Growing Without Schooling: The Complete Collection, Volume 1

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On Social Change

In starting this newsletter, we are putting into practice a nickel and dime theory about social change, which is, that important and lasting social change always comes slowly, and only when people change their lives, not just their political beliefs or parties. It is a process, that takes place over a period of time. At one moment in history, with respect to a certain matter, 99% of a society think and act one way; 1% think and act very differently. Some time later, that 1% minority becomes 2%, then 5%, then 10, 20, 30, until someday it becomes the dominant majority, and the social change has taken place. Some may ask, When did this social change take place? or When did it begin? There is no answer to these questions, except perhaps to say that any given social change begins the first time one person thinks of it.

I have come to understand, finally, and even to accept, that in almost everything I believe and care about I am a member of a minority in my own country, in most cases a very small minority. This is certainly true of all my ideas about children and education. We who do not believe in compulsory schooling, who believe that children want to learn about the world, are good at it, and can be trusted to do it, without much adult coercion or interference, are surely not more than 1% of the population and perhaps much less than that. And we are not likely to become the effective majority for many years, probably not in my lifetime, perhaps not in the lifetime of any readers of GWS.

This doesn’t trouble me any more, as long as those minorities of which I am a member go on growing. My work is to help them grow. If we can describe the effective majority of our society, with respect to children or schools or any other question, as moving in direction X, and ourselves, the small minority, as moving in direction Y, what I want to do is to find ways to help people, who want to move in direction Y, to move in that direction, rather than run after the great X-bound army shouting at them, Hey you guys, stop, turn around, you ought to be heading in direction Y! In areas they feel are important, people don’t change their ideas, much less their lives, because someone comes along with a bunch of arguments to show that they are mistaken, and even wicked, to think or do as they do. Once in a while, we may have to argue with the X-bound majority, to try to stop them from doing a great and immediate wrong. But most of the time, as a way of making real and deep changes in society, this kind of shouting and arguing seems to me a waste of time.

Why Keep Them Out?

Jud Jerome (Downhill Farm, Hancock, MD 21750) has written us a long letter, which he will print in this and the next issue. (I hope many other readers will follow his good example.) His youngest child, Topher, after a year of kindergarten, did not go to school again until he was 10. Then he went for a few months to a small free School on another commune. After a while, his parents took him out. Of this, Jud writes:

In regard to Topher, though, I should add that though we were glad he was happy and enjoying himself (in school), we were also sad as we watched him deteriorate from a person into a kid under peer influence in school. It was much like what we saw happening when he was in kindergarten. There are certain kinds of childishness which it seems most people accept as being natural, something children have to go through, something which it is, indeed, a shame to deny them. Silliness, self-indulgence, random rebelliousness, secretiveness, cruelty to other children, clubbishness, addiction to toys, possessions, junk, spending money, purchased entertainment, exploitation of adults to pay attention, take them places, amuse them, do things with them—all these things seem to be quite unnecessary, not normal at all (note: except in the sense of being common), and just as disgusting in children as they are in adults. And while they develop as a result of peer influence, I believe this is only and specifically because children are thrown together in schools and develop these means, as prisoners develop means of passing dull time and tormenting authorities to cope with an oppressive situation. The richer the families children come from, the worse these traits seem to be. Two years of school and Topher would probably have regressed two years in emotional development. I am not sure of that, of course, and it was not because of that fear that we pulled him out, but we saw enough of what happened to him in a school situation not to regret pulling him out.

——————

I have snatched this paragraph out of the middle of Jud’s letter because it seems to me to answer so perfectly a question many ask me when they first think of taking their kids out of school: But won’t they miss the social life? To this I say that if I had no other reason for wanting to keep kids out of school (and I have many), the social life would be reason enough. In all the schools I have taught in, visited, or know anything about, the social-life of the children is mean-spirited, competitive, exclusive, status-seeking, full of talk about who went to who’s birthday party and who got what Christmas presents and who got how many Valentine cards and who is talking to so-and-so and who is not. Even in the first grade, classes soon divide up into leaders, energetic, and (often deservedly) popular kids, their bands of followers, and other outsiders who are pointedly excluded from these groups.

And I remember my sister saying of one of her children, then five, that she never knew her to do anything really mean or silly until she went away to school—a nice school, by the way, in a nice small town.

Useful Resources

N.A.L.S.A.S. (National Association for the Legal Support of Alternative Schools, P.O. Box 2823, Santa Fe, NM 87501). This small organization, under the leadership of Ed Nagel, has done much important research into compulsory attendance laws, the right of people to start and run their own school, and the right of people to enroll their children in distant alternative schools which then approve and supervise a home study program. People from at least two other states have enrolled their children in the Santa Fe Community School (where Ed Nagel teaches) in this way, and in at l east one case, and I think more, local courts have upheld their right to do this. N.A.L.S.A.S. needs and deserves support.

