Woman: They're not hearing? John: No way in the world.
[Laughter] Woman: Okay.
John: Got to sing out. Woman: Okay.
John: I mean, it is possible.
Woman: [Laughs] There are a lot of people here.
Woman: If our children are most interested
in the things that we are most interested in,
are we not then as homeschoolers rearing lopsided children? And –
John: Everybody's lopsided. Woman: Okay.
John: I'm lopsided. You're lopsided.
All God's children are lopsided. [Laughter]
Woman: And will they fill out?
John: Yeah. Woman: Okay.
John: That doesn't mean to say they're going to wind up
knowing everything about everything, because nobody does.
But your life is not just you.
You've got friends. They come here.
You know people. They have interests.
The child lives in kind of bunch of concentric circles of family,
and then larger family, and close friends of family,
and neighbors, streets.
And this world, as I say, has many different layers in it.
And some of your children may meet people
who happen to be very interested
in things that you're not much interested in,
and they may pick up that interest.
That's okay.
As long as – as I say, as long as –
as far as we're able to,
we make it possible for children to move into the world
in whatever ways they want to do it,
they're going to find enough there.
Nobody's going to die of starvation.
I don't care whether you live on an isolated farm,
or this sterile suburb that everybody loves to talk about,
or the wicked big city that I live in,
the fact is that human life, as people live it,
has got more than enough food for thought
for children to bite into and to grow.
As they feel the need of more,
they're going to know more about where to go to look for it.
All right. Now, let's see, two?
Woman: May I just say to my friends here,
wait until they get married.
John: The chldren? Woman: Right.
Then their lives will widen up.
Because our first just did.
I'm still at homeschooling with a six-year-old.
I just want to thank you, John, from my heart
for having helped us very much here.
And I don't have a question.
But I wanted to tell you
that today, my sister-in-law had to hang up the phone
in order to go across the street to walk her third-grader home
because she has been molested within 400 feet of her own home.
And this doesn't even state how I feel about the fact
that they're not learning going to these places
that are supposed to be teaching – or pouring it in, as you say.
I don't think that we have to defend ourselves
any more than if you're walking down the street
and someone starts to kill you,
because I believe taking my children out of
the public school system saved their lives,
not just morally, religiously, mentally – every way possible.
And I appreciated the story in GWS
about the little girl who was diagnosed as terminally ill
because this was worth all the pennies I paid,
the pink wage we pay you for GWS.
Thank you, John, very much.
John: Well, you're welcome. [Applause]
We had an interesting story in the Globe the other day.
I cut out the clipping.
We always have about three times as much stuff to print in GWS
as we ever have room to print, which is frustrating.
This was about a young man –
he's now 18 – and he was autistic,
which is, to this day,
by the supposed official experts, called "incurable".
"Autistic" and "retarded," they're not the same thing.
I mean, he just had a whole bunch of these labels stuck on him.
It's hopeless – "vegetable," "institutionalized."
If you can get him in and out of the bathroom,
that's probably as much as you can do.
And somebody got interested in this boy
when he was seven or eight,
noticed that he seemed pretty energetic and lively, and liked moving,
and they got him started running – and running distances.
Took him on long runs or this, that, the other
– and they got him into this running world.
The boy's now 18, I think.
I don't remember whether this was because he was
getting ready to run in the Boston Marathon or not.
But at any rate, he's become an extremely good runner.
Incidentally, he has not caught up with his age,
but he talks intelligently and intelligibly,
reads – I don't know –
something on a 6th, 7th grade level.
But all this is going up.
He's become a fully-functioning human being –
because he was allowed and helped
to do the things that he liked best.
People grow through their strengths, not their weaknesses.
One of the many simple truths,
which the giant educational, psychological, medical, etc. institutions
don't seem to be able to learn is just that:
that people learn by and grow through their strengths,
not by having people pound away at their weaknesses.
Somebody had the wit and the imagination
to see that this boy had a talent,
a gift, a love, something he wanted to do.
And then all this other stuff kind of went along with it.
Well, we know that,
and they don't know it out there. [Chuckles]
And it's going to be a long time before they do –
which is interesting.
Okay, now let's see.
Yes.
