Experimenting on Children and The Role of the Teacher

As the new school year gets underway many homeschoolers, particularly first-timers, will get nervous because they doubt they know how to teach their children. Indeed, I’ve often heard the criticism of homeschooling that we are experimenting with our children’s education and therefore their futures by not following the methods used in institutional schooling. But this neglects the fact that schools have been experimenting on our children for years.

Add to that the controversies about teaching reading in school, which have resulted in decades of children not learning to read well; the sanitized versions of history taught in different states; standardized testing that is presented to us as the best way to judge a person’s intellect and abilities, and so on. My point is that schools have always experimented on their students. And homeschoolers should do so, too. Not because we want to emulate school’s mistakes at home, but because we want to help our children learn and grow by trying something different.

As you embark on another school season as a homeschooler, don’t be afraid to experiment. Don’t get stuck in the classroom mentality of isolated learning—get into the growth mentality. You don’t have to go to school to grow.

As I thought about this I remembered a radio interview John Holt did about a major national study that faulted American schools for not teaching children well. I hope his comments will encourage you as you live and learn with your children at home and in your community.

In 1983, WBOS-Radio in Boston interviewed John Holt about the report “A Nation At Risk” which was issued by the National Commission on Excellence in Education.

Q. If you feel, as you seem to, that teachers are only a segment of the educational process, how important are teachers and what makes a good teacher?

JH: Good. Very important question, which the commission almost certainly did not ask. The most important person in the learning process is the learner. The next most important is the teacher … The teacher does not fill up bottles—it’s much more like gardening. You don’t grow plants by going out with Scotch tape and sticking leaves onto the stems. The plant grows. But the gardener creates as far as she or he can the conditions for growth—in the case of plants, soil, fertilizer, acidity, shade, water, etc. It’s simple with plants. With children, it’s more complicated. What the teacher does—and the parents at home—is to create an environment, which is in part physical—there are books, records and tapes, and tools—and in part emotional, spiritual, moral, intellectual, in which growth can occur. Now that’s a very subtle, very difficult, very interesting task. Nobody in any school of education that I’ve ever heard of would describe it that way. It’s an extremely important task. It’s not what most teachers think they’re supposed to be doing—which is, as I say, filling the bottles—but it’s an important task in itself. It is by no means trivial, and it is certainly not easy.

Q: So where can teachers learn to teach?

JH: By teaching. Where do you learn to swim? In the water. Schools of education, I promise you, would like places where you’d spend four years studying courses on hydraulics and the theory of swimming and so forth, and then they’d say finally, “Okay, we’ve taught you how to swim, now here’s a pool, or here’s a lake.”

You learn to teach by teaching. I never had any educational training, luckily. I say “luckily” because I went into the classroom knowing that I didn’t know anything, and therefore realizing that if I wanted to learn something, I’d better keep my eyes and ears open and think about what I was seeing and hearing. The only way you learn about teaching is to do it and to see which of your inputs into this environment produce helpful results and which don’t, and maybe to talk about your problems with other teachers and say, “How are you making out?” That kind of a structure would help teachers get better.

Q: Aren’t you talking about doing a lot of experimenting as far as the teacher is concerned …

JH: Yes.

Q: … And if that’s true, aren’t the students possibly victims of this?

JH: They’re victims anyway. I mean, the commission says they’re victims. No, all your experiments aren’t going to work. The experiments they do now don’t work. Only the experiments now aren’t being done by people who are in the classroom, looking at these people, but by some character 500 or 1,000 or 2,000 miles away, very often somebody who never was in a classroom. All life is an experiment in a very real sense of the word. Teaching is, in that sense, a profoundly experimental activity.

But the only experiments that will ever improve education are experiments done by teachers in their own classrooms …