Too Much Schooling?

"Too much schooling works against education." So writes ex-Teacher John Holt, who has shown that schools encourage bored children to grope for rote answers and smother their spontaneous ways of acquiring knowledge. Those criticisms in his widely read books, How Children Fail and How Children Learn, made him a major spokesman for the reform movement in American education. Now, in his latest work, Freedom and Beyond (E.P. Dutton; $7.95), Holt argues that reformers of classroom methods might better work to "deschool" society.

Unlike Educational Iconoclast Ivan Illich, Holt does not want schools abolished entirely, but he thinks they should be de-emphasized. Last year education costs totaled about $80 billion; yet to give all young people the quality of schooling now available only to the upper 20%--which is what is meant by talk of "equal educational opportunity" --might cost three times as much, almost one-quarter of the gross national product. "We now spend 8% and there are many signs that this is about the limit of what people are willing to pay," Holt writes. "Yet this has in no way cut down the demand for schooling, which every day becomes more insistent. We have in short created about $250 billion worth or so of the most urgent demand for a product of which we are not likely to supply more than a third."

Preoccupied with their schools, educators too often overlook the fact that children learn more outside the classroom than in. Holt urges that the imbalance be redressed by ending compulsory schooling; he suggests, among other things, employing adult guides to teach children to read, and community learning centers open to both young and old. He concludes: "The deschooled society, a society in which learning is not separated from but joined to the rest of life, is not a luxury for which we can wait for hundreds of years, but something toward which we must move and work as quickly as possible."

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