Holt on the Failure of Schools
Holt: Criticism of Schools
The central charge
- Holt heavily criticises schools for cruelty to children, the chief among various reasons.
- From his observation, he deduces that a large number of children suffer at school in some form.
Time
- Schools take more and more time of the children, leaving them little time of their own.
- When schools take up so much of a child’s time, the child has very little time to pursue their own interests.
- Or to find time outside the school to make up for their failure at school.
Judgements
- The judgements that schools make about children follow them much further in life.
- School records are full of gossipy, malicious, damaging pseudo-psychological observations and diagnoses, often about the parents as well as the children.
Demands
Schools today make many more, larger, and vaguer demands on children.
Holt’s case against traditional schools is one of the sharpest in modern educational thought. The article works through the specific charges: cruelty to children, the time schools consume, the damaging judgements they record, and the growing demands they impose.
Cruelty to children
Holt heavily criticises schools for various reasons. The chief reason, in his account, is cruelty to children. The charge is direct and uncompromising. Schools are cruel to children, in ways that adults engaged in running the schools often do not see clearly because they are too close to the daily operation.
From his classroom observation, Holt deduced that a large number of the children he knew suffered at school in some form or another. The suffering was not exceptional; it was the typical experience. Some children suffered acutely from harsh teachers, public humiliation, peer cruelty, or the specific demands of subjects they could not master. Others suffered more quietly from the cumulative weight of years in an institution that did not fit them. Either way, the suffering was real.
The cruelty Holt named was not always the visible kind. Conventional schools in the developed world had largely moved away from corporal punishment by the time he was writing. But subtler kinds of cruelty remained. The cruelty of being made to do work that did not interest you, day after day, year after year. The cruelty of being judged in front of peers for things you could not control. The cruelty of having your time controlled by people who did not consult you. The cruelty of being treated as an object to be processed by an institution rather than as a person.
A modern reader can disagree with how strongly Holt frames the criticism. Some children genuinely thrive in conventional schools; the diagnosis of universal cruelty does not fit them. But the diagnosis fits enough children, in enough schools, that it has to be taken seriously. The charge bites even where it does not apply to every case.
Cruelty to children, in subtle forms that adults running the schools often do not see clearly
From classroom observation, Holt deduced that a large number of children suffered at school in some form. The suffering was typical, not exceptional. The cruelty was not always visible: conventional schools had moved away from corporal punishment, but subtler cruelties remained, making children do uninteresting work day after day, judging them publicly for things they could not control, controlling their time without consulting them, treating them as objects to be processed by an institution. The charge bites even where it does not apply to every case.
Time
The first specific charge Holt names is time. Schools take more and more time of children, leaving them little time of their own. The trend has continued since Holt wrote. Schools demand longer school days, longer school years, more homework, more after-school activities, more weekend work. The total time the school demands has grown.
The consequence is that the child has very little time to pursue their own interests. The personal projects, the deep reading, the creative work, the practical skills the child wants to develop, all of these compete with school for time, and school usually wins. The child arrives at adulthood with a substantial competence in school subjects and limited competence in anything else, because school took the time the other competence would have required.
A second consequence is that the child does not have time outside the school to make up for their failure at school. A child struggling in school subjects (say, mathematics) would, in an earlier era with shorter school days, have had time at home for help, practice, additional engagement with the subject. Modern children with longer school days and more homework have used their available time on the school’s terms. The struggling child has no remaining time for the extra work that might help them succeed. The school’s time demand thus compounds the child’s difficulties rather than helping.
Holt’s point connects to a broader observation. Schools have expanded their claim on children’s lives over the past century. The expansion has not produced demonstrably better educational outcomes; if anything, the outcomes have been mixed at best. The time claim has continued to grow without obvious benefit, and the cost (the child’s loss of time for their own pursuits) has continued to grow with it.
Schools take more and more of children’s time, leaving them little for their own pursuits, and no time outside school to make up for failures in it
The total time schools demand has grown over the past century: longer school days, longer school years, more homework, more after-school activities. The child has little time to pursue their own interests. The struggling child has no remaining time for extra work that might help them succeed. The time claim has grown without demonstrable improvement in outcomes; the cost (loss of personal time) has grown with it.