The Last? Resort, newsletter of the Committee to End Violence Against the Next Generation (or EVAN-G), 977 Keeler Ave., Berkeley, CA 94708. Members of the Committee ($l0/yr.) receive the newsletter, a very complete survey of court cases, newspaper stories and editorials, and other events in this field. Newsletter is scary reading; large numbers of children are still being brutally beaten, often for the most trivial offenses or no offenses at all. One boy, who had sprained his ankle and had a note from a doctor saying that he should not exercise on it, was severely paddled and in fact injured by a coach (the coaches and Physical Education teachers seem to be among the worst offenders) who told him to high jump during a Phys. Ed. class. The school sadists are in most cases upheld by the courts, most recently by the Supreme Court. Most Americans like the idea of beating up on kids, and are ready to seize on almost anything as an excuse to do so.

SEE (Selective Educational Equipment, Inc., 3 Bridge St., Newton MA 02195). These folks produce and/or distribute some very good school materials, many of which could be used at home. I will comment later in detail about some of the materials available. For the time being I urge you to get their catalogue. They have very good stuff for measuring things.

Outlook, a quarterly ($6/yr., $10/2 yrs.) pub. by Mountain View Center for Environmental Education, Univ. of Colorado, 1511 University Ave., Boulder, CO 80309. The only serious (but not stuffy) publication about teaching (as opposed to classroom management, tricks to keep the kids busy, etc.) that I know of in this country. Since the editor, Tony Kallet, is a musician, it is likely to have very good stuff about music.

Home Study Institute, Takoma Park, Washington, D.C. 20012. This well established, respectable, and very extensive correspondence school seems to be run by, or somehow connected to, the Seventh Day Adventists. They offer accredited elementary, high school, and other programs. At first glance, these seem to be very conventional, use standard school texts, etc. This has this advantage, that most schools will accept the credits or certificates of the Institute as being as good as their own.

Their course of study for all elementary and secondary grades includes some kind of bible or religious study each year, presumably from the Seventh Day Adventist point of view. Whether people of other religious faiths, or none at all, can waive this particular requirement, I have yet to find out.

On page 15 of their catalogue is this interesting statement:

School attendance laws vary from state to state. Parents are advised to counsel with the Educational Secretary of the local Seventh-Day Adventist conference regarding compulsory attendance laws and teacher qualification requirements in the area where they live. We will be glad to give assistance if the need arises. In New York, in the case of Foster, 330 N.Y.s 2d8, Family Court of City of New York, Kings County, Feb.16, 1972, the Court stated: "It is settled law that a parent need not avail himself of formal educational facilities for a child in order to satisfy the requirements of the law, it being sufficient that a systematic course of study be undertaken at home and that the parent render qualified quality instruction.

This suggests that the Adventists have had a good deal of experience in bucking compulsory attendance laws, and (judging from the size of their catalogue) that considerable numbers of children are using their courses instead of attending schools. In short, these folks may already know a great deal that we need to find out. We at GWS will look further into this and tell you what we find out.

School Violence And Vandalism—a report of the Subcommittee to Investigate Juvenile Delinquency (Sen. Birch Bayh, Chmn.) of the Committee on the Judiciary of the United States Senate. For sale by Supt. of Documents, U.S. Govt. Printing Office, Wash. D.C. 20402; $4.95.

This is a two-volume report, the first stating the problem, the second proposing ways (most of them rather foolish) for dealing with it. You may be able to get Vol.1 free from Sen. Bayh’s office; if not, it is worth $4.95 as an official statement of what life in most schools is really like.

Children’s Rights Report, published by the Juvenile Rights Project of the American Civil Liberties Union Foundation. 11 issues, $15/yr. Vol.1, No.8, May 1977, discusses the Supreme Court ruling on corporal punishment in the schools. Well worth reading.

Access to the World

The following is part of an article that came out in the New Schools Exchange Newsletter, and later, in the magazine Green Revolution.

(in this alternative school) there is more than a little talk about the curriculum, so carefully planned, guided, and enriched. So here in free and alternative schools we are still doing what conventional schools have always done. We take children out of and away from the great richness and variety of the world, and in its place we give them school subjects, the curriculum. Perhaps we may jazz it up with chicken bones, Cuisenaire rods, and all sorts of goodies from EDC. But the fact remains that instead of giving them access to more and more people, places, tools, and experiences, we are cutting the world up into little bits and giving it to the children according to this or that theory about what they need or can stand. I say instead that what they need is access to more and more of the real world; plenty of time and space to think over their experiences, and to use fantasy and play to make meaning out of them; advice, road maps, guide books, to make it easier for them to get where they want to go (not where we think they ought to go), and to find out what they want to find out. Finding ways to do all this is not a small matter. The modern world is dangerous, confusing, not meant for children, not generally kind or welcoming to them. We have a great deal to learn about how to make the world more accessible to them, and how to give them more freedom and competence in exploring it. It is not a small subject. But it is a very different thing indeed from designing nice little curricula.

——————

A small footnote. To people who are thinking of starting new schools, perhaps because there seems no other way that the law will let them teach their own children, my strong advice is, keep that school as small as possible, the absolute minimum that the law will allow and still call it a school. The problems of schools, the difficulties of running them, the troubles they get into with the authorities, seem to increase, roughly, with the square or maybe the cube of the size of the student body. Four or five kids can go anywhere with an adult; a dozen gets to be a problem; two dozen is a big problem; and for forty or fifty you have to get a permit from City Hall. Keep it small, keep it cheap; there’s no other way to go.

