Excerpts from ESCAPE FROM CHILDHOOD and another book, by John Holt

[anarchist of love]

Learning from John Holt
Excerpts from two of John's books:
ESCAPE FROM CHILDHOOD
and:
Freedom and Beyond

John Holt is best characterized as a root-seeking educator who made a very big impact in the 1970s--so much so that a group of people in Cambridge, Massachusetts (USA) named their informational bookstore after him. I was first drawn to Holt's writings when i stumbled upon his book about "Escape from Childhood." Later, i stumbled beyond books like "How Children Learn" and such things, to his writings about freedom.

I think John's ideas are very valuable to our community, if for no other reason than he constantly cuts thru all the superficial and goes right to the hearts of matters. Very important for quick insights into our own problems and challenges!


Excerpt from ESCAPE FROM CHILDHOOD: The Needs and Rights of Children, 1974

"A child's world." "To experience childhood." "To be allowed to be a child." Such words seem to say that childhood is a time and an experience very different from the rest of life and that it is the best part of our lives.

It is not, and no one know it better than children.
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"If we want children to grow not just in age, size and strength, but in understanding, awareness, kindness, confidence, competence and joy, then they need access to experiences that will build these qualities."
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Children want to grow up. They want, part of the time, to be around the kind of adults who like being grownup and who think of growing up as an exploration and adventure, not the process of being chased out of some garden of Eden.


They do not want to hear older people say, as many often do, "These are the best years of your life." What could be more discouraging? For they are going to grow up, whether they want to or not. What they want to hear from older people is the kind of message my best friend sent me on my thirteenth birthday: "The best is yet to come." He was right, it was, and I still feel that way.

"To be allowed to experience childhood," means being allowed to do some things and being spared--or forbidden--having to do others. It means adults will decide, without often or even asking children what they think, that some experiences are are good for children while others are not. It means for a child that adults are all the time deciding what is best for you and then letting or making you do it. But instead of trying to make sure that all children get only those experiences we think are good for them I would rather make available to children, as to everyone else, the widest possible range of experiences (except those that hurt others) and let them choose these they like best.

If we want children to grow not just in age, size and strength, but in understanding, awareness, kindness, confidence, competence and joy, then they need access to experiences that will build these qualities.

And they need the right to shun and flee experiences that do the opposite, experiences all too common in the lives of most children--the experience of terror, of humiliation, of contempt, of endless anxiety, of deception, of lack of trust, of being denied choice, of being pushed around, of having their lives filled with dull and pointless and repeated drudgery. But we all need this, so much that the lack of it is making us sick.

We all have a right to feel that we are not just what other people, even experts, say we are--not just this race, or color, or occupation, or income level, or personality profile--but that there is an essence that is much larger, more unknowable, and more important. And it is a delusion to believe that even if this right is denied to adults it may somehow be given to children, that they have a right to a dignity and identity where no one else has.

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What follows are a compilation of excerpts from John Holt's book Freedom and Beyond.


"[Most people] can't imagine [being a person who is free]! [Their] lives [are] poisoned by anger and hatred, which [they] dare not express..."
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"In a way this book marks the end of an argument. For some time I and others have been saying--some before I was born--that children are by nature smart, energetic, curious, eager to learn, and good at learning; that they do not need to be bribed and bullied to learn; that they learn best when they are happy, active, involved, and interested in what they are doing; that they learn least, or not at all, when they are bored, threatened, humiliated, frightened.



"...few of us really believe in freedom. As a slogan, it is fine...We have had in our own lives so little experience of freedom, except in the most trivial situations, that we can hardly imagine how it might work, how we might use it, or how it could possibly be of any use to us when any serious work was to be done. For our times the corporate-military model seems to be the only one we know, trust, and believe in." p.2


"...the casual or careless observer might say that much of the time the children are quarelling or fighting. This is not true. They are simply doing what most of their elders have forgotten how to do or are afraid to do, which is to show their feelings as they feel them. It is because they show them so openly that they are able to adjust to them so quickly and adroitly. When they are not pleased with what the other is doing, they do not hide and nurse their displeasure or resentment until it becomes an anger thay cannot cope with. They say or do something right away that gives the other a signal that things are not going right and that something must be done.