Woman: I have a lot of resentment against my public school education
and further education here at the University of Michigan,
although I learned, as you said,
to play the games very well and got good grades,
but felt that I didn't develop a lot of interest,
because I was too busy playing the games.
But I wondered how you would answer the question,
if I hear you correctly,
that you allow a child to choose what he wants to learn.
I can't imagine how a person would ever choose
to learn things like trigonometry,
or things that they say maybe later that you're going to need.
John: Well, you will need trigonometry
if you're a surveyor – in no other place and way.
I'm glad you picked that.
Woman: Well, I didn't take trigonometry,
but the algebra I used, for example.
John: Now, now [inaudible] –
Woman: I didn't enjoy learning it, but I've used it a lot.
John: Okay, well, if you had not learned it,
and if you got to a place in life
where you needed it to do something you wanted to do,
then you would learn it very quickly.
It's no mystery. It's not hidden.
The time to learn stuff is –
Woman: So you learn things when you need them,
not when the school system says, "This is geometry year."
John: Right, right. You learn things when you –
As a species, as a living creature,
we human beings are incredibly good
at learning stuff when we need to –
if we have not been convinced that we're so stupid that we can't do it –
which, unfortunately, in a great many places, does happen.
Man: I don't know who you're on right now,
but I just want to point out that I'm enjoying learning algebra.
I'm alternatively educated. [Laughter]
Woman: [Inaudible]
John: Good. And thank you.
Woman: What kind of school are you in now?
Man: Well, actually, it's a public school,
but it's an attempt at being an alternative school.
And it's not as close as the school I went to before it,
but it's closer than the standard public schools,
and it has the atmosphere of an alternative school.
But many of our classes are chosen,
I mean, rather than –
Beyond the state requirements that the public schools have to follow,
most of our classes are chosen.
Woman: Do you have friends in regular public school?
What I wonder is if you feel, in comparison,
that you're getting a far better education.
Man: Well, the – Woman: Obviously, you do.
Man: I was in the public schools until 7th grade.
And 7th grade, I jumped around,
and it was because of just
all sorts of problems I was having in public schools.
Yeah, I think my education since I've gone into alternative schools
has been infinitely better.
John: Good. Well, I'm glad to hear that.
But I do want to make clear, as far as I'm concerned,
I'm not trying to make – never have tried to make
a distinction between public and conventional private schools.
If you remember "How Children Fail,"
you'll remember that somewhere along in the book I wrote,
"School is a place where children learn to be stupid."
[Laughter]
Now, let me tell you about the school about which I was writing.
I was not writing about
some poor old PS 111 in the middle of the downtown,
I was talking about an extremely exclusive,
high-powered, selective, private elementary school,
one of the two or three outstanding such schools
in the whole Boston-Cambridge area –
the top of the top of the top of the top!
They had an admissions policy
under which a kid could not get into the school
if she or he did not have an IQ of 120.
That was the cut-off!
It was at that school that I wrote,
"School is a place where children learn to be stupid."
So I'm not drawing a line – [chuckles] never have drawn it.
I'm not drawing it here saying,
"Ooh, look at all these terrible, rotten public schools on one side.
Ooh, look at these –"
What I was saying then is that what I came to realize
in that school with these kids
is that you cannot coerce learning or attempt to coerce it
without making people stupid –
without making them afraid, shifty, evasive, clever tricksters.
Yeah, the cleverest tricksters, they'll sail on to Harvard, MIT, Yale –
I did that game.
Dope out the teacher, guess the exam.
Everybody knows how it goes.
And everybody who does it knows that 90% of that stuff
you throw out just like dirty dishwater as soon as the exam is passed.
How many people on any university faculty
could pass an exam –
other than, perhaps basic English reading and writing –
outside of their own specialty?
I mean, just very, very few – and they know it.
I mean, this idea that there's some great body of knowledge
which they all share – it's just nonsense!
Never was true – not true now.
It's a fraud.
I mean, I think a lot of people say it sincerely.
I don't think they're lying when they say it.
But I mean, it's a fraud because it's just not so!
Nobody remembers that stuff.
Harvard University –
if you're taking some big course, they announce an exam.
Some professor's going to have an exam in his or her course.