More From Jud Jerome

The next daughter down the line was twelve when we moved to the commune. She finished that year of school on independent study, living at the farm, turning in work to teachers back at the city. But when Fall came she did not want to enroll. To avoid the law we enrolled her in a free school in Spokane, Wash., run by a friend, who carried her on the rolls, though she has not yet, to date, seen that city or that school. She spent most of the first year here at the farm, pitching in as an adult, learning from experience as we were all learning. While she was still thirteen we went to help another commune, in northern Vermont, with sugaring, and she loved that place—which was very primitive and used horse-drawn equipment so asked to stay. This was an agreeable arrangement on all sides—and she has lived there now for over five years, except for one, when she was sixteen. That year she and her mate (ten years her senior) went to Iceland (Vermont was not rugged enough for them) to winter, working in a fish cannery. The next Spring they traveled, camping, to Scandinavia, hiked the Alps, then flew home—coming back with $3000 more than they left with after a year abroad. Last year, she wanted to apply for a government vocational program, for which she needed a high school diploma, so went to an adult education class for a few months, and took the test, passing in the top percentile (and being offered scholarships to various colleges). She graduated earlier than her classmates who stayed in school. I think her case illustrates especially dramatically the waste of time in schools. She is by no means a studious type, would never think of herself as an intellectual, has always been more interested in milking cows and hoeing vegetables and driving teams of horses than in books, and in her years between thirteen and eighteen moved comfortably into womanhood and acquired a vast number of skills, had a vast range of experiences in the adult world, yet managed to qualify exceptionally by academic standards. By comparison, her classmates who stayed in school are in many cases stunted in mind, emotionally disturbed, without significant goals or directions or sound values in their lives—in large part (in my judgment) specifically because of their schooling.

The Other World

The house magazine of a leading hotel chain contained the following advertisement, for itself:

When you stay at ——— you’re in among them … a never-ending parade of famous faces. The pace-setters work and play at ———. The people who shape events and places. The elevator door opens and she’s there beside you, the fabled face known in millions of homes throughout the world. Or suddenly the mood tenses, people rush forward to see or touch him as he pauses briefly, surrounded by his entourage, and then he’s gone. What he did here today, while you were staying at the ——— reported (sic) in the world press tonight.

On Counting

Many years ago I knew a child of about four whose older brothers and sisters were teaching her to count. One day I heard her say, One, two, three, four, five, seven, six, eight … at which point the older kids said indignantly, "No! No! Seven comes after six!"

Comes after. It seemed to me that from such words children could get a very strange idea of numbers, that they were a procession of little creatures, like dwarves, the first named One, the second named Two, the third named Three, and so on. Later on these dwarves would seem to do mysterious and meaningless dances, about which people would say things like Two and two make four, etc. It seemed likely that any child with such an idea of numbers would soon get into trouble, and this did indeed happen with this four-year-old. Later, I asked some adults who had always been hopeless at arithmetic what they thought of this idea of mine, and many of them laughed and said this was indeed how they had always felt about numbers, and why they could never make any sense of them.

It seems to me most important that a child not be taught to count number names in the absence of real objects. The Sesame Street approach (like many other things on that program) is dead wrong. When little children first meet numbers they should always meet them as adjectives, not nouns. Not three or seven all by itself, but three spoons or seven matches or five pennies or whatever. Time enough later, probably much later, for children to intuit slowly that the noun five is that quality which all groups of five objects have in common.

Nor is it a good idea for children always to meet numbers in the counting order. We might at one moment show a child two of some object, but the next thing we show might be five of some other object, or eight, or whatever. Numbers exist in nature in quite random ways, and a child should be ready to accept numbers where he finds them.

It would also be helpful to have children see, and in time learn to recognize all the numbers smaller than ten by the kinds of patterns they make. Thus, a child being shown three small objects might at one time see them in a row, at another, in a triangle. Four objects could be shown in a square, or in a row of three with the extra one on top. The patterns for five could be a regular pentagon, or a square with a fifth dot on top, or perhaps a square with the extra dot in the center. And so on. Such patterns could be put on cards, perhaps with the number symbol or digit on the other side. I’m not at all suggesting that children should be forced or even asked to memorize these cards. But if children had such cards to look at and play with—they all love regular playing cards—they might in time come to know all these patterns, and would thus have ways other than counting to identify small numbers. In this connection a set of dominoes might be a useful toy, and many young children would enjoy playing with them, even if they were doing no more than matching patterns.

It also seems to me important, when we adults count things for children, that we not do what most of us now do, that is, move from one object to the next saying as we go, One, two, three … The child sees us touching these objects, which otherwise look the same, and saying a different word for each one, and may well decide that One, two, three … are the names of the objects, dwarf style. We would do better, as we count each item, to move it to the side, saying as we move the first, Now we have one over here, then as we move the second, Now we have two over here, and then in turn, Now we have three, now we have four, now we have five, and so on. Thus at each point the child can see clearly that the number name refers not to a particular object but to the size of the group of objects which we have set to one side.

