Word: holte
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...wrote Richard Brautigan in his poem "Gee, You're So Beautiful That It's Starting to Rain." In this spirit, growing disenchantment with U.S. public schools has produced a new alternative in virtually every state: small, mostly private "free" schools. Influenced by reformist manifestos like John Holt's How Children Fail, more than 800 of them are now run by diverse idealists -suburban mothers, ghetto blacks, former campus radicals. Their mood is typified by exotic school names: The Mind Restaurant (Phoenix), The Elizabeth Cleaners (Manhattan). Stone Soup (Longwood, Fla.), All Together Now (Venice, Calif.). Their future...
...Holt encounters large obstacles in trying to portray any alternatives to current education. He has defined the problem so well that his solutions, like those of most other writers on education, are finally inadequate. Most of What Do I Do Monday? depicts a sort of ideal school. It would be a free and open place which presented more favorable conditions for growth than the outside world. That would be the only justification for its existence. A student would be free to do what he wanted in its rooms full of books, experiments, and other people, the prime resource material...
...Holt realizes that this kind of school will not be legal or popular for a long time. But eventually some solution in which a child is free to choose his own direction of growth must be adopted. George Dennison concluded the Lives of Children suggesting that it would be economically feasible to make a First Street School run by a teacher and children's parents on every residential block in New York City. Similarly Holt proposes a kind of community organizing to share ideas on education and demand changes in the schools. He also suggests that "student teachers [be given...
...ORDER to make some of his ideas useful rather than chimerical for teachers working within the present educational system Holt proposes letting students work on special projects that they design themselves. For example, students might be interested in measuring their height or strength over a long period of time and could learn arithmetic in this way. Or they could do interviews with other students with a tape recorder and learn about conversation, English, and grammar. Learning would be possible without the pain of failure and repetitious drills...
...trying to get his ideal school set up in more than a few isolated communities Holt will meet much greater obstacles than the fact that student teachers have forgotten how to play. He encounters a revealing kind of resistance from people who say, "[Society] rejects whoever doesn't fit. What's going to happen to kids educated in your way? How are they going to survive?" There is a large disparity between what Holt envisions and what many people want for children. These parents must be made aware not only of what is wrong in schools but also what...