Judgements
The second specific charge is about judgements. The judgements that schools make about children follow them much further in life than the schools themselves recognise. A judgement about a child made at age eight can shape opportunities offered to them at age fifteen, at age twenty-two, even at age forty. The institution that made the judgement may have moved on; the judgement persists in records that follow the child.
Holt’s specific claim about school records is harsh and worth quoting in full. School records of children, he writes, are full of the most gossipy, malicious, damaging pseudo-psychological observations and diagnoses, often about the parents as well as the children. The four adjectives indict the records seriously.
Gossipy: the records contain information that has no business being in formal documentation, written casually and informally as if it were gossip among teachers rather than a serious record.
Malicious: the records sometimes contain hostile material, reflecting teachers’ frustrations or biases against specific children or families, rather than neutral professional observation.
Damaging: the records carry real consequences for the children they describe. A label applied to a child in a school record shapes how subsequent teachers, administrators, and institutions treat them. The damage is real and often permanent.
Pseudo-psychological: the records contain diagnoses and observations that pretend to professional psychological authority without the training that would make them legitimate. Teachers, in many systems, write observations that look psychological but lack the diagnostic basis professional psychology would require.
The records are often, Holt notes, about the parents as well as the children. The pattern of judging children by their parents’ perceived characteristics is widespread in conventional schools, and the judgement makes the records about families as units rather than individuals. A child whose parents are seen as problematic gets treated as problematic themselves, even when their own behaviour does not warrant it.
The cumulative damage of these records is significant. A child labelled with a problem in elementary school may have the label follow them through middle school, high school, and into adult contexts where it continues to affect them. The school’s judgement, recorded once and then forgotten by the school, persists in the child’s life long after.
Judgements follow children long after the school has moved on; records are gossipy, malicious, damaging, and pseudo-psychological, often about parents as well as children
A judgement made at age 8 can shape opportunities at 15, 22, even 40. School records contain casual gossip, hostile material reflecting teacher biases, damaging labels that follow the child, and pseudo-psychological observations without the training to back them up. Records are often about parents as well as children, treating children by their parents’ perceived characteristics. The cumulative damage is significant; the judgements persist in the child’s life long after the school has forgotten them.
Demands
The third specific charge is about demands. Schools today, Holt observed, make many more, larger, and vaguer demands on children than schools of earlier eras did.
The increase in the number of demands is straightforward. A modern student is expected to master a much wider range of content than a student of the nineteenth or early twentieth century was. The standard curriculum has expanded considerably as societies have come to consider more subjects necessary.
The increase in the size of demands is also straightforward. Each subject in the modern curriculum covers more ground than its equivalent did in earlier eras. The mathematics expected of a high school graduate today goes well beyond what a high school graduate would have been expected to know a century ago. The same applies to science, history, and other subjects.
The increase in the vagueness of demands is the most interesting. Modern schools often demand things they cannot articulate clearly: critical thinking, creativity, 21st-century skills, career readiness. These demands sound serious; they are difficult to satisfy because they are difficult to specify. A student cannot work out what they have to do to satisfy a vague demand. The vagueness compounds the burden.
The combination of more, larger, and vaguer demands produces students under pressure they cannot relieve. They cannot satisfy demands they cannot understand. They cannot prioritise effectively when too many demands compete. They cannot rest when more demands keep arriving. The cumulative pressure is what Holt’s other criticisms (cruelty, time consumption, damaging judgements) operate within.
A modern reader can see this in contemporary school culture. The level of student anxiety in many conventional high schools is now widely documented. The pressures Holt described in the 1970s have intensified rather than relaxed. The criticisms apply more strongly today than they did when he wrote them.
The unschooling alternative is to take the child out of this demand structure altogether. The child is not subject to more, larger, and vaguer demands from an institution; they are pursuing their own interests at their own pace. The pressures Holt criticised do not apply to a child whose education is not organised around external demands.
Schools make many more, larger, and vaguer demands on children than schools of earlier eras
More: students master a wider range of content than students in earlier eras. Larger: each subject covers more ground. Vaguer: schools demand things they cannot articulate clearly (critical thinking, creativity, 21st-century skills, career readiness). The vagueness compounds the burden: students cannot satisfy demands they cannot understand. The combination produces students under pressure they cannot relieve. Modern school cultures show widely documented anxiety; the pressures Holt described have intensified rather than relaxed.
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