In time we could introduce the idea of ordinal numbers, which show the place of an item in an array, rather than the size of a group of items. Thus, given a row of small objects, we might touch them in turn, saying as we go something like, This is the first one, this is the second one, this is the third one, and the fourth one, and the fifth, and the sixth, etc. No need to talk at first about the words cardinal and ordinal. If we simply do our counting in a way that reflects the nature of these ideas, the child will soon intuit the difference. Later, when he fully grasps the idea that one set of number names refers to the quantity or size of something, while another set refers to the place of something, he may be interested in hearing the words cardinal and ordinal. If not, no matter.

When we count a group of small objects, we do not always have to count by ones, and can just as well count by twos or threes. The child will see from this that there are many ways of counting and that he can pick the one that seems most handy. He will also get a running start on learning some simple products.

A few children, of course, grasp these notions of cardinal and ordinal in spite of our very confused and confusing ways of presenting them. But most do not, and I suspect many children would move more confidently into the world of numbers if we introduced them as I have suggested here.

A School Story

In his wonderful book How to Survive in Your Native Land (Bantam paperback available from GWS) James Herndon writes:

In September of 1967 I looked through the cumulative folders we were going to have in our class for the coming year, that is to say, the next Monday. I read what I already knew—the first grader with testable high IQ, the remarked bright student, leader, reads at third-grade-level, headed for the big time; and the fourth grader with low-average capability, IQ 89, lazy kid, must-be-pushed-to-achieve, reads-at-second-grade-level, discipline problem, parents cooperative.

The first grader and the fourth grader are the same kid.

——————

I read this once to a group of school administrators. I asked them if they had kids like that, and if so how many, in their schools or school systems. None of them knew. I asked if any of them had ever checked through their files to see whether they had some kids like that. None of them had.

We Need To Know

We would like to print, in later issues from time to time, or perhaps someday in a separate directory, the names and addresses of our subscribers, so that people may get in touch with each other directly, or perhaps arrange to meet if they happen to go through each others’ home towns. Please let us know whether we may put your name and address in such a directory. Also, if you write us something, please let us know if we may print your name, or name and address, with your letter.

We also need to know, for as many states as possible, what the laws about compulsory school attendance, about acceptable alternatives to it, such as tutoring and home study, and about people starting their own schools, actually say. One group of people who probably know are the Seventh-Day Adventists (see in this issue under USEFUL RESOURCES). I would also suggest writing to your state representative and/or senator, not your state department of education. The department of education is itself a part of the school bureaucracy, and is very likely to give you a version of the laws which is tilted in favor of the schools, or to conceal from you any parts of the law that might help you escape the schools. Your legislator has no such interest. He is probably not a radical critic of the schools, but he is also almost certainly concerned that they spend so much money and are always asking for more, and also, that for what they spend, they don’t seem to get much results. More on this in the next section.

We also need to know (see again Useful Resources) any decisions that the courts may have made in your state to interpret school and school attendance laws. These will vary from place to place. Many people write or tell me about this or that court decision which told some parents that they could not teach their children at home, but almost no one knows of court decisions, which went the other way.

We also need to build up a list of people with teacher’s certificates who can and will act as tutors (real or paper) for children who are learning at home. People have written me that the schools in their area will not let them tutor their own children at home because they don’t have certificates for that state. (By the way, I think it very unlikely that the law contains any such specific requirement; this is more likely to be the schools’ interpretation of the law.) I have suggested that they try to find someone with such a certificate who would be willing to say that they were the child’s tutor. How much tutoring they would actually do, they and the parent could decide.

All this information we will have to get from you, the readers.

Letter To A Legislator

Dear Legislator:

I am a parent of school age children, and am seriously thinking about teaching them at home. I fear, with good reason (here you might cite the Bayh report—see Useful Resources), that in the schools they will be exposed to and tempted by all kinds of drugs, sex, and violence, and many kinds of peculiar ideas. I also fear that they may not learn anything, may indeed pick up from their peer group a contempt for learning, and in any case, that because of the large classes, they will not be able to get the kind of individual attention and help that I can give them at home.

I would therefore like to have the full text of all the laws in this state relating to school attendance, to alternative possibilities such as tutoring at home, and to the possibility of parents making their own home a school. I have written to you instead of the State Department of Education because I fear that, since their interest is in keeping my child in the schools, they may give me a somewhat biased version of the laws.

I would also like to know anything you may be able to tell me about court decisions in this state interpreting these laws. Thank you very much in advance for your attention and help.

Please don’t use this as a form letter. I offer it only to suggest an approach that would be likely to appeal to most legislators, of whatever party or beliefs.

Please let us know, if you send any such letter, what response you get, and if you get any.

What To Say To Neighbors

One mother, who was keeping her child out of school, said to me one day that people—neighbors, relatives, people she knew—kept asking where her child was in school, and that she didn’t know what to say to them. I suggested that it wasn’t their business and that she didn’t have to tell them anything. Later she said that she had tried that, but that it had not done any good—they kept insisting that she tell them. This seems to be one of those things that people feel they have to know, about other people.