Professor announces it:
"We will have such an exam on such and such a day,
and it will cover such and such and such a topic."
And then you spend a certain amount of time discussing this in review.
Nobody springs surprise exams on their students
because they know perfectly well what would happen.
No, it's a very –
All right. [Laughter]
I'll get out of that. I'll go on all night.
[Laughter]
Let's see, now, where are we in our numbers?
John: Yes.
Dorothy: I'm 4. John: Good.
Dorothy: I help coordinate
a homeschooling support group in Chicago,
and I'm noticing more and more
the split that you have alluded to in homeschooling as well
between those who wish to coerce learning and those who don't.
And those who do are very much interested –
as it happens in Illinois –
in keeping those of us who don't want to coerce
in a semblance of unity with them vis-à-vis the state.
And it's becoming more and more difficult,
I think, for that to happen.
And I wonder if you would comment on that, and also on –
There is a definite one-way flow of energy happening
because those of us who do not wish to coerce
give support and assistance very often to those who do,
because they believe they have the right to choose.
And those who wish to coerce
really don't think that the rest of us do have the right because,
"We're not doing it the right way, you see."
So, would you comment on that?
This is not a problem I want solved because I don't see it being [inaudible]
John: That's good, because it's –
Dorothy: – we're not going to do that.
But I would like a comment from you, if you will, on that,
especially vis-à-vis legislation, and that sort of thing,
when our interests tend to be moving further and further apart.
And what would you think we should do in terms of strategies about this?
John: Thank you, Dorothy.
I first think of something a friend of mine used to say:
"This isn't a problem, it's a predicament."
Dorothy: Right. [Laughter]
John: The word "problem" kind of cooks up in our mind
a picture of something which we could make go away
if we could just figure out the right thing to do.
Things like death and taxes are predicaments,
and they're just part of reality.
Yeah, this is a part of reality, and we are living with it,
and we're going to be living with it as far in the future as I can see.
It doesn't trouble me that –
I'm going to respond in several sections.
First place, I don't think
it's a cause for worry or concern or distress
that we may be helping people
to get rights which they would not help us to get.
Dorothy: I'm not worried about that.
John: Now, there's no reason in the world
not to work together with people
with whom we disagree about many things
on those things about which we agree.
Because when we improve the legislative situation,
then we've made things easier for all of us.
Another thing I would have to say is –
Well, first of all,
a lot of the people who begin as coercive homeschoolers change.
Dorothy: I've seen a lot of that [inaudible].
John: Their children teach them [laughter] about how learning really works.
And if – and this is very, very often true –
if they care enough about their children to pay attention to their feelings
and pick up these messages, they become educated,
and they become less and less coercive –
minimally coercive.
My experience is that the people who do not make that change
don't stay in homeschooling very long.
That is, people who –
whether for reasons religious or other,
believe in high-pressure coercion,
soon find ways to get together with other people who feel the same way
and they start some kind of coercive school.
I don't think you're very likely
to find people doing coercive homeschooling
for four or five years in a row.
I mean, their children would hit the road,
if nothing else happened. [Laughter]
I'm untroubled by having people start
in a position which is very far from my own,
partly because I believe people should have the right to do this
however they want to do it, not just if they agree with me,
and partly because I have a lot of confidence, as I say,
that they will learn from their children,
that they will move away from coercion.
As I have said at teachers' colleges,
one reason homeschooling works well in practice
is that the home is an absolutely splendid teacher-training institution.
[Laughter]
The numbers are small enough
so you can really hear the messages that your children are sending.
And you're in a position where, if you choose to,
you can learn from them.
Now, when I first discovered, as a fifth-grade classroom teacher,
that a lot of children were so scared
of the weekly arithmetic test
that they couldn't think about arithmetic,
I stopped giving the tests.
And it wasn't more than about two weeks
before the school administration
told me that I had to start giving them again,
and they fired me at the end of the year.
So I was not in a position to do
what my conscience and intelligence and instincts
told me needed to be done.
Parents aren't in that position.
"You can start with a little desk,
an American flag, a schedule on the blackboard –
[Laughter]
– but the day you find out it isn't working, you can say,
"We're going to do something different."
You have that freedom to move –
[Recording ends prematurely]