"There are no such things as "unstructured" situations. ...Every human situation, however casual and unforced...has a structure.
If two men meet on the street and for half a minute talk to each other, that meeting has a structure, perhaps even a very complicated one. Who are the two men? What is their relationship to each other? Are they more or less equals, or does one have some kind of power over the other? [and so on].

"This is just as true of children. ...Children are not indifferent to these structures. They sense them, intuit them, want to know about them, how to fit into them, how to make use of them.(...)p.4

"Kids want to know how to get along, how to become an insider instead of an outsider." p.5


THE USES OF FREEDOM
"[Most people] can't imagine [being a person who is free]! [Their] lives [are] poisoned by anger and hatred, which [they] dare not express--the consequences for [them] would be disasterous. Freedom, [they say] along with millions of others, just means letting people do everything they want. If you let them do that, they'll do bad things. 'I know, because that's what I'd want to do.' Freedom, [for these people] means tearing the lash away from the overseer and using it to flog him to death. But a world without lashes and overseers? Impossible!

"...People who feel they have no freedom hate the people who have it...What's all this about protest, they say. I got plenty of things I'd like to protest, but I keep my mouth shut, I can't afford to get into trouble. Such people don't want to be told that they might have protested all along, that it might have made a difference. The man in chains, seeing another man without them, thinks, is it possible I could have struck these chains off if I had only tried, that I didn't have to wear them all these years? The thought is unbearable. Better get some chains on the other guy.

"...We have had to invent a substitute word for "freedom", a spiteful, mean-spirited word that lets us say right out what we really feel: "permissiveness" [and] we find ourselves arguing about whether children should be allowed to do anything--torture animals or set buildings on fire. If we say No we are then told that we don't really believe in freedom after all. ...All such talk illustrates a great confusion about freedom...

"A society has moved well along toward tyranny when people begin to say (as many of our citizens do), 'Better not do that, you might get into trouble.' The free citizen says, "What do you mean, might...? If the law doesn't specifically tell me I can't do it, then I damn well can do it."

KIDS AT SUMERHILL
"[Kids went in] locked in their desperate protective strategies of self-defense and deliberate failings, filled with fear, suspicion, anger, and hatred...At Sumerhill [they] got well. [How? They were given freedom:) Is there something intrinsically therapeutic about being able to use four letter words, or go for days without a bath? I doubt it. What seems more important is that these children were freed from the enormous pressure under which they had been living. p.8

"...In short, ...Summerhill helps the children there to feel, and often for the first time, that they are human beings of some dignity, competence, and worth. Children get well and grow at Summerhill because of the freedom, support, and respect it gives them..." p.9

F R E E P E O P L E
"...What makes our truly inventive and creative thinkers, whether political, artistic, or scientific, what sets them apart from the great run of us, is, above all, that they can still play with their minds. They have not forgotten how to do it nor grown ashamed nor afraid of it. They like it, and they do it every chance they have...

"The ordinary, "serious," non-playful man cannot escape things as they are; though he is always talking about 'facing reality,' he is as trapped by his notion of reality as any rat in a cage. For him, whatever is, is all there can be. The playful man is always saying, and cannot help saying, "But suppose things weren't this way, didn't have to be this way. Let's just for the fun of it imagine what might happen if this were different, if we did that instead of this...just for the fun of it.

"Now we know from experience that out of such play may come, and often do come, ideas that may change the whole shape of human life and thought...

"It is not hard to see why a stable society would find such men unsettling...and would try to silence or do away with them if possible [(perhaps via use of mental "illness" politics?--ed)]...But a society like ours, facing life-or-death crises and predicaments about which nobody knows what to do and about which most people think nothing at all can be done, needs for its very survival not just a few but hundreds of thousands, indeed a whole new generation of people who can play."


Goes on with ideas about tensions of freedom being natural and having important values to teach those able to see such: "The tension is not a 'problem,' and there is no 'solution' that will make it go away." p.15

My comment: Though the usual superficially looking social control oriented forces are working overtime to find ways to silence such "illness" and unwanted truths...and may perhaps be successful in delivering a kind of what Aldous Huxley called the human "automaton".

Continues with discussion of Authority, and then gets into Choice.