After thinking about it a while I suggested that when people asked where her child was going to school, she say something like this, Well, he’s in a special program. If people then asked what kind of program, she could say, It’s very new, and somewhat experimental, and they don’t want me to talk about it.

All of which, by the way, is perfectly true.

She tried it out on a few people and said it worked fine. Maybe it will work for others.

Six Hours A Day?

When they first think of taking their child out of school, people often say to me, How am I going to teach him six hours a day?

I say, "Who’s teaching him six hours a day?"

As a kid, I went to the best schools, some public, most private. I was a good student, the kind that teachers like to talk to. And it was a rare day in my schooling when I got fifteen minutes of teaching, that is, of concerned and thoughtful adult talk about something that I found interesting, puzzling, or important. Over the whole of my schooling, the average was probably closer to fifteen minutes a week. For most kids in most schools, it is a lot less than that. Many poor, non-white, or unusual kids, in their entire schooling, never get any teaching at all. When teachers speak to them, it is only to command, correct, warn, threaten, or blame.

Anyway, your kids don’t need, don’t want, and couldn’t stand six hours of your teaching a day, even if you wanted to do that much. To help them find out about the world doesn’t take that much adult input. Most of what they need, you have been giving them since they were born. As I have said, they need access. They need a chance, sometimes, for honest, serious, unhurried talk; or sometimes, for joking, play, and foolishness; or sometimes, for tenderness, sympathy, and comfort. They need, much of the time, to share your life, or at least, not to feel shut out of it, in short, to go some of the places you go, see and do some of the things that interest you, get to know some of your friends, find out what you did when you were little and before they were born. They need to have their questions answered, or at least heard and attended to—if you don’t know, say I don’t know. They need to get to know more and more adults whose main work in life is not taking care of kids. They need some friends their own age, but not dozens of them; two or three, at most half a dozen, is as many real friends as any child can have at one time. Perhaps above all, they need a lot of privacy, solitude, calm, times when there’s nothing to do.

Schools do not provide any of these, and no matter how or how much we changed them, never could provide most of them. But the average parent, family, circle of friends, neighborhood, and community can and do provide all of these things, perhaps not as well as they once did or might again, but well enough. People do not need a Ph.D. or some kind of Certificate to help their children find their way into the world.

A School Story

The following are excerpts from a news story in The Real Paper (Boston, Mass.), of 3/17/ 76, headed Doping Springfield School Children.

Dr. Leo Sullivan of Boston prescribed 15 milligrams of Ritalin daily to another ten-year old boy. On a certificate filed with the Department of Public Health he listed this diagnosis: immaturity. Under tests administered he wrote none and under alternative treatment he wrote none.

Over 60 percent of all the children certified last year apparently never received alternative therapy before drugs were administered and an equal number never received anything more than a physical exam for diagnostic purposes.

——————

Despite a nine-month investigation by the attorney general’s office, and another by the Department of Public Health, no abuses were officially found in the Springfield schools.

Neither investigative agency did more than make a few phone calls. DPH did nothing at all except send the Springfield press a release saying that no abuses were evident.

During the past week, however, The Real Paper has obtained sworn affidavits describing numerous cases of abuse.

In one instance, the mother of a first grade child reports that her son was one of five children placed on drugs by Dr. Ploof after a teacher referral. When the teacher found little behavioral change with Dexedrine, Dr. Ploof prescribed Ritalin. A pharmacist refused to fill the prescription because of the child’s age, and the mother got worried. She refused to place her child on any more drugs.

She was told that if the child were not kept on drugs he would not be allowed in school. According to the affidavit, the mother agreed to place her child back on drugs, but secretly substituted one-a-day vitamins for Ritalin. During a public hearing on the controversy, the teacher defended drug therapy, saying this child had improved considerably since taking drugs. The teacher was shocked when the mother announced her trick.

In another affidavit, the mother of an eight-year-old girl says that her daughter was placed on Ritalin by Dr. Ploof after a teacher referral and a 20-minute evaluation by the doctor. The drug had little effect, so without any reevaluation Dr. Ploof raised the dosage two times over the phone.

That child eventually left the Springfield school system and did very well in a private school.

In the most disturbing story of them all, Dr. Ploof prescribed Ritalin for an epileptic first-grade boy. Ritalin is dangerous to epileptics. Had it not been for a rediagnosis by a second physician, the child might have suffered effects ranging from convulsions to death. The father is considering a suit against both Dr. Ploof and the school system.

I said this story was typical, and it is, as Schrag–Divoky’s The Myth of the Hyperactive Child makes plain. This kind of thing goes on in school systems all over the country. Everywhere I go to lecture to education students, they tell me that in the schools where they do their practice teaching many children are on school-ordered drugs, and they describe many of these drugged children as being like vegetables.

There are Dr. Ploof’s everywhere. They are never brought to account. It would seem wise to be extremely skeptical of any kind of psychological or neurological diagnosis made by any doctor, psychologist, or other expert or professional connected in any way with the schools, and to have any such diagnoses checked by outside and independent persons (if you can find such).

It is instructive to read what the Physician’s Desk Reference has to say about Ritalin. And it may be worth noting that in Sweden (so I have been told) Ritalin is felt to be so powerful, dangerous, and little understood that doctors may not even prescribe it.

This matter, and many others equally sinister and important, including the keeping of secret, detailed, misleading, and damaging reports on schoolchildren, are dealt with carefully and at length in The Myth of the Hyperactive Child (Dell paperback available from GWS). I strongly recommend it.

The Self-Respecting Child

This is the title of a book by Alison Stallibrass, published in England by Thames & Hudson, Ltd., London. It is the best book I have seen about the ways in which very young children explore the world and use, test, and develop their powers. Since no American publisher was willing to print an American edition, GWS is selling the British edition.

One of the interesting and surprising things Ms. Stallibrass says is that, even for four and five year olds, bicycles are much safer than tricycles. She has found that children that young are perfectly able to ride real bikes, which have this great advantage over trikes, that they can’t run away with the child on a hill.

There are many delightful photos. One, which perfectly expresses the spirit of the book, is of a sixteenth-month-old child, standing at the top of a jungle gym, to which she has climbed by herself, holding on with one hand and with the other waving away an anxious adult who has come running up to help. A wonderful book.

Helpless

In the last year or so, a number of people have talked or written to me about their children. They tell a familiar story. The child, who had always been alert, curious, bright, eager, was now fearful, bored, withdrawn, etc. All these people had tried to get the schools to make changes, without results. Many of them had tried to find alternative schools; either they could find none, or could not afford them, or felt they were not really different from or better than the public schools. All of them said to me, early in our talk or correspondence, I just don’t know what to do, I feel so helpless. I say, Take them out of school altogether. They say, The law won’t let me. I say, There are ways. They say, I don’t know how to teach my own children. I say, Yes, you do, or at least, you know as much as anyone else. Sometimes they do take their children out of school, sometimes not. But even if they don’t, it changes everything to know that if they want to, they can. They say, I don’t feel so helpless anymore.

GWS is to help people to feel less helpless.

A Studying Trick

Here’s a good trick for people who have to learn a list of disconnected facts—names and dates in History, formulas in Chemistry, Physics, or Math, capital cities, etc. Get some 3 x 5 cards. On one side of each card put half of your piece of information, on the other side put the other. Thus, on one side, Columbus discovered America, on the other, 1492. Or, on one side, Salt, on the other, Sodium Chloride or NaCl2. Then use the cards to test yourself. Shuffle them up, put aside those you know, work on those you don’t. You’ll find that just deciding what to put on the card in the first place will do most of the work of memorizing it.

They Really Said It

A number of parents, in different parts of the country, have sued the schools because after spending years in them their kids had not learned anything. A judge on the West Coast recently threw out one such suit, saying in his ruling, in plain black and white for the world to see, that the schools had no legal obligation to teach anyone anything.

I foolishly mislaid the news clipping about this. If anyone can send us the details of this case and ruling, I will be grateful.

——————

Editor—John Holt

Managing Editor—Peg Durkee

Growing Without Schooling 2

November 1977

Quite a few people have written us about the first issue of GWS. They like it, say it makes them feel less alone, isolated, helpless. One said it was like a beacon. We hope many others feel this way.

Some liked its plain looks. One or two thought we should jazz it up a bit, to look more like other magazines. (We have no plans to do this.)

We see that we didn’t make it clear enough that if two or more people take out a joint subscription to GWS, all copies of each issue will be sent to one of them, who must then mail or deliver the other copies to the other subscribers. Sending all copies to one address is what makes it possible for us to sell joint subscriptions for less. The record joint subscription so far, by the way, is a 14X sub. from a group in Seattle, who by this means are getting GWS for about $2.55 each.

A single subscription is $10 for six issues; a 2X sub, $12; a 3X sub, $14, and so on up. If you don’t say otherwise, all subs begin with Issue No.1.

You may buy extra copies of Issue #1 for 50¢ each, or 25¢ each for orders of 10 or more. Extra copies of all later issues will be $2 each, two for $3, $1 each for orders of five or more. Please send checks (U.S.$) made out to Growing Without Schooling.

Serious Teaching

My first teaching job was to tutor an otherwise interesting and bright teenager whose school skills were at about second or third grade level. Top specialists had pronounced him brain damaged. In spite of the label, he wanted to read, write, and figure like everyone else, and wanted me to help him.

Not having studied education, I had never heard of brain-damage, didn’t know enough to know that it was just a fancy way of saying, We don’t know what the trouble is. But it was clear to me that brain damage or no, it was my task and my responsibility to find out what was keeping him from learning and to figure out something to do about it. Working with him, I found out that he had a very precise, thorough, and logical mind, and had to understand a thing thoroughly before he could move on to the next. He asked hard questions; to find answers to some of them took me many years. But if I did not solve his problems, perhaps my belief that they could be solved was enough. Some years later, while in the Army, he wrote me, and told me what books he was reading—serious, adult books. He had clearly solved his problem himself.

In short, I was what I call a serious teacher—I would not accept fancy excuses and alibis as a substitute for doing the work I had chosen and had been hired to do—help children learn things. If they were not learning, as many were not, I couldn’t blame it on them, but had to keep trying until I found something that worked. As How Children Fail makes clear, this often took a long time, and I failed as much as I succeeded. Another book about serious teaching is James Herndon’s The Way It Spozed To Be, a very funny, truthful, and in the end sad story about his first year’s painful struggles—finally successful, for which he was fired—to help students that the rest of his school had long since given up on.

The reason that schools are no good at their work is above all that they are not serious. Good schools and bad, private and public, with only a few exceptions they have always run under this rule—when learning happens, the school takes the credit; when it doesn’t, the students get the blame. In the old days the schools said the kids were stupid, bad, lazy, or crazy. Now they say they have mysterious diseases like minimal brain dysfunction or learning disabilities. Under whatever name, these remain what they always were—excuses for the school and teachers not being able to do their job.

Life in Schools

From a letter from Raleigh, N.C., which by the way is supposed to be one of the enlightened areas of that state.

Only today I had a luncheon with a good friend whose 9th grade son has on his permanent record (thanks to one of his teachers this year) these crimes: suspension from school for three days because of breaking into lunch line, going up a flight of stairs used by the teachers but not permitted to students and saying dang back to a teacher for saying something to him, and a comparable list of 4 other unbelievable offenses.

A 5th grade boy and son of good friends was spanked in front of the class when he was out sick for the day. He was used as an example to the class so that the class would not be tempted to do the same thing, i.e., think of being out sick.

A 2nd grader took more money to school than her teacher thought she should have. She argued with the mother, who said that the money was actually that of the child. She was accused of stealing and spanked. Two months later on April 1st, the same teacher told her class to put on their coats and hats as they were going outside to play. After they were dressed, she told them April Fool! Nothing could be done about her treatment of the children; it was all legal.

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Defenders of schools might say that such incidents are the exception rather than the rule. It would be easier to believe this if unjust and cruel teachers ever got into trouble for acts like these. I have not yet heard of this happening.

Reading Guides

In Freedom and Beyond, and again in Instead of Education, I proposed a reading program which for little or no money might help children, above all poor children (or adults), to read better. I proposed that we have what we might call Reading Guides. Anyone who could read could volunteer—college students, younger children, housewives, older or retired people, or anyone of any age who in daily life might come in contact with children or other non-readers. The guides would wear some identifying armband, hat, button, etc. so that anyone wanting information could easily spot them. Seeing a guide wearing a sign, you could ask him either or both of these questions: 1) You could show him a written word and say, What does this say? 2) You could say, How do you write such and such a word? That’s all the guide would have to do.

A school, a church, a group of parents, a block committee, a branch library, or students themselves (in or out of school) could run such a program. It would cost little or nothing. There would be no need to test or screen the guides; there is no reason why they should have to know every word they might be asked.

So far, no one I know of has tried to start such a program. This is not surprising; most people now believe, after all, that only official programs run by professionals can get anything done. Every year these programs cost more and fail worse. We can only hope that when ordinary people get enough fed up with these incompetent experts, they will begin to act for themselves.

Angry Asps

ASPS are what I call people who constantly Attack Schools but Protect (or promote) Schooling. In one breath they say, Schools are terrible to, and for, poor kids. In the next they say, Schools are the only way that poor kids can escape from being poor. The logic is hard to follow. Schools have made it far harder for poor kids to escape from poverty than it used to be. There are hundreds or thousands of jobs, that people used to do perfectly well without college or even high school diplomas, that people now have to have diplomas to get. And how the schools, which have always despised, ignored, insulted, and oppressed poor kids, are suddenly going to protect and help them, the ASPS never make clear.

One ASP wrote me a furious letter about GWS, saying How is a welfare mother with five kids going to teach them how to read? The answer is, teach them herself. If she can’t read, but one of her children can, that child can teach the other children, and her. If none of them can read, they can get a relative, or friend, or neighbor, or neighbor’s child, to teach them.

Reading, and teaching reading, are not a mystery. The schools, in teaching the poor (and the rich, too) that no one can teach a child anything except a trained teacher, have done them (and all of us) a great and crippling injury and wrong. A number of poor countries have had mass literacy programs, often called Each One Teach One, in which as fast as people learn to read they begin to teach others. They found that anyone who can read, even if only fifty or a hundred words, and even if he only learned them recently, can teach those words to anyone else who wants to learn them. Every now and then, in this country, a school, often a city school for poor kids, lets older children, fifth or sixth graders, teach first graders to read. Most of them do a better job than the regular teachers. Quite often, older children who themselves are not very good readers turn out to be the best teachers of all. There is a clear lesson here, but the schools don’t seem able to learn it, mostly because they don’t want to.

People who make careers out of helping others—sometimes at some sacrifice, often not—usually don’t like to hear that those others might get along fine, might even get along better, without their help. We should keep this in mind in dealing with attacks from ASPS.

And this may be the place to note that trained teachers are not trained in teaching, but in classroom management, i.e., in controlling, manipulating, measuring, and classifying large numbers of children. These may be useful skills for schools, or people working in schools. But they have nothing whatever to do with teaching—helping others to learn things.

Reading, Chicago Style

From a recent Chicago Tribune:

It has been ten years in the making, but Chicago school officials now believe they have in place a complete sweeping program to teach children to read—a program that may be the pacesetter for the nation … it is built upon the concept developed by Benjamin Bloom, distinguished University of Chicago professor of education, that children should master—bit by bit—elements of reading. … For some years, a Board of Education reading expert, Bernard Gallegos, has been putting together a package of the reading skills children need to learn in elementary school. At one point, Gallegos’ list topped 500 elements. It has since been reduced to 273 over grades 1 through 8. The first skill a child needs to master, is to repeat two- and three-syllable words. The second is to point out objects by going from left to right … some other skills the child should acquire: knows long vowel sounds, (Ed. note: There is nothing long about them, the word is inaccurate and needlessly confusing.) places accent marks on accented syllables, (Ed. note: I was reading at near-college level before I began to do that.) and identifies rhyming patterns. This is the final skill: (No. 273)

This might be quite funny if it were not so horrifying. 500 skills! What could they be? When I taught myself to read, I didn’t learn 500 skills, or even 273; I looked at printed words, on signs and in books, and puzzled them out; each one I learned made it easier for me to figure out the next. And how did the 500 get cut down to 273?

ASPS would do well to take a look at Bernie’s first skill: to repeat two—and three-syllable words. In practice, this is going to mean the children, black, Hispanic, Asian, or from other non-WASP groups, are going to have to pronounce these words the way the teacher wants them pronounced. Until they do, they will not be allowed to go to the next step, or into the next grade. So step No. 1 in the Chicago schools is going to be to talk like white people, and until you can do that, you won’t be allowed to do anything else.

This, in spite of the fact that many people in the West Indies or Africa, or for that matter Great Britain, can read fluently, though they speak an English that few Chicago teachers could understand.

The schools were never intelligent; as I pointed out in Instead of Education, they have never even tried to find out how many children teach themselves to read, or in what ways; nor have they tried to find out what skillful readers did to become skillful (they read books that were too hard for them); nor have they learned anything from the experience of people like Dennison, Fader, Herndon, Kohl, who taught kids to read that the schools said could not be taught.

But now the schools are beginning to make stupidity into a system, even a kind of pseudo-science like alchemy, or phrenology, the old science of reading people’s characters from the shapes of their heads. Like all pseudo-sciences, the pseudo-science of education has all the trappings of real science, including mysterious big words, plenty of measurement, plenty of numbers. But this is as far from reality, and its precision is just as spurious, as medieval arguments about how many angels could stand on the head of a pin (326.734 angels). The alchemists tried to measure what did not exist; the educators say something even stupider, that nothing exists except what they can measure.

Not long ago, a teacher in Baltimore, who being serious had found a way to make good readers out of children who had never read before, was fired, because when the school board adopted some new reading program and ordered all teachers to use it, she sensibly and responsibly refused to scrap her reading program that worked. This will happen in Chicago; most of what few good reading teachers they have will quit or be fired. The children will be so busy trying to learn how to pass 273 reading tests that they will have no time to read, and what’s worse, no desire. Indeed, some children who can read will probably be held back because they can’t pass some of the 273 tests. Then, ten years or so from now, we will hear about some great new plan.

Life At Home

A mother of four children, the wife of a career officer in the U.S. Armed Forces (both of them church-going Catholics), who for obvious reasons prefers that we not (yet) give her name, has written us a splendid letter, saying, in part:

Always, always must we parents and anyone else who undertakes a revolutionary change which seriously affects the lives of others remind ourselves that we do so for selfish reasons. My husband and I began to get cold feet (sounds like an epidemic, our daughter said) two or three days before school started this year; what urged me to continue with our plans was the thought that I would be very unhappy if I didn’t give it a try. It was certainly not that we didn’t consider what was best for the children; we believed (and believe) they would be better off growing up at home than in a classroom. But keeping them home was mostly my decision, my experiment, my act of faith. What I hope is that the children not only will flower more truly in their home environment, but also will be enriched by growing up with parents who are attempting to live their beliefs. I hope that they will learn the true meaning of action, that a wrong seen is a wrong to be righted; a better way seen, one to be taken.

We did not give C (12), M (9), S (7), and K (5) a choice between school and school-at-home. As the excitement in the neighborhood mounted during the week before school started, the boys were disturbed about our decision. But we felt that they had been so completely indoctrinated by our society’s trust in schooling that they would never decide in our favor if we gave them a choice. If after two or three years of this experiment they are still determined, we will discuss it. Living as we do in the heart of our school-going, career-pursuing, achievement-oriented culture, we had to operate this way. We justify it by the fact that we are their parents and, we think, of all the people on earth, wisest when it comes to their upbringing. We monitor their socialization as we do their TV and sugar consumption. And yes, they’re doing fine. They’re generally contented. Only S complains about staying home, and that less often each month. They occupy themselves continually and, though I don’t get out much, we get on each other’s nerves very little, even when it’s been raining for days.

You’ll notice I didn’t say back there, We monitor their education. That’s because the whole subject is an embarrassment. We are in charge of their education, (thank you, state), but if the local superintendent came to take a look,